Camelot

Inspiration

Taking care of a home is a list of never ending things to do: problems to fix, stuff to clean, projects to plan, and upgrades to complete. I've intermittently been working on a web tool (Minicastle) to help myself and others with this, and as it's grown, I've learned that these problems extend to people to many people with a DIY-mentality (regardless of whether they live in a single-family home, condo, apartment, farm, RV, or more). Since users have been asking for a true mobile app to make the experience even more convenient, Shipaton felt like the right time to go for it!

What it does

Camelot's core feature is to help you track, organize, and complete "issues" around your house. You can think of it like Linear but for homeowners and their homes. Within an Issue, you can record helpful information like status, priority, costs, time spent, images, links, and more. (Generally, the more context you capture, the more helpful it will be when you inevitably encounter the same issue later on!) In addition, you can organize your issues by Areas - it's less daunting to tackle a house full of problems when you can deal with them one room at-at-time. You can also organize your Issues by Project, so that when you have a renovation or other home improvement project, you can break down a bigger vision or goal into more doable chunks of work. Lastly, you can view everything within your mobile phone's calendar, so that you can plan your work into your weekend and free time.

How we built it

Built with Expo and RevenueCat.

What we learned

Just getting started with everything there is to learn about the mobile world, but my mind is blown 🤯 with the crazy amount of technical things can do with mobile that you don't even think about on web, as well as the business elements like paywalls, localization, ASO, etc.

In particularly, I'm most focused on learning and experimenting with everything I can in terms of marketing and growth before investing in the next major improvements to the product. This includes:

• ASO: slowly getting Camelot into top-ranking spots on niche keywords, then hoping that will help propel growth into more popular words (along with ratings, which I still need to implement)
• Apple Ads: I tested Apple Ads for a week but realized I didn't know enough about keywords to target effectively, so I've put that on pause for now. Conversion rates were very low, and cost per acquisition (CPA) was on the verge of exceeding $10 USD. But it was amazing to see that I could cheaply and quickly get thousands of impression, which will be super useful once I've got a sense of how to target effectively within that level of traffic.
• Reddit Ads: I'm most familiar with the Reddit ecosystem, and realized that would probably be a better place to start given that I know my target audience is there and looking for a solution. I've had time to run ads for just a few days now, and am testing different copy across the same groups of homeowner related subreddits. So far the click-through conversion has been much better than Apple Ads (up to 8% vs. <1% for Apple), so soon I'll be focused on optimizing for installs once I figure out the messages that work for each particular audience.

Lastly, I learned that the Sub Club podcast is the podcast I've been looking for for years - an awesome mix of business, marketing, creative, and technical knowledge for consumer applications.

What's next for Camelot

More features are planned to gain parity with the web-version, like Inventory tracking, Reporting, Recommendations, and more. I'm also planning to add on-device AI capabilities, then introduce social, sharing, and data syncing functionality to help drive growth once I know that the product really clicks for individual users.

Built With

• expo.io
• react-native
• revenuecat
• typescript