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“It has been a while” is putting it mildly. The last time we released an update for Dress Measurement was on June 22, 2023, when we rolled out DM 1.4.8.
I’m not happy about the long break, but it was necessary.
So, what have we been up to?
In Q1 and Q2 of 2023, we began seriously designing Catch the Ghost Cloud. By August 2023, our focus shifted entirely to Catch the Ghost Cloud and consulting work. Since January 2024, we have been moving at warp speed to launch Catch the Ghost in May 2024, followed by a rapid rollout of new features.
Meanwhile, Dress Measurement quietly gained a cult following. We weren’t exactly sure who our audience was (Google Analytics has been tricky since GA4), but the app seemed to hit a plateau. We didn’t have the manpower to investigate and push forward.
In 2024, I decided it was time to take stock of Dress Measurement. Here’s what we found:
- Dress Measurement has over 153,000 downloads since launch.
- We have 3,000 monthly active users in 120 countries.
- The app is still installed on about 125,000 phones and maintains a 4.5 rating on the App Store.
Over the years, we slowly added features requested by users, culminating in the Custom Measurements feature in 1.4 back in 2021. All these years, we’ve given away the core app for free, ad-supported. As long as you didn’t need custom measurements, photos, and notes, you could use the app for free.
My goal for the end of 2024 was to:
- Offer a yearly paid tier with a significant discount (requested by many paid users).
- Analyze how many profiles our users created—did they have just a few profiles, or hundreds?
- Read all the app reviews and investigate complaints about iCloud syncing and backup bugs.
- Monetize the app by limiting the free tier to users with light, personal use.
- Fix all iCloud syncing and backup bugs.
- Dedicate more time to personally provide tech support and get to know our customers. This was something we hadn’t done well before. Over the past few months, I’ve had back-and-forth conversations with several power users and even conducted over a dozen video calls to diagnose their issues.
Here’s what we learned:
- Google Analytics 4 didn’t give us the exact figures we needed, so we used a random sampling method and discovered that most of our users are SMBs.
- Many of our users have hundreds of profiles, some as high 900 profiles that they manage for their clients.
- Despite severe issues with iCloud syncing and backups, our app maintained a 4.5 rating on the App Store.
- We had achieved Product-Market Fit for a niche market. Even with broken syncing, users were forgiving and continued running data locally on their iPhones.
- 100% of our tech support requests in the past year came from SMBs in the clothing and fashion industry.
- Many of our clients exclusively user our app to run their custom clothing business. This was something we wanted to happen, but it came as a bit of a surprise. We have to have many more conversations with our users to understand their needs and how DM can grow to fit their business needs!
Without any advertising, our app has been growing organically. However, our conversion rate and cancelations have been about equal due to recurring bugs in the app.
Since November 2024, we’ve been hard at work testing and debugging, leading to numerous fixes in 1.4.10, which will be our final release before monetizing Dress Measurement. We already introduced our Tailor Shop Annual tier with DM 1.4.9 in November 2024.
What’s next?
We will be releasing DM 1.5 before the end of January. In this release, the free tier will be limited to 7 profiles. Users needing unlimited profiles will need to subscribe to a paid tier.
We notified our users about this change on November 21, 2024, initially planning to release 1.5 in December. However, we delayed the release to ensure a smooth transition and protect customer data. Since we don’t have access to user data (it’s entirely private), it’s been challenging to fix bugs without direct data access.
As a thank you to our early adopters, we’re offering 100 free promo codes for a 1-year subscription to Tailor Shop, the paid tier of Dress Measurement. Several users have already taken us up on this offer.
We’re excited about the future and grateful for your continued support. Thank you for trusting Dress Measurement to help you manage your work in the clothing and fashion industry!
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Dress Measurement 1.4.10 is live!
“It has been a while” is putting it mildly. The last time we released an update for Dress Measurement was on June 22, 2023, when we rolled out DM 1.4.8. I’m not happy about the long break, but it was necessary. So, what have we been up to? In Q1 and Q2 of 2023, we…
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Catch the Ghost 1.4.5 is Live with Ambience!
