87.000 installs/year. Startup rollercoaster | 2022

Welcome to the RatePunk amusement park of rollercoasters 🎢. Buckle up and dive down with the hope of coming back up.

2022 was the year my browser extension entered the travel & tech industries. February 14th, to be precise. Starting there from 0, we now have over 87 000 installs, new features, bringing it closer to our overall goal of making it an ultimate travel app and the coolest design it ever had. Also, an important thing to mention - during this year, we did not monetize it in any way, and it remains FREE to all users.

From only a browser extension comparing hotel prices on different OTAs and showing the cheapest option, it now offers a RatePunk reward program of CASHBACK, and some other big upgrades, such as a rebooking option or review aggregation, are on their way.

To say thanks & goodbye to 2022, I wanted to rewind all that had happened - month by month.

✅ FEBRUARY

Okay, so our developers’ team started creating it earlier, but it officially launched on the 14th of February, and that’s what we call our official birthday. Creating a tool that doesn’t have a similar one in the market was as exciting as it was… challenging.

👨‍💻 THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF CREATING THE EXTENSION. Developers’ pain.

Our team has never worked with chrome extensions or scraping libraries. So there were a lot of topics to cover before starting any development of the extension and price scraping from different hotel providers. You can find various Chrome extension boilerplate projects on the Internet, but most are outdated and do not support the newest Manifest-Version. So, we decided to create our own boilerplate, which took us a while, but at least we have a fully adjustable boilerplate that meets all our needs.

While creating price comparison, we had to dig deep into every hotel provider and find out how they are structured. One of the most complex parts was how hotel providers approach internationalization. Hotel data might change according to user location, browser, or even the type of hotel selected. That means we must manually encounter every possible use case available to check if the extension will work as expected.

RatePunk extension is available in 3 different stores: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Each store requires different extension configurations to be approved. Another problem we faced with these stores was that the process of tracking data that they provide is impractical and inaccurate, to put it mildly.

You can find more details on this process in my other IH article, where our lead developer shared it step-by-step.

✅ MARCH

300 users reached, vuuuhu! 🥳 No, really, that was a win because we’ve been moving like snails when it came to skyrocketing these numbers. We did it all, and it brought nothing.

📈 What about marketing, guys?!

That’s exactly why there’s a question mark. And an exclamation mark to add some drama we were fighting at that moment. We weren’t quite sure of what we were doing (not that we would be now), but at the same time, we were doing it all.

However, our first goal was to create all the possible social media channels, and we were sure we could push our amazing amazing amazing product without spending any money. Because we didn’t have it, hahaha. But no, it was not effective for us in the long run. We tried every googled advice, but we couldn’t pull it. And even though we got back to trying to make it work a few months after, now, when I’m writing this, we’ve agreed just to keep it alive and not invest much time or energy in it. Until we find a new technique that seems to work.

🖼️ Landing page launched. Price comparison website.

It was really complicated to move forward with marketing without having a proper landing page. That's how new updates came - we made the landing website sexier, and then it was possible to compare the hotel prices not only by using the extension but also on the RatePunk website.

That was a feature that we didn’t promote much after all. We understood that it was not bringing us any installs (which was always our main focus), and it didn’t have any leverage over all the other hotel-price-comparing websites like momondo or Kayak. And we couldn’t compete with them at that stage, so the concept of a browser extension was our main difference. Moreover, it wasn’t comparing the prices as accurately as the pop-up could.

📺 Giving a shot to ADS

It was the first half of March when we decided to give it a try and spend some money on it. We launched different ad campaigns and tested out different countries and visuals. Our CPA has been quite decent the whole time, but still, we can’t invest much there.

✅ APRIL

This could be the month that’s best described as “MARKETING TEAM, YOU HAVE 0 BUCKS AND TIME UNTIL YESTERDAY TO GET 10K NEW INSTALLS.” Sure, easy. In other words:

📈 MARKETING. Time of experimentation.

What didn’t we try? It seems like ever since February, we tried it all:

• The already mentioned social media marketing with all the following accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and we also had TikTok, but canceled it recently.
• A blog. At first, it was a completely different website created by WIX, but in April, we moved it to be linked directly with our official website. I’ll include more details about it in later months because the beginning was harsh and unsuccessful, but here’s the link to check the current version.

• Directories. Like Top 10 extensions you won’t survive without etc. April was the first month we tried it out, but we’ve been trying to do that up until now. Not very successfully, again. We sent out hundreds of emails but barely got an answer.
• We got our first press releases published. Although the distribution platforms weren’t the best because they were free (to name a few: Market Press Release, PRFree, PRLOG), they still gained us the spot in Google Search.
• IndieHackers was a very successful platform for us at the beginning, and it also grew a habit in me to share our journey here.

