I ‘m sitting here at my desk, looking at my 10-year-old daughter’s handiwork. Before going off to overnight camp, she painted Daddy’s toe nails black. Because I wear my Chaco’s almost daily, my toes are exposed for the world to see. Daddy walking around in his sandals, with black toe nails may be one of the funniest things my kids have ever seen. Definitely worth it for the laughs alone.

We are in growth mode now. The majority of our bugs have been crushed under my painted toes. Our global search for an exceptional Sys Admin has taken me from Lithuania to Mexico and then back east again to Russia where Evgeniy is working his magic on our boxes.

On the other side of the app, the software side of things, we’ve also traveled quite a distance to land back at home. We tried Russia, Brazil, India, back to Russia, only to land back on my desk, at my keyboard. I’ve recently been promoted to junior developer for ByteStand. Hopefully I’ll last longer than my predecessors. I definitely have more skin in the game. I stopped counting my investment after $20,000. I sleep better that way.

After 3 months in the Shopify App Store we have 441 app installs, and just under $5,000 in total revenue. I’ve installed Google Analytics on our Shopify Store page, and we are getting about 50 visits a day there and roughly 100 visits a day to our website. Plus, we have a Google Adwords campaign that is costing about $15/day and bringing in anywhere from 10 to 30 visits.

Thankfully, with a more stable code base, our burn rate for developers has dropped from almost $1,500 a week to less than $500 a week. I’m hoping that eventually my burn rate inches closer to zero, while my revenue number continues to climb. Ahh, what a day that will be.

During all the turmoil from developing the main application, I’ve also just submitted a new app to the App Store. It’s called FBA Shipping and will hopefully be live soon. Our plans here are to eventually integrate my shipping app into the main ByteStand app.

Now I have to switch roles and move from technology to marketing, finding new users and expanding our brand. I’ve been trying 100 things or more, I’ll expand on those in the next post, but for now I’ll just enjoy learning the ByteStand code base and admiring my black toe nails.