Our app went through something of a transformation since I last checked in. For the better part of the process, it felt like a student project. A really good student project, but a student project nonetheless. It had its quirks, it felt somewhat….unfinished. There was something that separated it from its competitors. Ours looked better, it felt better, but every time the app launched, something didn’t feel quite right.
Well, that’s not the case anymore. For those who aren’t beta testers, we’ve got a BIG update coming your way. For those chosen few with their email addresses enshrined within our TestFlight account, you know what I’m talking about. The app feels refined. It feels pro. It feels like something I could pay money for and not feel pissed off.
That’s saying something. The app may — just may—be worth something.
It’s moments like this that we work towards, that we anticipate, that our aspirations lead towards but rarely realize. The difficulties of this development process have been abundant and frustrating. We had huge moments of progress paired with longer stretches of stagnancy. Things would fall into place, but I never felt like we were quite there.
Much to the dismay of Robert Quigley, our oracle and siren, we didn’t feel quite ready to unleash our project on the world. It’s in the app store and we’ve had more than a hundred downloads from all over the world, but we didn’t think it was worthy of promotion in our backyard. Time will tell, but I think we made the right decision.
We now have a product, in hand, that we are proud of, that we feel is worth promoting, that we believe will end up on the phones of hundreds or thousands or millions of people.
What to do with all this app?
The next series of decisions we have to make will be about how to further refine, how to seek out users and hear them, how to put Vibrant on as many phones as possible.
The last challenge will be the most difficult. We will need to devise a cost-effective, highly effective advertising campaign to get this in front of as many users as possible. People want this kind of product — our research has shown that. Vibrant is good at what we built it to do—our research has shown that too.
Carriages, horses, and blog posts
A lot of these rambling posts are the result of long Sunday nights of thinking, planning, stressing, and working. So often that leads to the tackling of big, complicated, and somewhat irrelevant questions. We have a demo day coming up in less than a week, and our presentation looks killer. Our team, on the other hand, has a bit of work to do. We’ve made it this far. We’ve put in hundreds of hours of work. We can own this presentation, own the room, and own the app store. All we need to do is get up there and say:
“We’d like to introduce you to Vibrant.”
Our team will carry it home from there. We have so far, so why stop now?
-CL
