Reminders.company started as a spin off of another project I had going at that time. I was working on a small website to allow users to signin and create a bunch of reminders that are due on certain date/timezone and they would get a simple email notification when it happens.

I was fiddling with the UI quite a bit, until it clicked to me that this isn’t something that anyone will use because it doesn’t really solve a problem that another tool fixes already, like a calendar reminder for example. So I decided to repack all that functionality into an API and sell that API as a SAAS product targeted to developers. So that’s what I did!

It took me about 3 months to get it done, working on it every day after I was done with my day-to-day job. The platform was divided in 3 services:

• Website: A nodejs app with koa, postgres and stripe for managing subscriptions.
• API: The actual api users were iteracting with, using koa, postgres, redis and cronjobs.
• Docs: Based on slate

The platform was deployed in heroku, with a paid dyno, a basic postgres and redis store. When launch day came, I patiently waited until producthunt submissions of the day were open and once they were I finally push the submit button, also to hackernews and a few subreddits. Reaction from users was pretty good, got quite some traction through out those days and even made it to 4th product of the day which was quite an achievement for me. Got around 240 accounts created, out of those around 100 tested the product and only 2 people converted to paid users for only one month.

A few API marketplaces got in touch to see if I was interested in integrating my product into their platform and one even offered to buy it for 300 bucks. But I felt like the product and the experiment itself failed and didn’t wanted to give it away for a few bucks; there was obviously some interest on it but maybe the pricing wasn’t adequate or it was just missing something else that I didn’t figure out back then.