Puzzling 6 months later

More than half a year has passed since the release of my little project, the puzzle designer PuzzleIT.org .



Of course, on the one hand - the full 6 months of life is a solid period and really outstanding things can be done during this time. Here, in the community, there are many examples of how small teams for the same, or even less, time create truly unique things. Creative brains madly happy from such examples and their enviable number. But if we take a different point of view - for complete awareness of where we are moving and what we will encounter in the future, most often half a year - a completely insignificant period.



What has changed during this time, what the service finally came to, what I, as its only developer, thought of, I would like to tell you.

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Caution! I tried to move away from the standard narrative in the style “We are the best! All the best! Come to us! ”, Therefore further in the text there will be a lot of rantings and personal reflections.



The first days after the launch passed in euphoria. Habraeffekt made itself felt and I received thousands of visits and quite a lot of quality feedback. And there were a lot of new features and improvements with users. At least - for a year of development in its most active stage. I was cheerful, fresh and satisfied with myself. Indicators pleased and wanted to create, refine, improve and in every possible way file what was not finished or was only planned.



At that time, during the month after launch, the main functionality was improved, many features were worked out and everything that caught the eye was added. If you dive deeper into the essence of these changes, the following was done: tags to the puzzles appeared during this period, each user I got a personal page with a little statistics, the best achievements and a list of puzzles he created, a developer blog appeared (so far - me in the singular), where it was planned to publish all the news, comments were added to the puzzles with automatic Kim update. The policy of the work of the puzzles was slightly revised, the mechanism of cutting the image into its components was optimized in every possible way.







Past and present. ScreenIt of the first release of the ITIT PuzzleK on DPK and the current appearance of the puzzle assembly interface .





In general, the work was in full swing and demanded more and more attention, time and resources. At one of those moments, I realized that I was trying to fight windmills, and if my service did not bring me money, I couldn’t put the lion’s part of my working time on the altar and at least something had to be left to the bread place that fed me and family.



What to say about the cost of time, even if the daily schedule of observations has changed? On the site, even if it was built according to the principle of the greatest openness for the end user, we had to introduce the beginnings of the institute of moderation and ask the most active users to become moderators. There were days when I drank my morning coffee with horror - the amount of outright pornography was off the scale of all imaginable and inconceivable limits, and under the sign “18+” I had to blow down entire pages. Actually, I had to enter the full control with the maximum number of alerts. I put myself in a situation that I didn’t know about new puzzles only when I was sleeping. Of course, this gave its fruits and excitement around the puzzles of erotic content verse, while not affecting the current state of attendance.



Even this, small in its beginning, development began to surround with special tools. For example, I have a long time ago in Opera a special User-JS hangs for automatic assembly and testing of JS operation on the user's side. A very useful thing and I would not have found many errors without this utility.



Under this I would like to draw a positive line. Because in a month and a half, attendance fell to a stable 150-200 people per day and did not want to grow, despite all my improvements. This fact was not so much frustrating, but motivated to do something else, more mundane, for the sake of ordinary earnings, which later could be invested in promotion, SEO and at least some, but website promotion (although I understand the essence of this issue mediocre).





Google Analytics chart. Blue bar - the number of visits, Yellow - the number of pages visited.





Actually, at this stage, everything froze for about 4 months. At one time, youthful maximalism was not eradicated, and the habit of fully surrendering to the current cause showed itself. I plunged into the flow of the main work, only controlling what was in the service. Meanwhile, PuzzleIT reached a static point of its development, when the site only occasionally had new users, attendance was at the same level, and the only thing that changed was the images on the main page.



In the same period, I hung up a little bit of advertising on the site in order to somehow try to move in the direction of CEO and promotion. But it didn’t give any fruit to this day.



In general, everything looked beautiful at the very beginning, so at this “dead” point everything began to look more than sad. The service did not develop, I was busy with other things, there was no help waiting. Some blogs even skipped the thought that the service was dead and nothing good could happen to him. On the same bitby.net slipped a note about Internet miscarriages with great potential, which were simply abandoned. Yes, PuzzleIT hit exactly this note. On top of that, the emergence of a competitor was a serious blow to the morale. A solid, variegated and fat competitor, whose development was clearly engaged in more than one person and he was presented as the development of a solid company that ate a dog on the web technologies. At its core, of course, the orientation of the target audience was somewhat different, but the niche is the same. And with the competition, based on the potential of the company, things were, and even now, much better and more positive.





