Android client for Asana.com or how I met the founder of Facebook

Preamble

When in the fall of 2011, then new and ambitious, and now the most fashionable task management system in the valley, asana.com, created by Facebook co-founder Dastin Moskovitz , came into my life, of course, I tried to find a client for my Android-based smartphone. To my regret, in Google Market (at that time), apart from yoga applications, nothing could be found for the keyword asana. However, the mobile web interface asana was quite original and innovative, but little functional and difficult to operate.




The first question that arose with me, and how often do we, when finding a new Internet service, look for a mobile application for it? I do not know about you, but if there is even a small chance that I will use some kind of tool in the future, I will definitely do a search on Google Play. Based on this logic, I assumed that if you create any mobile application for a popular service that has not done it yet, then popularity and setups are guaranteed regardless of the quality of the latter. In my reasoning, I went further, but what if this is a very popular service and what if you make a simple hook - make a layer mobile client that is only a browser window to the mobile web interface and let's say, take money for it (oh, how good you will not say) . It was thought - done to not bother with any development with debugging and to make proof of concept as quickly as possible. I used a suitable service appsgeyser.ru created in Novosibirsk and having an older ' .com ' brother from the same company, which by the way, is the leader simple packers of web interfaces in apk for Android. An hour after the venture, I was ready:
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• Mobile application for asana.com, which opened their native mobile interface
• A set of icons, skinshots and descriptions for this application
• Developer account in the Google Market (Play)

Having collected everything in a heap, I just submitted an application for accommodation with a price of $ 0.99 (it would be possible less, I would have done less). Even then I wanted to know how many people need a mobile client for asana.
As it happens, experiments at bedtime were forgotten by morning and I remembered this application only after a few days. What was my surprise when I discovered more than 40 purchases in 3 days.
The freebie in the form of sales on someone else’s fame turned out to be quite real, but it’s not for us and I began to look at who the geniuses who bought the raw and useless app were. Here, I was even more surprised - one of the first buyers was the founder of asana.com - Dustin Moskowitz, apparently google alerts for the right words he was set up.

What's the result

When you have someone who bought something in the Google Market, you can contact him through a special email alias, so without hesitation, I wrote a letter to Dastin that this and that way, I, like many others, really need a mobile client when to wait. The answer came immediately, Dustin said that the mobile client is not a priority, but he will be interested to see the installation statistics.



In order not to cash in and sell the useless app, I made an application forever free and returned the money (made a refund) to all buyers, after which the installation curve went up as a forecast of income in any business plan. For some time we corresponded with Dustin, I showed him how quickly I typed the first thousand installations, how the client is in demand and that the guys say, change the priority in your backlogs, people want it. He evasively thanked for the cause, but at the expense of the client was unmoved. A few months passed and when the number of active setups approached 10k, and only about 40 thousand customers tried the application and the application hit the top 300 G Market , Dustin himself started writing to me about the fact that they thought and decided it was time to make a mobile the client asked to rename the application unofficial, as the reviews are bad (still, their mobile interface was still incomplete, and I had no interest in either improving the application (there was no API yet).

I asked for official comments on the timing of the launch of the application and promised that in the near future I will remove the application altogether. And so, the insider was caught - they promised to do it by the end of the year .

Conclusions and facts:

• if you are already popular, do not forget about your users, monitor the demand for mobile customers and do not wait until someone starts earning on you
• Ways to get direct emails and personal contacts with successful people in your industry are always inscrutable.
• You can always achieve a change of priorities in the backlog of your favorite service, if you approach the issue with fiction and imagination

And what were the stories you had not ordinary familiarity with interesting people in the industry?

PS from the time of the statistical report for Dustin, the number of installations still exceeded 10k. In order not to upset users, a week after this post, I will remove the application from Google Play.