Monthly recap for july 2024
In July, we released Dédale! First in private beta, while we gathered our first user feedback, then publicly two weeks later, after making a few modifications such as improving the model creation process.
Summary of what have been done in July 2024
In July, we finished work on Dédale and published it!
The launch took place in two stages:
- We put the service into production and started communicating at the very beginning of the month, with drip access via private message and to members on the waiting list,
- We shared access publicly 2 weeks later, while we made final adjustments based on initial user feedback.
Private beta and feedback from selected users
The first step was to get as much initial feedback as possible from users to "validate" our initial idea.
We invited a select group of users from our waiting list. This stage was important for gathering direct feedback and identifying the first points to be improved with a view to public release.
We use the term "validation" very loosely with regard to this product, since the aim has always been to enter rapidly into a process of cyclical exchange between the products we build and the audience we seek to develop. For us, Dédale has always been a way of demonstrating our know-how by offering, free of charge, a tool that is useful to us at Bireme Lab.
Prioritizing key features for public release
Feedback has been generally positive, with many users commenting on the attention to detail and care taken with the interface.
However, a few comments caught our attention:
- Difficulties in understanding how to use it: some people didn't immediately understand how to use the tool,
- Difficulties in understanding the added value: some users didn't immediately understand the added value provided by the platform.
To address these two points, we have:
- Prioritized the addition of automatic detection with Can I email, which brings easily discernible added value,
- Prioritized the addition of predefined templates, integrating most of the React Email examples we've adapted to Dédale functionalities,
- Modified the home page by replacing a conversion element with a video introducing the tool and each of its functionalities.
Public launch and general reception
As with the initial beta feedback, the general reception to the launch of Dédale was very positive. There was a great deal of praise for the quality of the application, and this validated our initial specifications, i.e. to validate our technical infrastructure and offer the best possible product quality.
For the launch we were lucky enough to get a helping hand from @guillaume_rygn on X who communicated on his account to an audience of almost 20,000 people with the results:
- 238 "likes",
- 308 bookmarks to save the tweet,
- 31 republications,
- 8 comments including praise for the quality of the tool.
- 24 new subscribers.
Above all, here are the statistics for July 2024:
- 440 unique visitors to Bireme Lab website, mainly from our social networks,
- 179 Monthly Active Users (MAU) on Dédale
- 16 registered users on Dédale.
Work related to product design and development
Focus of the month: Dédale
Product tasks completed during the month
bireme.io website update:
- Modification of the Dédale landing page to highlight the "Can I email?" feature,
- Modification of the Dédale landing page to replace the waiting list form with buttons to access the product and documentation,
UX/UI:
- New template creation interface, including the ability to select a predefined template
- Redesign of the home page, with the addition of an introductory video to help visitors understand the benefits of Dédale.
Communication and marketing work
Focus of the month: getting started!
Marketing and communication tasks completed during the month
- Definition of a content creation strategy,
- Creation of a publication schedule,
- Ideation, production and planning,
- Creation, filming and editing of the Dédale presentation video,
- Openness to connection with other content creators, introduction to communities of solopreneurs,
- Account creation and warm-up on platforms such as Reddit and Indiehackers,
- Creation of YouTube Instagram and TikTok accounts.
A look back at July 2024 in figures
- 94.2k impressions,
- 344 new subscribers,
- 550 likes,
- 26 republications,
- 47 publications published,
- 153 comments.
- 30,3k impressions,
- 18.3k unique views,
- 261 interactions,
- 55 new subscribers
Development work
Focus of the month: Dédale
Technical tasks completed during the month
- Addition of pre-configured templates to start working from an example
- Modified interface for deleting a template
- Added the ability to duplicate a template
- Integration of an introductory video on the Dedale home page
- Creation of a panel indicating template incompatibility with certain email clients, based on Can I Email
- Implemented tracking using Mixpanel
Focus on: detecting incompatible features in email clients
One of the features we're particularly keen on for Dédale is the ability to easily check whether the email template under development will be displayed correctly for all recipients.
With Can I email, we can retrieve the list of features supported by each email client (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, ...).
But this tool only allows us to search by property, so we have to repeat this action for each feature implemented in our email template to ensure compatibility.
This can quickly become tedious, motivating us to automate this process in Dédale.
Step 1: Retrieve an email template's list of features
To ensure that an e-mail template is compatible with all existing clients, the first thing to do is to list all its features:
- the use of a customized font,
- displaying images in certain formats,
- having a color gradient on a button.
From a technical point of view, we'll analyze the model's code and extract the list of functions it uses. This analysis is performed with :
- hast, which retrieves all the model's text/images,
- csstree](https://github.com/csstree/csstree), which lists the rules concerning the model's visual appearance.
Step 2: Optimize access to Can I Email data
Once you've listed the features used by an e-mail template, you need to check the percentage of compatibility with the various e-mail clients for each of them.
The first idea we came up with was to automatically search the https://www.caniemail.com/ website for each existing feature in the model. But this poses the following problems:
- from a performance point of view, the check could take dozens of seconds to load the pages for each feature,
- from a reliability point of view, if the site design changes, the information retrieval would no longer work for all users and would require an urgent update on our side.
To avoid this problem, we have created our own list of features with their percentage of compatibility based on Can I email:
- through an API provided for developers, accessible at https://www.caniemail.com/api/data.json,
- on each property page to retrieve the percentage of compatible e-mail clients (not available in the API).
Once this list has been generated, we automatically integrate it into the Daedalus source code. This eliminates the need to make requests to Can I email for compatibility testing, making this verification instantaneous while remaining immune to potential changes to the Can I email site.
1 An API (Application Programming Interface) enables different applications to communicate and exchange information in a standardized way.