Another year has come to a close, so it’s time for celebration! 🎉
December might have been short, but we are here again with another product update. This is our third one since we committed to providing more transparency on what we do every cycle. So maybe you remember back during the first product cycle when we announced this new way of communicating with our community, back then we gave you a peek into how our product team was organized. You can check out the insights right here.
We’ve reached some milestones this last year and since this is the last update of 2018 we’ll try to share some of what we learned. As usual, this cycle is marked by a song, this time it’s Go by Pearl Jam, the live version 😅, so we call it Go (Live).
Since we have now more than a handful of songs we have decided to create a public playlist at Spotify with all the cycle songs bundled together, follow us! 🎵
Learning is a never-ending process for us. We believe strongly in the Lean Startup mindset of “build-measure-iterate.” So, to that end, we’ve been adding tools which help us measure in order to improve our iterations. But you’ll learn more about that in a post by our marketing team soon. Spoiler alert: the waiting list was an astounding place to validate some thoughts we had. Not only did we get far more sign-ups than we first were expecting, but it also provided valuable information to test our assumptions. By the way, thanks so much to everyone who filled out our surveys, we can’t tell you how much it helps.
During our second update, we let you know about the 3 important parts of the buyer protection platform that we’re working on. Well, the ability to submit documents and the chat system between the buyer and the merchant has now been finished. Allowing buyers and merchants to communicate directly inside the platform was not a part of our original plan as we had initially prepared for this to happen through email. However, thanks to your feedback, we realized that it was a critical part of our user flow. Build, measure, iterate, you know the drill!
Anyway, more than words, have a look at the following video.
A simple dispute in action
Our merchandise store payment system is now fully working in our production environment. In fact, if you didn’t visit it this month, then you haven’t seen all of the cool changes we’ve made! Pop on over when you get a chance. We were able to use this store as our minimum viable product to showcase what UTRUST will be able to do, but it wasn’t quite ready for implementation as most of the integration was lacking and tailored to that particular store. In a way, you could think of the store as a timebox full of hand-stitches with the sole intention of validating our market fit.
Now you can think of our store as UTRUST’s first merchant. This is a way of replicating the buying experience so that we can understand our merchants and customers interactions with everything we do. But, our biggest milestone this year was the use of the v1.0 WooCommerce plugin in this particular environment. This plugin will let our merchants apply our platform directly to their website, allowing us to update and fix whenever needed.
Some of you may have noticed that at the moment we’re only accepting Bitcoin, but that’s only temporary. We wanted to test the live environment during the shopping season so it made more sense to us to accept only one currency at a time to ensure stability. We had more than 500 users and quite a few payments. While that may not sound like much, it did exactly what we needed it to do: testing and building. But hey, guess what, in the next coming weeks we’ll have ETH and UTK back on the market and ready to make payments.
While getting our beta wallet online took a bit longer than we expected, we now have external users enjoying build 70 of our wallet. It uses blockchain testnets to allow access to our payments and top-ups without any financial concern.
Right now, we’re migrating iOS delivery to TestFlight so that we can get our iOS users up to speed, this should also speed up our approval in the App Store later. Soon, we’ll be unleashing updates based on your feedback, which we’re all very excited about.
At the moment we’ve got 3000 people eagerly waiting to get access to our wallet. But, it’s important to us that we learn how to scale. That’s what the beta is really for. Our marketing team gets to learn the keys which bring more people to our platform. On top of that our support team understands how to handle customer queries and build FAQs based on that.
Meanwhile, our user experience team has a chance to conduct interviews to find out what is working, and what needs improvements. This all means that we’ll be able to grow our beta users at a faster rate while delivering a better product. Get ready for this next cycle, because it’s going to grow by leaps and bounds.
Even though the race has ended we’re still bringing in our top supporters in batches. If you haven’t joined the waiting list yet, you can start any time, right here. Share that referral link and you too can have a fresh new beta wallet as a late Christmas present from us.
We’re stable in four environments from development and staging to sandbox and production. We have also been able to keep nearly 100% uptime for weeks and, although this is with very low traffic it’s still an important achievement. We still have improvements to make but now we can focus on our next steps.
At the moment when you see our product being showcased at conferences or meetups, it is running in our sandbox environment (the one using testnet). In fact, at our recent gatherings in London and Basel we had about four people simultaneously paying for dozens of items with the UTRUST Wallet!
We’re also excited about our recent update to the team page, have a look! Our product team has doubled going from 10 to 20 people. We’re still recruiting so if you’d like to join the team, go on over to the offers page and drop us a line.
Even though our team is mostly based in Braga, Portugal we now have people working all over the world. UTRUST is in Poland, the Czech Republic and Scotland, sometimes you can actually find them way farther away such as Russia, Colombia and the USA.
It’s been just a few months since we published my first blog post where we gave you insights into how we worked back in September. But you can already feel so many differences as we grow and adapt in order to provide you with the best of UTRUST.
Thank you all for your continued support and keep an eye out for the future of online payments. See you soon! 👋
Originally published at medium.com on January 4, 2019.
