How to invest $ 100,000 in your own karma (part 2)
The story of the creation of Patrolife - the "coolest and most convenient personal gps monitoring system."
Part 1 here
')
Taking this opportunity, we want to thank Habrahabr for the startup support program.
About bicycle inventing
Resigned to the harsh reality, we took into the hands of Google. Since we noted the absence of acceptable options on the market, it took quite a long time and the situation could change. Or rather, it could not change, considering where, when and with what speed we live.
This time everything looked much more optimistic: the trackers became more, they became more functional and compact. In the end, the Queclink GL-200 was chosen for our testing system. Several copies thereof were purchased.
Soon, this choice pleased us: in terms of its technical characteristics, this piece turned out to be quite worthy of the mission entrusted to it.
The tracker is miniature enough to fit in your pocket. The period of sending data can be controlled remotely. And the operating time of the device turned out to be quite acceptable. In our system, you can remotely set various data sending periods: “only on request”, 30 seconds, 2-5-10-30 minutes and 1-3-6-12-24 hours. With a period of "30 seconds." The tracker runs for about 10 hours. With a period of "10 minutes" - a little more than 10 days. Well, and so on.
The tracker even has an SOS button, which is maintained and processed by our system, but unfortunately it is not very convenient, and in an emergency it will be problematic to press it. In all other respects, the device showed itself on the positive side, revealing all the signs of the bicycle that we began to invent two years ago. Therefore, we mentally said “thank you” to the omnipresent Chinese and bought several more pieces - already for ourselves, as was intended at the very beginning of the journey.
Sometimes the universe wants to help so much that it gives ready-made bicycles, invented at your request. And this, admittedly, is not the worst option of cooperation with her.
About slip, perseverance and Victory Day
It is April 2011. Our attention has shifted to developing an application for iPhone. This responsible task was assigned to a group of programmers from one southern Russian town. We wanted, “so that the program has, if possible, all the functionality of the web interface and, in addition, performs the functions of a GPS tracker, that is, sent the coordinates to the server with the necessary frequency”.
After discussing the TK, the head of the group of programmers was pleased with the forecast: only a week for coding, another for catching bugs - and everything will be at its best. And we, the naive children, believed in the stated two weeks. As if with freelancers never worked.
April is over. Then May. June is June. July. August. September has come. Yellowed leaves, first-graders gave bouquets to teachers and took places at their desks. In September, all that we had in terms of the application is a very unstable unit that is responsible for sending data in the background. And not a single interface picture. All this time, the project was in a state of endless slippage, followed by comments like "we are about to finish it" and "is almost ready."
In the end, we realized that we live on different calendars. Probably, in the southern Russian town reigned an eternal groundhog day, within which the terms become fireproof, and the projects impossible in principle. Of course, it was a big disappointment. Losing so much time without getting a result - it's some kind of sabotage!
From despair, we again contacted the developers from Kiev, who made for us the UI of the web system. And in some miraculous way, it turned out that they also know how to
After active Skype discussions, preparation, commenting and reworking of the mocaps, the design of the application was finally approved and work began. We regularly received beta versions of the program, put them on our phones, phones of our wives, friends, and tested, tested, tested ...
By this time, the idea of ​​monetization of the project had also matured. So far, there has been no talk of selling gps trackers, so we concentrated on monetizing the application. They decided to monetize according to the Freemium model. The free version of the application made it possible to see only two devices — one’s own and one friend’s. The built-in purchase of the Pro version removed this restriction. There are no restrictions on the number of viewed devices in the web interface. In addition, SMS alerts were also paid - 5 cents for 1 notice. In general, everything looked, as it seemed to us, with dignity, and it was possible to take the next step into the big world.
Several screenshots of the first version of the application
On March 16, 2012 the app was sent for review in Appstore. The state “Waiting for review” lasted 10 calendar days. Then it changed to “In review” and after another four hours to ... “Rejected”. I won't say that it surprised us very much. We did deliberately break one of the Guidelines clauses, which prohibits the use of SDK functions for purposes for which these functions are not intended.
A little more than a month was occupied by rework and testing, in order to bring the application into full compliance with the requirements of Apple and, in order not to get up twice, they added a “pair of new features”. On April 27, 2012 a revised version was sent for review. Standard 10 days of waiting, starting the Review process. And in the early morning of May 9, when the whole of Moscow was still seeing dreams, and in the courtyards between the cars the wipers were shaking with brooms, finally, the long-awaited notice came that the application was approved.
How to dispel illusions in flight
The smell of success makes you drunk and dizzy. However, the harsh reality has a remarkable effect of instant sobering. Therefore, before meeting with her, it is better to lay straws in advance and prepare yourself morally.
The first test “flight” was decided to be not very high - only on the territory of the Russian Appstore. Soft lunch was scheduled for May 15th. Although the program was bilingual, it was decided not to aim a blow at the publication in America. We felt that first we need to see the reaction of users, get feedback and understand for ourselves what level we are at. And, as time has shown, it was a wise decision ...