Have you ever wished your job would send you to the beach for a weekend? Well, my job just did. After scouring the web for ambient sounds to purchase, all of which require complex licensing and thousands of dollars, I had given up on this feature for a while. Then one day there was a…
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New Universe with 400 Ghosts
Our last universe had 350 ghosts, and we’ve published 50 new ghosts since then! Some notable names in this release include Nelson Mandela, Sigmund Freud, Neil Armstrong, Sidney Poitier, and Steve McQueen. Subscribers, simply log out and log back in to see the new universe!
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New Universe with 350 Ghosts
We just published a new universe today! Our last release had 300 ghosts, and this one has 50 new ghosts. Some notable names in this release include US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Pierce. We also have Stepin Fetchit, James Avery, Red Foxx, Ossie David, Mel Ferrer and Lucille…
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Catch the Ghost 1.4 is Live!
You’ve waited and we’ve delivered. Catch the Ghost now rewards you for maintaining a Streak! Streaks You only have to complete one focus session per day to maintain your streak. Hit a 7-day streak milestone and you get your first multiplier rewards. Your rewards apply to every apparition you unveil from then onwards. Streak Milestones:…
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Catch the Ghost 1.3.1 is Live!
This version includes: Streaks, tooltips, better animations, and a lot of bug fixes are just around the corner in 1.3.2 and 1.4. Stay tuned! Download Catch the Ghost 1.3.1 for FREE on iOS: https://apple.co/3WOw79M
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Catch the Ghost 1.3 is Live!
Version 1.3 is our biggest feature release since launch! History – What gets measured gets managed! Whenever you run a focus session, that data gets stored with your account in the cloud. All this time you’ve been revealing apparitions, catching ghosts, and staying productive, but where’s the proof! As of Version 1.3, if you subscribe…
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Catch the Ghost 1.2.2 is Live!
One of our most requested features has just been completed: Custom Timer Length! Custom Timers in Detail Catch the Ghost is an app built entirely upon peer-reviewed behavioral psychology and brain science. Our goal is to help you create a better you and accomplish your goals, by making it easy for you to condition your…
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Composers Collection on Catch the Ghost
If you’re a fan of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, Neoclassical, and Modern eras of European music…. If you love symphonies, chamber music, string quartets, operas, concertos, sonatas, masses, and etudes… then we have a real treat for you in our Composers collection! Here are just a few of the composers in our collection (left to…
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Catch the Ghost 1.2 is Live!
Catch the Ghost 1.2 is live on the App Store, and now it’s free to download! New features include: We have a lot in store for the month of July. Our team is working on the History page and Streaks, so get ready for a big version update because 1.3 is on the way!
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Asian History and Indian History incoming…
Over the weekend, I published about 10 ghosts that are exclusively famous to Asian history, the Indian subcontinent, and Japan. It was a wild ride! We now have 206 ghosts published! About 800 more to go before I’ll feel like we’ve made a significant contribution to the Productivity and Education categories of the App Store.…
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Famous Scientists on Catch the Ghost™
When I tell people about our app, we often get asked about who we have. In fact, one negative review from Japan complained that we had too many activists and politicians and no scientists. Well, they were wrong, we had two published scientists, LOL! But clearly that’s not enough. It’s difficult for a small team…
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Happy Juneteenth 2024 from Aeeiee!
Happy Juneteenth from our team at Aeeiee, and from the abolitionists, activists, and trailblazers who ultimately made this holiday possible! Here are just a few of these heroes that we memorialize in Catch the Ghost (from left to right): Coretta Scott King, Martin Delany, Maya Angelou, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass (our…
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16 New Ghosts, 135 Published, 747 in Queue
🔎Our team at Aeeiee has spent thousands of hours curating the data of historical figures (our “ghosts”) into our custom built Cloud for use on the Catch the Ghost™ app. We don’t add everyone to our library, but when we do, our mission is to memorialize them in an inspirational and educational light. This wouldn’t…
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Catch the Ghost 1.1.2 is Out!
We’ve got a new version of Catch the Ghost out with a few important new features: One of the core features of Catch the Ghost is the Digital Hourglass™, or generally known as a focus timer. When it’s running you simply need to wait out the clock in order to use your phone normally again.…
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Big Bug Fix: Catch the Ghost Version 1.1.1 is Out!
