Three months and 70k installs later…
Three months out the door. Three months since we launched Zimly in the quest to give all of us Android fanboys and girls out there a better way to consume media on our devices. In the span of things, three months isn’t really a very long time. But a lot can happen in three months. And for a us, it’s been a lifetime.
So I wanted to take a moment and reflect on what we have learned over these last three months. To begin with, GetSatisfaction is awesome. When this project was first getting off the ground, we knew that we wanted an easy way to talk with our users… to hear what issues they were having with Zimly and discover what they wanted to see in upcoming releases. We debated using a simple forum at first, but decided against it in the end. Now I know I am making it sound like we put a lot of thought into this decision. But the truth is… not really. We pretty much shrugged our shoulders, threw up our hands, and said “What the hell”.
So I wanted to take a moment and reflect on what we have learned over these last three months. To begin with, GetSatisfaction is awesome. When this project was first getting off the ground, we knew that we wanted an easy way to talk with our users… to hear what issues they were having with Zimly and discover what they wanted to see in upcoming releases. We debated using a simple forum at first, but decided against it in the end. Now I know I am making it sound like we put a lot of thought into this decision. But the truth is… not really. We pretty much shrugged our shoulders, threw up our hands, and said “What the hell”.
In retrospect it was a good decision. A lot of people find forums daunting, conversations there are difficult to follow, information is hard to find, and topics are repeated all the time. GetSatisfaction fixes a great many of those issues, greatly simplifying the process of staying in touch with our users. And at a grand total price of 0 dollar and 0 cents, it was definitely one of our smarter moments.Deadlines are a bitch to keep because life gets in the way. We are a tiny, unfunded company, so life… i.e. staying a live gets in the way of working on what we want to work on (aka Zimly). We end up accepting a lot of work that we don’t really want to do just to make ends meet, and our ambitious development plans for Zimly ends up with sloppy seconds. We have tried to keep up a 2 week release cycle over the last 3 months, and thanks to the incredible hard work of our team we have been able to maintain that for the most part. In fact this is the first time since we launched that we have missed our update by more then 3 days. The bad news is, there is nothing we can do about that now, and because we are no where ready with our next release it is still going to be a few weeks before we can get it out. The good news is, it’s going to be awesome (imho). In fact if you are interested in helping us test it, we have started a sign-up form here.And finally, our users are awesome. I have nothing else to say about that. You guys rock my world. And every time we miss a release deadline it is the thought of you holding your phone, intently watching your notification bar for an update alert that isn’t coming that keeps us working to get it out. (I know you probably don’t do this… but one can wish can’t they?)