A warm spring day came on May 15, 2012. The application has become available in Appstor. Began the first few jumps. Our friends published in their Facebook information about the appearance of the application, the number of horse races grew, we entered the top ten categories of Navigation "Top-free" Russian Appstor. As the program became popular, we received long-awaited feedback from users and at the same time our eyes opened wider ...
Three years of work on the project did not go unnoticed for our perception. It seemed to us that there were no non-intuitive elements in the interface at all. But the real users, the first of whom were our
But that was not all. The final epiphany came after the first attempt to conduct a “marketing” program. We sent a request to one large and well-known site dedicated to AI products and software for it. Quite quickly, we agreed on the preparation and placement of an objective review of our program on this site.
Soon comments and questions from the owner of the site and from its reviser came down to our email. There were a lot of comments and, admittedly, they were really objective. People did not understand how to use the program. But the technical problems associated with external restrictions (for example, a significant error in determining the location of the stations of cellular communication), for them looked like the jambs of the program. We perceived these restrictions as an inevitable evil, to which we ourselves are already accustomed.
Life testing confirmed the validity of our fears: we look at our program from the inside - from the server side, while ordinary people look at it from where users should look. And they do not understand anything!
The review on the site was never posted, and we received the first independent high-quality feedback. If you remove the lyrics, it came down to the fact that our program is “raw material” and it, as well as reviews of it, does not belong on a solid website. It was the second control shell. Our flight ended with a corkscrew and a swift return to earth.
For a week we sat in the rubble of our hopes, licking our wounds. And they tried to realize where we actually spent three years of our life and an impressive amount of money from family budgets (since all this time bootstrap on our money).
Probably, in this place we had every chance to come to our senses, stop and do more serious and grateful things. But we, of course, did not do that ...
O what good is a good shake
Recovering, we started to redesign the program. Objective (albeit sometimes tough) criticism helped to see what had not previously come into our field of vision.
Initially, we tried to give the user almost complete freedom and the opportunity for self-realization (for example, in terms of creating geo-zones). But now it has become clear that this only complicates everything, and for some reason nobody seeks for self-realization as part of our program. Therefore, significant changes occurred in the modules overloaded with functionalities, and the “possibilities of self-realization” were limited to reasonable limits.
We concluded that the program should be more like a social network than a remote control trackers and phones.
The most important and fundamental change in the concept was the following: in the first version of the system, the user could unilaterally share his location to another user. To do this, he had to enter the name of the second user account in the corresponding field. If they had this mutual, then the sharing should be mutual - each of them enters the account name of his vis-a-vis. This is a long and dreary, - we decided. In the new version of the system, we decided to apply the social network approach: one user sends another offer to be friends (invite) and if the second confirms it, then they both see the location of each other. Invite can be sent to any known email friend. If he is not yet registered with Patrolife, then by clicking on the link he will be able to go through a simple registration process and after installing the application, a friendship will be established between him and the invitee. If the invite was sent to the registered Patrolife email, then it will come directly to the application. And to completely simplify the process, we added Bump technology: now you can make friends just by knocking two phones with each other. Much to our regret (for ours, not for the Bump team), Google bought Bump and from January 31 of the next year the service will be closed. In this regard, in the recent update of the iOS application, we had to remove this method of friendship.
In general, we went along the normal (and already beaten by us) development path of all versions No. 2, in which redundant functionality is cut, everything is simplified and facilitated. On paper, of course, it looked very light and inspiring. But very quickly it came to the realization that the server would have to be redone a third time. Our St. Petersburg colleagues, gritting their teeth, again took up "nuclear" reconstruction. Processing the server core took ... it took a lot of time. The process of updating the application for the iPhone was, of course, suspended until the server was ready.
Despite the lack of updates to the program in Appstore it continued to download. Someone managed to independently figure out the old functionality and even learn how to use its capabilities.
After the server was ready, our next, almost gray-haired, head fell on our heads. In Kiev, the developers of ios applications appeared a solid client with undeniable arguments in the form of big money, which literally bought out all their free time for many millennia in advance.
Although the work on the application was resumed, it was going very slowly, which upset us incredibly. We mumbled the people of Kiev to devote at least some time to our project by whining, rolling, promising a bright future, glory and eternal life. Squeezing us into the window pane between orders from a priority client turned out, alas, not always.
In the process of testing the application, we noticed, sometimes the hand itself stretches to click somewhere to write a message to a friend who you are following. This resulted in the development of a TOR for embedding a chat in an application, a TOR on a chat server, and four to five weeks of negotiating a chat design. As a result, our own chat server was written with the ability to transfer text, files (currently not implemented on the application side) and push notifications about incoming messages.
In January 2013, the second version of Patrolife appeared in Appstore.
That's how it looks now
And, of course, also not without problems. At first, she was banned a couple of times due to a misunderstanding. And we had to "bring to the understanding" some points, re-explaining to the reviewers how and what works. And after she was admitted to Appstore, another “surprise” came to light. It turned out that the program remained developer certificates for push, not combat, and push messages in the app from Appstore did not work.
In general, we gradually and steadily moved towards the goal. On the road shook. But from such trifles we were not even swayed.
To be continued….
Bins:
Application for Android (in development, not yet published)
IPhone application
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/202524/
All Articles