This was also the month when a marketing switch to money happened. Together with the idea to trying out collaborating with travel influencers. We’re a bootstrapped startup, and our budget is limited, so our choices were just as few. After trying to work with micro & macro-influencers both, we’ve noticed that it’s a challenge to get a good price-return of investment ratio. Since we finished it after a few months of strictly focusing only there, here’s how it could be shortly concluded in our case:

• Instagram influencers weren’t effective. Maybe because most of the ones we collaborated with were micro (we couldn’t afford bigger ones). Most of them generated 1-5 installs, keeping their CPA super high.
• YouTube influencers performed best. And that also can be because most of them were macro influencers. The CPA was mostly around 20-30 euros, which is a lot, but it still generated the base of installs. The first collaboration was the most successful one, with a CPA of fewer than 5 euros & more than 600 (!) installs from one video generated.
• Macro influencers performed better than micro-influencers. That you most likely already understood. Bigger audiences and more trust showed better results.
• It’s very important to have strict guidelines. After some time of dealing with influencers and seeing the results, we understood we have to explain everything with as much detail as possible. We made a Creator's Guide for them to be easier to work with us. Things that seem very understandable and vital to mention to you might not be that obvious to people who’re seeing the product for the first time.

As you can see, a lot of things were tried out and were changed this month. The one thing that didn’t change at that moment was the number of installs sad face.

✅ MAY

If someone tells you complaining won’t bring you a long way, we dare to disagree. Okay, just a little. We did complain A LOT about reaching 500 installs in 5 months in May because nothing seemed to be working. But then, with the help of Indie Hackers, we reached our first 500 installs per ONE DAY. It really did move things for us, and we can call May the sort of the beginning of our little success.

✉️ LAUNCH OF THE RATEPUNK NEWSLETTER. Travel love emails.

The first one was sent out on May 15th. We’ve been collecting users’ email addresses from the very beginning, and we finally did it. However, it didn’t seem to be working super efficiently, so we quit it for a while after sending 4 and not seeing any traffic. But we brought it back again a few months back, and this time it has been showing better open & click rates.

You should have noticed how we constantly jump on & off on things that might seem messy, but, oh well, that’s how we’ve been rolling. I warned you it’s a rollercoaster, you know what you signed up for…

✅ JUNE

🕊️ Don’t give up too early

We were already talking about quitting and moving on to the next project at the end of April, and we hit 2000 installs on June the 1st. After working on it for around half a year & struggling to make it to 500 installs, we collected 1500 in less than two weeks after a breakthrough.

If someone asked me what’s the best decision I’ve made in creating RatePunk, I’d definitely say not giving up and quitting when the going got tough.

🔝 Hit App Store TOPS

After noticing the rapid growth in installs & keeping them coming constantly, we made it to TOP Free Tools in the App Store. We, for the first time, became the #1 Free Tool in Lithuania, #3 in the United Kingdom, and #20 in the US. Way to go!

Overall, we hit 4000 installs in June. That brought in some long-lost motivation to move forward and inspired us to move our goal to 10k installs.

🏆 Make it to the World Summit Awards

First awards, hello?! On June 15th, I took part in the audition to represent Lithuania at World Summit Awards (WSA). It's an awards system that selects and promotes local digital innovation to improve society. Its first round is the National Contest & preselection, which takes place in 182 countries. I pitched RatePunk in Lithuania, and RATEPUNK WON ITS CATEGORY "TOURISM & CULTURE."

Although we didn’t win the overall contest, we got more coverage on our product, a seal to use on our website, and crucial feedback. Oh, and a scooter.

✅ JULY

👨‍💻 Come on, developers, we need that mobile thingy

We noticed that our main challenge was MOBILE TRAFFIC in the first months. The fact that browser extensions can only be used on desktops became our curse. I believe that it’s a problem that many browser extension creators face. Mobile traffic has wholly taken over the computer version, and we had to find ways to attract people to use their laptops when making reservations. Keeping in mind how easy & popular it’s to do this using a smartphone - our goal was really complicated.

At first, we were trying to convert more mobile phone users into actual installers when they’re on our website by offering them to get a desktop reminder later. Later, we started working on the mobile version of RatePunk and launched it on July 4th. iPhone users could download RatePunk on their phones & compare the hotel prices there.