Last Monday we released Catch the Ghost™ version 1.1 and we were really excited about its new features. It turns out that in our excitement we missed a crucial test where we needed to make sure that upgrading from the previous version didn’t crash the app. Lo and behold, my wife upgrades her app from…
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Catch the Ghost Version 1.1 Update
Catch the Ghost version 1.1 update is out now with a tuned up Universe, a new UI for apparitions, scroll for more, focus timer screen tips, and “Normal Mode.” So that’s it! Version 1.1 is available for download now on the App Store.
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Catch the Ghost™ Launch
It’s my pleasure to announce the launch of Aeeiee’s latest iOS app called Catch the Ghost™. We all find it hard to put down our phones, and there’s a reason for that. Big companies spend billions of dollars to make their apps as addictive as possible. This results in a lot of wasted time and…
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Redesigning Dress Measurement Version 1.4
Recently at Aeeiee, we released the latest version of our product- Dress Measurement App, version 1.4, on the App Store. This new version has new UI designs and important features that the users asked for. In this article, I am going to talk about these new features and the process that went into the redesign.…
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How to Use AWS S3 to host your static websites
Cloud technologies are fast becoming the mainstay of what we use to develop custom solutions for consumers. Amazon Web Services(AWS) has become the dominant player and go cloud service for developers. I particularly like the variety of services, tools, and metrics at my disposal when using AWS in comparison to other cloud options. In this…
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Deploying your Nodejs App to AWS Elastic Beanstalk from GitHub using CodePipeline
In this article, I’m going to do a walkthrough of how to deploy our Nodejs app to Elastic Beanstalk, but first I’m going to give a brief overview of the service. Overview of Elastic Beanstalk AWS Elastic beanstalk is a managed service which means AWS automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, application health monitoring,…
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Aeeiee awards $1500 scholarship to intern, Jasmine Amoako-Agyei to launch new startup
Introducing Jasmine Jasmine Amoako-Agyei is a social entrepreneur and is launching her new startup, Countdown. She just completed her 3rd year at Arizona State University, pursuing a degree in Marketing with double minors in Sustainability and Technological Entrepreneurship & Management. She’s a very active and engaged individual, participating and leading in a UN Millennium Fellowship, Luminosity…
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An Introduction to Docker
What is Docker? “Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.” – Wikipedia. To begin, let’s examine each of the highlighted terms above to help us better understand the need for Docker. Platform as a service (PaaS) – PaaS are essentially…
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Build a Slackbot for your dev team with Slack’s Bolt APIs
Slack is a messaging platform used by numerous developer teams around the world for their day-to-day instant messaging interactions. Slack is a very powerful productivity tool that makes our lives easier here at Aeeiee. Bots in slack allow us to run code to automate tasks. They can also: In this blog post, we’ll explore how…
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Using Bull as a Priority Job Handler in Node Js
Let’s build a Node.js API that uses Bull to handle priority Jobs Why Bull? There are a wide variety of priority job queues for Node js. “A Queue is a linear structure which follows a particular order in which the operations are performed. The order is First In First Out (FIFO). A good example of…
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How to Use Custom code snippets in WordPress
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes. There are times when we might want to add custom code to our theme’s functions.php file or in one of…
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How to use WordPress as a Headless CMS with React
React, the frontend framework created at Facebook in 2013, with over 165k GitHub stars is now one of the most loved Frontend frameworks used by JavaScript developers. React is a powerful framework that allows developers to create re-usable code blocks called components, use the Virtual DOM to update DOM elements – making web apps more…
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How to programmatically insert a new table into a Database in WordPress
Recently, at AEEIEE, we needed to programmatically insert a new table into the WordPress database for a plugin we were developing. The table had to hold certain data about users. We wanted this table to be tied directly to our plugin and not be affected by changes around the site. For our use case, we…
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How to Create Custom Taxonomies in WordPress
A WordPress taxonomy is a way to organize groups of posts and custom post types. This gives you the flexibility to group posts, pages, etc. for your site needs. Fortunately, WordPress comes with some inbuilt custom taxonomies that make it possible to organize contents and posts but unfortunately, those inbuilt taxonomies might not meet your specific need. This…
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How to Upload Files to S3 with the AWS JavaScript SDK and WordPress
Why AWS? AWS has a ton of amazing services to help in the software development process. From services that help you cache static assets like CloudFront, to services that scale based on the traffic to your application like ElasticBeanstalk (this comes with a load balancer by default). At Aeeiee, we’re huge fans of AWS. Our…
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Getting Started with Local by Flywheel
Developers always need a local environment to write, run, and test their code before deployment. At Aeeiee, one of the technologies we use is WordPress, but we need to be able to develop WordPress locally before pushing it to production, hence our use of Local by Flywheel. Local by Flywheel is easy to use and very…
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Everyday Life at Aeeiee
January 2021 Update: This article was originally written in 2020. It’s now 2021 and thankfully, many more companies are learning to cope better with COVID. Let’s hope that this year brings in an effective Vaccine and things go back to some sort of normalcy. 2020 has been a year! There has been enough significant events…
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#EndSARS: Seize the Moment
As a Nigerian citizen living abroad, as a Pan-Africanist, and as the leader of a company with remote workers based in Nigeria, I wish to lend my support and my voice to the #EndSARS cause. #EndSARS is a powerful movement of passionate young Nigerians putting their lives on the line to demonstrate in civil disobedience…
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Aeeiee is hiring again!
