Today, we are super excited to announce that Neverinstall has reached over 100,000+ users on the platform in just 3 months since the public beta launch in July.
We have had an amazing journey so far with immense learning each day. We're thankful to all our users for making Neverinstall the go-to app for users who want to access apps from the browser.
Building a scalable product with such rapid growth is no easy task and we're continuously faced with challenges like scaling our team and processes as well as our technology which is powering the platform. We wanted to share how we got here and some of our key learnings so far:
Early access signups- Sept 2020
Introducing Android Studio on the cloud, Request for early access - https://yaoe.io/android from androiddev
We started by asking users on Reddit what they think about using their hardware-intensive desktop apps like - Android Studio, IntelliJ, etc. on the cloud through a browser with some additional features like:
- Real-time collaboration
- Accessibility from mobile or tablet devices.
- Virtual browsers with superfast internet.
It was cool to see their curiosity about our product and in the end, around 500 users were interested in our early access.
Rebranding YAOE to Neverinstall - Feb 2021
We had started by porting VS Code to the browser back in March 2020 and thus the name YAOE which is short for "Yet Another Online Editor". Though most of the users liked accessing a full-fledged IDE in the browser, they wanted to be able to use their favorite IDE rather than VS Code.
After that, our problem changed from running just VS Code in the browsers to running any desktop application in the browser.
With a different product, we had to come up with a new brand name. Coming up with a good brand name is difficult today and getting the domain is more challenging. After some long months of trials, we eventually picked out Neverinstall.
Public Beta - June 2021
This was a big milestone for us, and we were more than ready to share our project with the public. We had a lot of interest from early access users, but now we wanted to see how far it will go with everyone out there.
25 Daily Active Users
After another month of iterations, we had only about 25 daily active users. We were in a rut of doing more iterations to make that "perfect" product for our users without actually getting statistically significant users to the platform.
ProductHunt Launch - July 22nd, 2021
We finally decided to launch the platform on ProductHunt. We were excited and curious about how the platform would be perceived by a large audience.
Despite a busy Wednesday on PH and with the launch of some great products, we made it to the top 5 products of the day!
We also made it to the PH newsletter which we wanted, it was a successful launch for us and grew by around 2000 users that day.
Trending #1 on Hacker News Show
The same day we posted on Hacker News and we were trending #1 for 2 days straight.
The following weekend we also posted on the r/webdev subreddit
A progressive web app that uses WebRTC to stream desktop apps from AWS to your browser from webdev
and we were trending #1 in that subreddit for the day.
Across ProductHunt, HackerNews, and Reddit we were able to get great reviews and helpful feedback.
Neverinstall is fantastic! I work on pion/webrtc and this is something I have wanted to see for a long time. Keep up the really great work, excited to see this grow :) Would love to chat WebRTC sometime and hear how it could be better.
- Sean Dubois
With this, we doubled down on the Product-led growth strategy that helped us acquire over 100,000 users organically. We will write more about this in the next post.
In the coming months:
- We will be adding Steam and some other apps.
- We will be adding more servers in US and EU.
- Allow users to create and build custom apps.
Our journey is just beginning, and we want to thank you for joining us on the ride. We know that our users are our greatest asset, and we're looking forward to growing with all of you.
