Teaminal is an agile meeting tool for distributed teams. It lets you conduct agile meetings like standup, backlog refinement, and retro asynchronously, and integrates with Slack, GitHub, Jira, and more.

I’m a solo, bootstrapped founder, and I’ve been working on Teaminal for the past three years. As we head into the end of the year, I’ve been reflecting on 2024 - what happened, what I learned, how I’m feeling, what the numbers looked like, my goals from last year, and what goals I want to set for 2025.

For past years in review, here are the 2022 and 2023 updates.

What happened

My efforts to improve SEO paid off a little bit and I started getting real traffic to the site, which converted to more signups! The number of signups who actually started using the product wasn’t great, though.

Monthly updates

If you want the whole story of the year, you can read my monthly updates from 2024. I won’t link them all here, but you can start in January, and at the end of each post there’s a link to the next one.

The last update is from July, though, and I’m writing this at the end December. What’s the deal?

I took some time off

After investing a bunch of time and money into SEO content and link building in the first half of the year, I basically took the the last 5 months off from working on Teaminal.

I basically got to the point where I had enough traffic to see how the downstream numbers were shaking out, and they didn’t look good, but I wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger and shut things down yet, so I just took a break.

I still shipped stuff

Some of the major features I shipped this year:

• PagerDuty, Clickup, Linear, and Wrike integrations
• Social login and signup with Google and Slack
• A new post-signup onboarding flow
• The ability to hide poker votes and then reveal them
• A new streamlined navbar
• Added a “request an invite” signup flow for users who want to join an existing team
• Published 32 blog posts and 15 new marketing pages
• A ton quality of life improvements and bug fixes

I think the social login and post-signup onboarding flow had the biggest impact on the numbers, but the integrations and quality of life improvements were the biggest product updates.

What I learned

SEO is real

I paid an SEO agency for some help with content and link building, and also built out quite a few SEO-focused pages on the marketing site, and I’m happy to say that I did see a big lift from that. Not quite as much as I’d like, but I got 336k impressions and 1.76k clicks from Google this year, which is a lot more than 2023.

Freemium is tough (or the product sucks?)

Now that I’m getting some traffic, I got to see how the rest of my funnel performs, and it was bad.

My visitor-to-signup conversion rate was around 4-5%, which I think is fine but not great for freemium.

The real problem is activation and retention. The number of people who activated (invited at least one teammate and did a planning poker or retro) was something like 5%. Of those, the number of people who did a second session of planning pokers or another retro was like 10%.

So basically ~0.5% of signups become active users. If you then imagine industry average free-to-paid conversion of like 20%, I’d need 1000 signups to get each paying customer.

The question is, why do so few signups activate?

It’s hard to get feedback

I wish I knew why the product wasn’t resonating. Getting feedback has proven to be basically impossible, though.

I spent 3 months emailing everybody who signed up, offering an Amazon gift card if they’d hop on a call with me, and got I think 2 responses, both of which then ghosted me.

Vitamin vs. painkiller

I always knew that Teaminal wasn’t solving a hair-on-fire problem. It’s a nice-to-have tool.

But it’s really become obvious when I try to get feedback, when I talk to people about it in-person, and then most of all when I’ve had a couple enterprise deals fall through. I’ve had a couple bigger companies who needed to buy through an enterprise procurement process who reached out, but it turned out they wanted me to jump through their hoops without actually wanting to pay an enterprise plan price for the product.

Unfortunately, Teaminal mostly appeals to bigger companies who want to standardize agile rituals, but when it’s just a nice-to-have for them, it’s kind of a paradox where they want to buy it for cheap but can’t do it without a convoluted process that necessitates my enterprise pricing.

How I’m feeling

Maybe this ain’t it

To be honest, I’m feeling kind of at the end of my rope. I have a bit of traffic, but the product isn’t working, and I’m not sure why or how to find out why.

It’s also been 3 years now, which is a very long time to keep grinding away at a product that isn’t working. I’m ready to try something new.

On the other hand, the fact that I’ve had a few near-misses with potential buyers gives me a glimmer of hope. I’m not really sure what to do.

The numbers

Top-line metrics

Visitors and signups are way up this year, but the overall picture isn’t looking great:

• 4.6k visitors to the marketing site (vs. 1473 in 2023)
• 269 account signups, 408 user signups (vs. 70 accounts, 104 users in 2023)
• 25 monthly active users in December (vs. 70 in 2023)
• $0 in MRR (same as 2023)

So basically I churned all of my monthly actives from 2023, and only 6% of this year’s signups activated and kept using the product.

Engineering metrics

The pace of development was relatively steady from last year. In 2024 I made 376 git commits (an average of 1.03 commits per day) vs. 392 commits in 2023 and 1,079 in 2022.

The work was also spread pretty evenly between the marketing site and the app, but I was by far the most active in Q1 and Q2.

Costs

Here’s the breakdown of my regular expenses:

• $112/month for Render (hosting)
• $23/month for AppSignal (monitoring)
• $12/month for Google Workspace (email and productivity)
• $10/month for Postmark (transactional emails)
• $100/year to keep the LLC alive (legal)
• $12/year for Cloudflare (domain registration, object storage, and CDN)

That’s $166/month in total. The only change since last year is that I stopped paying the SEO agency $1300/month in June.

Last year’s goals

The goals I set for myself last year were:

• Publish 52 blog posts about remote work, agile, scrum, etc. for SEO.
• Get going on social media, sharing those articles (or at least my monthly updates) on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Hacker News.
• Try Google Ads and retargeting as new marketing channels.
• Ship 12 new integrations and get into their app directories.
• End the year with 1000+ monthly active users.
• Get my first paying customer.

In reality:

• I published 32 blog posts.
• I posted to Twitter and LinkedIn about my first 3-4 monthly updates of the year, then fell off.
• I didn’t try any new marketing channels.
• I shipped 4 new integrations: PagerDuty, Clickup, Linear, and Wrike, but didn’t submit to any app directories.
• I have 25 active users and no paying customers.

Aside from the actual outcomes that matter, I feel pretty good about the rest!

Goals for 2025

My only goal for the year is to decide what to do with Teaminal going forward. Should I shut it down? Try to sell it? Trim my expenses and keep it online?

I don’t have any answers yet. I’m tempted to try to sell it, but not sure how realistic that is as basically just a code base and a site with a bit of content. I guess we’ll see!