CRON-O-Meter 0.9.9 Released

This is a little late, but version 0.9.9 of CRON-o-Meter was released a few weeks ago.

This version brings an update to the foods database (USDA sr24).  Naturally my web version of the popular nutrition software was also updated with this new data.

The website’s traffic has been steadily growing since it was launched in March.

For anyone that checked out the site several months ago, but didn’t switch over, I strongly suggest checking it out again, as there’s been a lot of work and improvements made over that time.

I’ve run the whole thing as a bootstrapped startup, and almost all of the growth has been organic (A negligible amount of traffic is from online paid advertising). A bootstrapped startup is one that starts with basically no capital investment, besides your own elbow grease. It starts generating income modestly from the start, and then feeds that back directly to cover operating expenses as it scales.

It’s currently making about 25% of its revenue from the mobile app sales (iPhone & Android), 25% from advertisements, and 50% from the gold subscription sales. There’s still a long way to go before I can claim a stable income, but the steady growth and revenue stream has been quite encouraging that all the hard work I’ve put in over the past 8 months will be worth while.

If anything, it’s been a tremendous learning experience, and at times frazzling, to mentally juggle so many codebases and platforms (the Java/GWT/SQL website, Android, iPhone, and the original open source version).

I’m surprised that the iPhone version is outselling the Android app nearly 4-to-1. I had thought there were a lot of Android users out there, but maybe they don’t like buying apps as much as iPhone users.