Our journey with Chime
We began working on Chime in March 2012, almost a year ago. It’s been a long and eventful journey to go from our first lines of code to the hands of our users.
“Make an awesome way to consume and interact with web notifications.”
We faced a number of key decisions leading to the neat user experience Chime provides today. What browser? Extension or app? How to display the Chime feed? OAuth or an automagical login?
Browser? We decided to start with Chime for Chrome because of the awesome development support, the web store activity, and simply because we’re big fans of the browser.
Extension or app? This could have been a toss-up for us, but we felt comfortable with a lot of the features Chrome offered for in-browser extensions. Having an extension also mitigated the overhead of the user having to open a new app or window.
How to display the Chime feed? Chime started out as having all the notifications available through what is now the All Notifications page. That was it. As we iterated and heard from our users, we realized jumping to a tab was rather cumbersome and began work on the popup.
Login? This happens to be the most appreciated feature. Nonetheless, it was a series of decisions that allowed us to implement the automagical login flow. We noticed that logging-in and authorizing multiple sites can be tedious and users are usually already logged-in to sites they frequent (and want to be informed about). Leveraging a lot of the Chrome API and users’ browser credentials, Chime is able to detect which sites the user is logged-in to and can provide a smarter Chime feed.
None of these decisions were made overnight, and were a culmination of iterating, feedback, and beta testing.
As summer approached, the three of us were headed in different directions for work. Guru stayed behind in Toronto (Husky Injection Molding) while Thariq was off to SF (Yelp), and I had gone to Mountain View (Microsoft). Working as remote team brought its own set of challenges but we were able to crank out a lot of work during this time. Thariq and I would spend weekends coding together in coffee shops and even on our Caltrain commutes.
At the end of the summer, we had a product that worked, albeit very rough around the edges. We began accepting beta invites on our launch page and started giving access to batches of users. These users were super helpful and patient with us as we quickly iterated, fixed bugs, and morphed Chime into what it is today.
In January 2013, we finally realized Chime was stable enough to come out of beta and begin a public launch. We started doing some last minute touch-ups, updated our site, and prepared our web store page. As Chime came out of beta, we emailed our ~700 signups and let them take the first bite. We spent that night tracking errors, analytics, and getting our social media up-to-date. Thariq showed me Leo’s advice on contacting media and I sent off emails to TheNextWeb and Lifehacker that evening.
As we were juggling incoming user feedback and quickly responding to issues, we were also dealing with everything else. The “everything else” is a lot of work, and nothing had prepared us for any of this. Over the next few days, we were lucky enough to be covered by TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, and #3 on HackerNews. The downloads and reviews from the traffic drove us to #1 trending extension on the web store.
Chime grew to 10,000 users in its first week and we we’re very excited! Today, we’re happy to have a 5-star rating on the web store. All of this is only possible with our incredible users. We’re always getting feedback and we try to reply to every single one personally as a way of saying Thank You. Here are some of my favorites:
“I just wanted to let you know I've actually switched back over to Google Chrome just for this extension.” — Dylan J., dylangs1030 on HackerNews
“Chime just blew my mind with an awesome UX. I hope Google hires you for the Chrome notification center.” — Josh B.
“This looks very useful.” — Zee, CEO of TheNextWeb
“Super responsive dev team, can't wait for the update!” — Irial B.
“I'm in love with this Chrome extension” — @missiontoread
“I can't imagine life without it, now.” — @Mahkia
“Chrome users, here. Contain the pee. :) chimeapp.com” — @el_adaya
“...the onboarding is incredibly slick. Well done, Canada.” — @laurenwick
“Chime is so freakin’ amazing: chimeapp.com” — @wedtm
“I'm keeping up with this conversation via Chime notifications!” — @maguay
“Oh this is amazing!” — @_JessDilJay
Lessons learned:
- Always be ready to iterate super quickly.
- Be transparent with your users.
- Absolutely love your users. If users send you great feedback, that’s awesome. If they send you terrible feedback, that’s great too. It means they care enough about your product to help you improve. Appreciate it, see their pain points, and grow your product.
- Read Leo’s post on contacting media before you contact media.
- Take risks and enjoy the ride.