The biggest puzzle assembled at the moment. Dimensions - 54x40. The number of parts: 2160. The size of the original image - 2700h2000px. Cutting this puzzle took 34 minutes. It is a pity, but the person who collected it in the rating was not noted. Hardly anyone will be able to repeat the feat of the unknown hero ^ _ ^





It is in order to take on the head in moments of fatigue, each developer should know why he is doing his job. Money - one of those "why." But the money did not interest me. I, on the contrary, was ready to invest them in my offspring. What then? I was dragged out of the moral gap by another project, the development of which I was watching. With each update letter, more and more internal decadence began to undermine the thought “Why am I worse? There is a project, there are ideas - why are I still sitting and doing nothing, letting snot out? ” It was then that ambition played its important role. The second, very important factor was that no matter what service they used. There were new users, 10 GB on the server were eaten ready-made puzzles and life, at least some, but present. So someone still needed it!



Since then, it has been almost 3 weeks, and yesterday a new update has been made on PuzzleIT. There was an adequate rating, internal mail, adding friends, the puzzle collection interface changed slightly, a number of errors were corrected both in the layout and on the server side. In general, full-featured update functionality, allowing to expand and multiply further. And, among other things, the most important thing - the goal appeared. Just keep up and constantly keep what you are doing, in adequate condition and not paying attention to everything else. This is exactly “Just For Fun” - when you wait for nothing, you don’t hope for anything, you just do it. For myself. And the point.



Maybe that's why I didn’t have a conversation at all, even with those comrades who offered to buy a puzzle creation engine or make some investments. Yes, all this is very good and the extra money for my work I couldn’t have strangled my pocket. But I, at that time, had no idea at all whether this service should be monetized, how to do it, why, and why. Most likely in these conversations showed my complete lack of readiness to talk about investments. Just initially, I was not going to conduct such conversations with anyone. And when someone asked me for calculations about how much I think to earn on the service, I was lost. Because I did not know what to answer. Accordingly, very quickly all conversations fell, and soon they stopped altogether.



In addition, during these three weeks I tried my hand at Yandex.Direct. The 50 killed raccoons planted there did not go to ashes and nearly a thousand new IPs came to the site, which could not but rejoice.





One of the craziest ideas. Make this kind of jigsaw puzzles from scan images online without using Flash.





In general, the only conclusion I made for myself is to strive to bring it to the bitter end in any business. Hence, planning, and costs, and design, and much more grows tight roots. Without striving there will be nothing and nothing good will come out of it.



Since I touched on the topic of planning - after the update, I decided to switch to monthly releases. Even if there is nothing particularly important in these future updates and they may well go unnoticed, releases should be done all the same. At least in order to simply maintain a stable interest in the resource. This is another “marketing” mistake that I made at the very beginning after the first review of PuzzleIT. In no case can not go into the shadows, and every step you take, associated with the development, should be visible and need to be trumpeted wherever possible. Yes, many may not like it, but in our realities in the same runet there are millions of places of burning time, and if you don’t talk about yourself, nothing good will come out of it. However, even here you need to balance out on the fine side of attracting interest in the service and stupid spam. If you write every week that the style of links has changed on the site and the icons of the cups have been added near the nickname of the best collector - with time they simply stop paying attention to this.



Of the plans for the future now, first of all, the joint assembly of puzzles between users of several computers. I already had some experience in this area. I think that with the help of a rasp it is possible to bring them to a sane state without any special losses. Another very important thing at the moment - the regulation of the difficulty level of puzzles. Still, to collect a puzzle for 500 pieces (an entry-level puzzle in RL) in the browser becomes a painful exercise and it takes, at best, a few hours.



As a result, I would like to say something, but I set forth all my thoughts above. The work of “Just Fro Fun” has as many advantages as disadvantages. The main thing is to agree with their presence and continue to do the things for which everything started. I hope the current update of the ITIT is not the last, and everyone present here will be interested in watching it.



ZY A full review of the changes can be found here .