It’s been just about a month since I posted my article on how I built Tout and took it to market in 3 days. I think it’s time to do a bit of a retrospective and talk about how things are going.

To give the quick back story, I built Tout to “scratch my own itch.” I was sending out a ton of marketing and customer development emails for my other product Braintrust and I needed a way to do it more effectively.

And so, I built Tout, a way to templatize my emails. Just for kicks, I added a premium plan that would give website like analytics on the emails I sent.

The numbers

After about 30 days since launch, Tout has signed up a total of **334 users**, processed about **1,600 pitches**, and signed up **10 premium subscribers** each paying $30 per month.

Changes to Tout over the first 30 days

Thanks to a rather passionate group of customers around Tout, I also received a ton of feedback around the service.

The first two weeks after launch were spent ironing out random bugs around the service, implementing things like a “Forgot Password” feature.

And, adding some features that I wouldn’t have thought of myself such as integrating with Highrise, being able to change the greeting for templates for other languages, and ensuring people can put in HTML in their messages for customizations.

After the first two weeks or so, Tout got to a pretty humming state. It turns out the problem it was solving struck a real nerve in people.

One of my customers put it best: “Copy-n-Paste is SO 1990s thanks to Tout.” With the fires put out, I started to focus more on customer development.

I hooked up a survey widget to gather feedback, and I also used Tout to email new users and ask them how their experience was going.

About three weeks into the service being online, I got enough information from customers to realize that:

1. people were looking for a slightly more polished interface for Tout (but admitted that it met their immediate need).

2. and although some people were turned off by the $30 price tag, there were lots of people who were perfectly fine with it as long as I put in some certain features.

And so, on the three week mark, even with existing premium subscribers, I implemented the low hanging fruit of the premium features: the ability to share Tout Premium with up to five team members AND the ability to share the pitch templates across the team.

This meant that if five of the team members used the same pitch template to deliver a consistent message, you’ll get 5x the amount of analytics data tracking whether your email pitches (and messaging) is working with your audience.

The premium update struck yet another nerve, followed with a set of emails saying “Perfect! I was waiting for exactly this feature…” I got yet another bump in revenues.

Over the last week or so, it seems I hit another peak, and people started to complain about slowness.

And so, thanks to Heroku’s awesome infrastructure, I just dialed up the # of dynos, and added some background worker threads for synching Highrise and sending e-mails. Problem solved.

What’s next for Tout

At this point, I see a Premium subscriber sign up just about every other day or so. I told myself that since Braintrust is my first priority, working on Tout would not be worth it to me without the $30/month price tag.

At this point, I’m pretty satisfied. Tout is more than paying for it self, and is also generating extra cash that I can feed into Braintrust.

More importantly, Tout is easily attracting the type of people that also happen to be perfect candidates for Braintrust.

Which means that by placing a simple upsell link for Braintrust in Tout, I can more than recoup whatever time I’ve put into it already revenues aside.

Moving forward, I’ve got some killer feature ideas from my customers.

As time permits, I’ll be implementing them over the next few weeks. If I see enough of a response from all of you, I’ll post another update reporting back in a few months or so.