Rocket: Slack-style Emoji Everywhere on your Mac

Last week I released Rocket, a Mac app that gives you Slack-style emoji autocomplete everywhere you type on your Mac.

The launch of Rocket easily had the best reception for any app I’ve made—quite a dream launch. Some highlights:

• Front page of Product Hunt with around 200 upvotes
• ~2,200 downloads, ~1,300 installs
• My tweet about it went a bit crazy, with like 130 retweets and a few hundred favs
• Featured on iMore

I made Rocket, an app that gives you Slack-style emoji everywhere on your Mac. https://t.co/kNfHNxSZcb pic.twitter.com/i8ry8nNAkI

— Matthew Palmer (@_matthewpalmer) July 13, 2016

A couple of lowlights, now that I think about it:

• the app auto-update integration I added doesn’t seem to be working in the 1.0… I think lots of people will never get to use the newer versions
• the app wasn’t quite done when I decided to ship (I wasn’t expecting this response!)—the licensing stuff, the custom gifs and emojis, and a few bugs weren’t in there. This meant that I didn’t make any revenue off the launch (that’s okay though, the rush of the launch was good enough).

A thought I had considering that this is my first launch that anyone could consider successful: even with being featured and all the tweets and everyone being so positive, say I had the licensing stuff in there, and say it was $6. Now let’s just say that 5% of the 1,300 people who installed the app got the upgrade (I reckon that’s a bit high, but we’ll go with it). That’s 65 people × $7 upgrade = $455. Even with a dream launch—how the hell does anyone make money off software? Maybe for my dream launch I didn’t have my dreams high enough?

Anyway, I couldn’t be happier. These have a been very exciting days.