Sendtric - https://sendtric.com

Sendtric is a SaaS product for email marketers. It allows creation of dynamic email countdown timers for use in HTML email templates. Originally a small side project, I have grown Sendtric (with a colleague) into a sustainable and growing small business in the email marketing space. We have many big name clients and our volume regularly exceeds 100 million requests every month. My responsibilities have included building the web application, marketing, sales, business development, legal, and more.

ama.io (inactive)

The idea with this project was to design a better system for people to host "Ask Me Anything" sessions with their followers. These are essentially live Q&A sessions, popularized by Reddit. However, the UI/UX of Reddit is not well suited for AMAs, and thus ama.io was born. This screenshot is from a live AMA session conducted with a Google Engineer and author.

Post Mortem: We had a couple of successful AMA sessions on the site, but ultimately it was difficult to get in touch with people to try our site with their followers. We had significant value add over Reddit for AMAs, but this was not enough to make up for the loss of not having near the traction and audience size of Reddit. Without this, we had to reach out in a very cold fashion to people who we thought would be good fits for the platform to engage with their audience.

Dynoroute (inactive)

Dynoroute was a software solution for indoor rock climbing gyms. The system allows for tracking of all of the different climbing routes, which reduces overhead and management time, as well as add value to the climbing gym in general since it provides an interface for climbers of the gym to see new routes and even track routes they have climbed.

Post Mortem: We had a handful of very successful rock gyms use our site. The main difficulty was the education piece of our software. It was easy to get local rock gyms on board, as we could communicate directly with them about the tool and how much value it provided. Outside of that, it proved challenging to convince climbing gyms that the initial learning curve and effort needed to use the tracking software was worth the investment. We made the software as easy to use as possible in attempts to reduce this initial effort, including making the software completely mobile compatible so that climbing routes could be entered easily while on site in a gym, but I ultimately decided to end the project after the realization of the time investment needed to get gyms established. I'd love to try to revitalize this project in the future in some way, as I still see an opportunity.

Mystic Realms (inactive)

Mystic Realms was a Minecraft game server, with a number of custom Java plugins to enhance the experience. Our team of three created a giant mystical world with quests, spells, multiplayer events, and more. We implemented a donation system to help with server costs whereby players would donate for in-game benefits and items, which successfully helped keep the server going for over a year, with many months experiencing a surplus of funds. We had over 17,000 players play on our server from launch to shutdown. I published a few of the custom Java plugins I wrote for the server online and received 20,000+ downloads for them in total.

Post Mortem: Our server had a very successful run of over a year. It was a great learning experience, as it presented many challenges similar to running a small business. The biggest area we struggled was with marketing and although we had an absolutely amazing server concept, and our player retention rates were extremely solid, we had difficulty finding effective ways to market, especially since we were 100% bootstrapped and self funded through donations. Ultimately we were unable to keep up with the rapidly changing multiplayer server scene and started losing out to larger server networks that had much larger teams and funding.