📰 First publications

3..2..1… Starter Story was our first big publication, where we had the chance to present RatePunk to a wider public. Although we didn’t get many installs from it, it gave us a new idea about trying to get published on more platforms and collecting installs like that. It was something we didn’t try before and, most importantly - didn’t require financial investments. Just some pitching skills.

✅ AUGUST

Guess who reached their primary goal of 10k installs on the 8th of August? That’s right!

From scoring 500 installs per 5 months, we moved to 500 installs daily. But it wasn’t the only benchmark we hit this month - we ended it with 20k installs, and for the first time from the very start, RatePunk got 1000 installs/day.

Overall, this was the most successful month for RatePunk, HANDS DOWN.

Only around 10% of browser extensions existing out there reach 1k, so it was a huge win for our book. We had tested a bunch of marketing strategies and still mainly focused on influencers & press.

🌍 Going more international than ever before

We started translating our landing website to some of the most used languages & focused on adding more. At first, it was just English, but since we’re interested in trying out as many markets as possible, we decided that this could open up more doors.

📰 Featured in #4 news source in the UK

Express.co.uk shared a travel-hacking article where I shared some of the insights we found while working on RatePunk. It was a huge win for us since their website has around 114M+ monthly visitors and is one of the biggest ones in the UK.

✅ SEPTEMBER

50 000 INSTALLS 🦄

September put us halfway to the primary install goal - 100k! But we grew not only in the way of installs: with this increase, 6 new people joined our team. While being one of the highest ups of RatePunk, this month also brought new challenges: new competition with a very similar concept stepped into the travel market during this time.

📖 Giving a try to RatePunk BLOG. 2nd try.

With more hands joining the team, we decided to bring our blog back from the dead. We started writing way more than before and tracking the performance.

These were our main problems:

❌ We couldn’t get what the keyword system was.
❌ We didn’t try to change the headlines & notice the traffic tendencies after.
❌ We didn’t jump on trends on time - most often came in late.
❌ We wrote about any topic that came to mind & was travel-related.
❌ We relied too much on quality & not quantity. One blog post per day is not enough.

✅ OCTOBER

Here, we got to 70 000 installs. Only 30k to 100k left. With these paces, we can do it easily. What could go wrong?

❌ When “the wrong” happens

That’s exactly the time when we ceased an important partnership with one of our affiliate providers, and it slowed down our growth significantly at this point. We stopped all ads and got back to square one of focusing only on FREE things.

🏆 Featured on the TOP list in Tech Advisor

To make the bad not that bad, this happened. Not paid, not contacted. We've been working on getting on listings as TOP Tools To Save Your Money, etc., from the very beginning, and we got featured on Tech Advisor, one of the best-known tech websites. RatePunk got here as a tool that saves money when traveling by comparing hotel rates on major booking websites.

We were finally discovered.

✅ NOVEMBER

This was the months of working on big new features coming. We always have in mind the ultimate travel app and try to move towards it with every upgrade we make.

🤝 NEW PARTNERSHIP

After the huge “down” in October, we looked for new opportunities and started working with another major provider! That allowed us to think wider: work on new upgrades and start investing in ads that showed good results again.

✅ DECEMBER

The time has come to present one of the most-waited new features.

🪙 RatePunk CASHBACK launched

It’s our FREE REWARDS PROGRAM. From that point, RatePunk is not only a hotel-price-comparing browser extension. Now our users can create a personal RatePunk CASHBACK account and earn money by... spending it on hotels.

RatePunk CASHBACK lets them earn reward points towards cashback on eligible hotel bookings. After booking by participating providers with the RatePunk browser extension, our users get a chance to earn points on their purchases. Every user gets 10 free coins just for joining the RatePunk cashback: 5 for creating an account and another 5 for activating it. When a benchmark of 100 coins is reached, the $10 cashback can be redeemed.

Although we didn’t reach our main goal - getting to 100k installs, we’re really close. We also kicked off January on a good note - got published two RatePunk reviews on blogs Coco Travels & Travel or Die Trying, and finally...

🔀 Launched RatePunk REBOOKING

It's a feature where RatePunk will notify you if the hotel price drops. You’ll have this option after confirming your hotel booking. A notification will pop up on the success page offering you the option of receiving an update if the price decreases, letting you cancel that booking then & rebook with the lower price.

That sounds like a promising beginning.

Overall, that was not a bad year to have. We’re proud of bringing such a competitive product into the market and did the best we could. Although I still hope 2023 will have fewer “downs” and more “ups” 🤞. That would also be the biggest wish I’m sending to all of you this year - you go!