72M users, 1M todos, 2 new products, 1 acquisition, and more
This month my products reached 72M users, Todorant reached 1M todos, I acquired a bot, and more...
How do you do, fellow kids? If you asked me, I couldn't be doing better this month! Why? Roll in the chart:
Aside from growing to 72 559 509 users (+7,162,213 or roughly +11% growth from the last month), you might also notice the new charting library used at borodut.ch. Oh! And the new gorgeous shorter domain name. The whole thing is just shy of 43Kb! You heard it right! Insane.
Let's dive into the juicy details.
Big Whale Labs
From now on, please, refer to our company blog for the news. I'm afraid of telling you too much too early, but this is going to be epic, no way around it. Our experiments are running, and we are full throttle heads down in the development. So you are going to hear a lot more about BWL soon. Especially with the recent funding round.
But if you want to get more info on BWL, feel free to reach out to me on Telegram. I might be able to share a few details about the products that can make you go
This is on top of the regular newsletter that Jason and I address to the investors (things are looking bright, by the way).
How's Voicy doing?
You can see that the charts now show only the last one month-ish of data by default. I did it to decrease the load on the device — you can still use the "Chart more data" button to see it all.
All in all, Voicy did well this month. It grew to 13 063 644 users, 2 399 069 chats and 49 916 271 recognized voice messages. The impressive part is that at least half of these voice messages were recognized since April this year! I've recently calculated that Voicy recognizes at least 3 000 000 voice messages per month!
This is an amazing opportunity for deep learning as a great dataset. A bit of an exclusive info for you here: the top languages from the most recent 22 000 000 voice messages recognized:
- Russian: 11,753,223
- Turkish: 3,005,133
- Italian: 2,744,162
- Portuguese: 2,362,850
- Spanish: 844,612
- English: 768,550
- Arabic: 412,184
- German: 274,574
- Malay: 116,140
- Indonesian: 106,150
- French: 16,622
- Chinese: 15,418
Once again, I'm glad I translate most of my products to multiple languages from the very beginning of their life cycles!
I'm still in talks with a few parties that are looking to buy Voicy. A couple of them seem to check out all the moral and logic boxes (e.g. no need to run ads or seek ROI after the purchase, no immoral uses of data expected, high respect for the user privacy, etc.) If you're interested in placing a bid, let me know on Telegram — @borodutch. Thank you.
Shieldy stopped growing
but only the free version. Finally, I can stop biting my elbows over selling Shieldy at 20M users and seeing it promptly rise to 42M users four months after the deal. It seems like everybody is using Shieldy on Telegram nowadays — and the premium version thrives. I can't disclose any numbers at the moment for obvious reasons — but chats are even buying the lifetime licenses to save in bulk (which are $450 apiece).
Overall, I don't think there is much to discuss about Shieldy at this moment. Business as usual, keeping Telegram safe from annoying spammers.
🎉 1M todos at Todorant 🎉
God, this is huge. When I started Todorant a few years back, I thought that 1M todos would be inevitable. Still, for some reason, I hadn't felt the real high of it until this milestone was reached. So far, 34 966 users have created 1 074 501 todos! This is excellent news!
Being a tiny independent development team, reaching these milestones are no joke. Going to squeeze in a marketing push in the next few months into the roadmap somehow, though.
I'll let a small selection of reviews do the talking. It's so uplifting to see the app you're working on changing the lives around you!
Borodutch Club
This month the members of my elite club launched 25 new products 😱 This is more than what I usually launch every month. But it gets better: we raided the most popular Russian website vc.ru, getting the first places of the most popular articles every week of the month.
I didn't expect such a fantastic result, but I was astonished after seeing it play out in real life. But I mostly like that every one of these products brings value to the world and increases the overall amount of good.
The acquisition
I'm happy to announce that I have acquired @AnyVideoDownloadBot, improved its codebase, removed all ads and made it open source! It does what it's named after — you send it a link, and the bot uploads this video to Telegram to be played natively.
This is another one of my bots written purely in grammY — and I even utilized the self-hosted Telegram Bot API! However, only for uploading the video. It turned out that a self-hosted telegram-bot-api instance still barely works if you use it for both uploading large videos and receiving/sending messages.
But how many people use it?
Is Bot Down
This is the answer — one of the new products I've launched. isbotdown.com and @IsBotDownBot is the solution for automatic Telegram bot health checks. Send it a bot's username, subscribe to its status — and you will receive a notice if it goes down! Completely free of charge.
Even better! The bot got added to the list of bots at isbotdown.com and even got its own link like isbotdown.com/#/AnyVideoDownloadBot, which not only shows the status of the bot but also gives you the stats from @TrueCheckerBot and @botspulsebot if available.
Go on, check out how many users @AnyVideoDownloadBot has!
@NFTFounders
I was looking for a decent community to share the experience with other NFT project founders. I couldn't find one, so I created a Russian-speaking community to discuss NFTs here.
We live in a strange time when launching a community is as simple as one-two-three. Felt a bit weird.
Other projects
Let's start with the biggest loser so far! Can you guess it? CryptoGranny is one of the most useless complex things I've built!
So many deals, millions of them... and none are good enough to take profit from. Unfortunately, CryptoGranny algorithm is too quick to react to certain opportunities, and people are just not quick enough to act on the signals. The number of paid subscribers? 0. Nada. I refunded all of the subscribers. It was a good and fun ride, but CryptoGranny will simply dangle on my servers for eternity now, posting endless useless signals that no human being can act on.
Well, I'm glad I spent only two days building it and not two years. Fail fast. That's what they say!
Who's the most enjoyable positive outlier? @randymbot. At first, I was like: "This doesn't seem right, 9 million people use it?" And then I was like: "Oh, I get it now."
See, there are still no good solutions on Telegram to do giveaways and sweepstakes. So large communities still use a bot I wrote years ago in like an evening. And I mean large communities use it.
Well, I think I know which bot is going to get re-written to grammY next. So here's another good source of new users.
Conclusion
Another month goes by, Christmas is at the doorsteps, coffee shops probably already dropped the fall attire (I'm not sure, haven't been out in weeks lol), and we are cooking something revolutionary in-house.
Next year. I'll do everything next year. I'll deliver on everything next year. 2022 — this is going to be amazing, this is going to be huge, mark my words.
Unless another variant of COVID gets released.