Aeeiee is hiring again! One of our goals for 2020 is to get back on the iOS App Development train. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of success with Dress Measurement, with over 26,000 downloads from 126 different countries. Over 12,000 of those downloads were in this year alone. We’ve also maintained a 4.6/5 rating in…
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Dress Measurement Version 1.3.1
We’re happy to announce that Dress Measurement Version 1.3.1 is live on the app store. This new version includes the following new features and fixes:
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Dress Measurement Version 1.3
Dress Measurement version 1.3 is now on the App Store. Download it today and try out our new features! iCloud for Everyone All users can now backup their data to the cloud, and sync with multiple devices Tailor Shop Subscription Tailor Shop is a premium subscription tier with access to exclusive features like Profile Photos,…
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We’ve Been Listening
Dress Measurement version 1.3 is about to hit the App Store. We currently have over 9000 downloads, and a 4.5/5 rating on the App Store, but we know that our app needs plenty of improvements. Before we launch, I wanted to take time to let our users know that despite our silence and despite our shifting…
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It’s Over 9000
We’ve been quiet over at Aeeiee, but we haven’t been resting on our laurels. We’ve got a ton of updates coming for Dress Measurement, but before that, a little milestone. As of today, Dress Measurement has reached over 9000 downloads, and our app is used in 108 different countries. Our top five countries are: Notice…
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Dress Measurement is back on track!
Back in June 2017, Aeeiee began the process of expansion and moved to a new office on 4th & Mill in Tempe, Arizona. Then came the month long process of hiring talent to fill our development needs. By August 7th, 2017 we had hired our team and began the training our devs on our various…
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Aeeiee is hiring!
Things are moving fast here at Aeeiee. We’ve just closed on a new office in the heart of downtown Tempe, walking distance from Arizona State University. We’re hoping the downtown location and proximity to one of the best engineering colleges in the country will attract top notch software talent to work at our growing Arizona startup. We’re…
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What’s going on with Dress Measurement?
It’s been a year since we’ve launched our first iOS app, Dress Measurement. What’s happened since then? First, we’ve reached over 4000 downloads, with no advertising (well, no advertising after the first week). This is also with no SEO, which is to my chagrin, because we’re a company that specializes in Search Engine Optimization. This…
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Scalable Cloud Architecture
Aeeiee is proud to announce our first real-world implementation of our auto-scaling cloud hosting environment for our client, Iridium Communications Inc. Iridium is replacing its satellite constellation by sending 75 Iridium NEXT satellites into space on SpaceX’s Falon 9 rocket platform.On January 14, 2017, Space X successfully launched Iridium’s first 10 satellites into space. IridiumNext.com, a…
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Mashable is right, web design is dead
A little over a year ago, Mashable wrote an article entitled Web Design is Dead. A website like Mashable has incentive to write controversial content with a standout title, and you can tell it worked by how many disgruntled web designers have been commenting on their article that has been shared 28.5K times and liked over 128K times…
