On making promises you can’t keep
A status update on the development of Boxy 2
Boxy, launched in December 2015, is our first Mac app. In that time, and still today, making a Mac app and trying to earn money from it might sound risky if not a bit crazy, but that’s what we did. We reached roughly 8k Monthly Active Users in a few months, and our app is still profitable today, more than a year after its launch, even with the amazing competitors we have and their exciting updates.
Seriously, who would have thought that emails clients would have been so hot in 2016? 😎
With this success also came a software engineer day job for Francesco, the developer of Boxy, and other commitments for me, Fabrizio, since I’m a product designer by chance and mainly a filmmaker. But we kept on working on Boxy nonetheless, even with much less time on our hands. Boxy is a very important part of our lives, and our thousands of monthly active loyal users (that’s MALU, a metric I just invented) remind us of that every day.
A few months ago we announced Boxy 2, the first major update in Boxy’s history. We felt like Boxy had already some legacy to take care of (the project basically started off as a hack) and we needed to carefully modernize the code base to perform many fixes and make room for new amazing features. Too much for a minor upgrade.
Announcing a major update before even starting the actual work was a big mistake, and we realized it after missing the first deadlines. When you’re a small two-men team you can set deadlines, but they have to be extremely realistic, and before announcing anything it’s best to ponder your foreseeable future and consider any other plans and responsibilities you might have. We should have known better.
Since we couldn’t hire anyone else, we also dealt ourselves with splitting revenues (it’s way harder than you might think) and taxation. That was overwhelmingly complex, especially in the beginning, but it was part of the challenge. We now know way more than we’d like about taxes, and Italian taxation and bureaucracy aren’t exactly known for being simple.
Almost half a year after announcing that major update, we want to be completely honest with our users and with ourselves. We need more time to finish Boxy 2 and make it a worthy update, like we planned. This means we still need at least a few months to finish it. We won’t say exactly when it’s going to be out — we learned our lesson and we’re not making that mistake again — but be assured that we’re working hard on it and it’s coming out later this year (duh!).
We’re also actively maintaining the current version of Boxy, and Boxy 2 will be a free update for all our current users. We already finished working on some of the new features, like Saved Searches to make life easier for power users with tons of emails and part of the new multi-account system which will make notifications work like a charm (we’re pretty excited about this). Personally, I finished rewriting the whole UI styling in SCSS (which changed my life by the way, I can’t go back to standard CSS anymore).
We’re always actively listening to our users’ critiques and requests and developing the update accordingly. We can’t possibly grant every wish but it’s important for us to know what kind of relationship our users have with Boxy and to ask ourselves what we can do to improve it.
Our users deserve to try Boxy 2 as soon as possible, and that’s one of the reasons why we decided to launch an open Beta Program. If you want to try the next iteration of the best Mac client for Inbox by Gmail, apply now and you’ll get Boxy 2 Beta as soon as it’s ready.
Thanks so much to all our fantastic and (very) patient users, especially those who left a positive review on the Mac App Store and tweeted about Boxy, and to our dear day-one supporters like Chris Messina.
You’re all awesome and we wish you a fulfilling and exciting 2017. 💙
Yours truly,
