On August 2nd of 2018, I committed the first code to the Suitcase Dancer repository! Since the project has now been going on for over a year, I thought it would be a good time to stop and reflect on how far it’s come in a year. And since I’m a programmer, what better place to start than with numbers?
The Numbers:
While I’ve only been doing SEO for about 5 months, the website has appeared in more than 11,000 Google searches, and these search results have been clicked 179 times.
In the last year, 859 users have visited the site, and viewed more than 7,100 pages.
In addition, despite being only two weeks since its launch, the Suitcase Dancer mobile app has been downloaded by more than 100 people!
Who Uses Suitcase Dancer?
We’ve had visitors from 38 different countries! So far, about 72% of the site’s web traffic has been in the United States. Canada is tied with Germany for the second most visitors with just shy of 3% of our traffic. About 19% of the site’s traffic comes from Europe, and I’m pleased to see more than 3% from Asia! こんにちは〜 여보세요!
How Do People Use Suitcase Dancer?
A whopping 45% of visitors view the Suitcase Dancer website on phones or tablets. I had a feeling this would be the case when building the site, and took a lot of care to try to create a good mobile experience! I hope you’ve found the website to be easy to use, and things will only become easier as the mobile app becomes more polished!
What’s Next?
I have a million ideas, and I try to avoid listing them all to avoid propagating vaporware - software that sounds exciting but never ends up actually existing. Instead, I try to keep quiet about my ideas and rely on user feedback to determine what to work on first.
The nature of the app I’m building is that it has very strong network effects - the more people who use it, the more useful it becomes. Thus I try to respond to user feedback quickly and build what people are most excited about. As of late, there seems to be a lot of excitement around the release of the mobile app - people want more features in the app, and an easier experience posting local dances so that they can use the mobile app as a tool for promoting their local dance scenes.
So I’m prioritizing some features I’ve had in mind for a while now regarding local dances (such as using a phone’s GPS location to filter local dance results to your area) in the hopes of making Suitcase Dancer the best way to find out about West Coast Swing dances anywhere in the world!
You
While I’ve done all of the coding myself, I haven’t done this all alone! There’s lots of dancers who have supported the project in many different ways - from testing the website and mobile app, to helping me design logos, requesting cool features, recommending it to friends, and just generally being supportive! We have such great people in the WCS community!
Thank you all so much for the tremendous support you’ve shown this project. I hope that as Suitcase Dancer becomes more mature and more features are released it will become an even better tool for discovering opportunities to dance wherever you happen to be!