Lately, this blog has been more quiet than usual and we thought it was high time to give you a status update. We don’t have a dedicated “content team,” meaning that updating this blog takes time out of our development schedule. Ordinarily, that’s fine — we love sharing tips enabling you to use Calcapp more efficiently and detailing new features — but what we’re working on now is important enough that we want to focus solely on it. As a result, we hope you’ll forgive us if this blog is more quiet than usual over the next few months.
Commercializing Calcapp
We feel that what we’re now working on is simultaneously the least important project we have undertaken and at the same time the most important. Ever since we released the first beta version, we have worked hard to learn about your requirements and to realize them in the form of new and improved features. That’s not what we’re currently doing, though.
Everything we’ve done since our last major release in June has been focused on what we call commercialization, which entails introducing paid plans and finally starting to derive revenue directly from Calcapp. That’s dull work if you only want to focus on creating the best product possible, but absolutely vital if you want to build a company capable of sustaining said product in the future. That’s why this is the most important project we have undertaken, because it will enable us to continue to work full-time on Calcapp and making it even more versatile and powerful.
Our work over the past five months
In practical terms, we started this summer by working on the unglamorous features you can get away with not having when you’re in beta but absolutely need to have when you’re offering a commercial product: the ability to set a secure password and other mundane account management features (like deciding whether you want to subscribe to our newsletter). That work also includes a password reset feature, enabling you to set a new password if you forget your old one.
We also redid our primary landing page (complete with an interactive app showing off Calcapp’s capabilities), created two new template apps, introduced a new privacy policy compliant with the European Union’s GDPR privacy law and enabled the app designer to be used without creating an account (just click Start app designer and Calcapp Creator opens, with no forms to fill out and no emails to wait for). We did that primarily to get ready for our launch on Product Hunt, an influential site for sharing and discovering new products.
We’re proud to report that Calcapp reached their coveted number two slot the day it was launched in August and generated many thousands of hits to our site. Apps built with Calcapp are now used by 60% more users than before our Product Hunt launch.
Our day-to-day activities are now centered around perfecting the payment experience. There’s a lot of work related to making sure that this all works smoothly, though, including making sure that we comply with all applicable laws and regulations. For instance, we need to make sure that we collect and remit the EU’s value added tax (VAT) for some European customers and the associated reporting requirements.
We hope to be done before the end of the year and we’ll let you know through email when we’ll launch our paid plans. Also, we will work very hard to ensure that the transition is smooth — we’re well aware that countless businesses now rely on the apps they have created and have made them central to their operations. Making sure that your apps continue running smoothly through this transition is at the top of our minds.
Thanks for your patience.