Software for Startups – FreeAgent
byThis is the first in a series of articles describing the support system of products we swear by at Gameplan. If a product is in this series, we can vouch for its awesomeness.
Weeks 19 and 20 – Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working
byFirst of all, apologies for the absence of last week’s weekly update. We’ve been neck deep in knocking out bugs and payments and polishing our product and one thing led to another and it was already Friday, so we decided to roll out a combined report this week.
Read more on Weeks 19 and 20 – Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working…
Week 18 – The Startup Cup, Founders Meetup and Payments
bySo last week we launched Cups and Tournaments, released the second edition of our newsletter and started work on our biggest challenge of ‘em all (yet) – payments.
We’ve received some great feedback on the tournaments feature – some praise and some great feedback on what we can do to improve it – some of which already have been rolled into our product. This reinforces the notion we have which is do not build in vacuum – get the Minimum Viable Product out and iterate rapidly. Some of the best lessons we’ve learnt so far have come from things pointed out by our users and it does make the both of us focused on fixing the right problems.
Read more on Week 18 – The Startup Cup, Founders Meetup and Payments…
Week 17 – iPad
byWe’re late again with our weekly update. I’d been trying to get it back on at least a Monday so we were only one day in arrears but the release of the iPad on Friday put pay to that. We’re both Apple users on the desktop, and prior to Arun’s pre-Echelon stumble-destruction we were both iPhone users. So the chance to experiment with a new device that may reshape our industry, plus a little bit of ‘new-shiny-fever’ meant we formulated a plan to cover multiple locations on Friday morning – in case there was a shortage.
Hack N’ Hustle – The Developer’s Business Mantra
byFour months into Gameplan’s existence, things are slowly getting warm. We’re getting to a place where Gameplan’s product core is very stable, we’ve started getting meetings with customers and we’re in the process of building payments so we can buy our volcano lair filled with wooden lion statuettes (and maybe even real lions).
Read more on Hack N’ Hustle – The Developer’s Business Mantra…
Week 16 – Live From Sports Planet
byYou join us here live at Sports Planet in the East where Arun and I are sat at a registration desk helping out the organisers with a one-day tournament.
We met with the guys from Sports Planet last week, and they seemed keen to try out the software – but their main use would be in running regular one-day tournaments for various corporate clients. This was not something that we had in the code base last Friday and we agreed to run in parallel with their current spreadsheets today (Saturday). Easy, right?
Week 15 – The Steady Ascent
byFirst of all, let’s see how far we can go with the aviation metaphors.
We’ve already documented some of the tweaks that we made to Gameplan, post-launch. We added a couple of other exciting new features and tweaks which we’ve posted on our product blog. What made our week was to see the entire French Ligue One on Gameplan (courtesy of one of our users) and we hope other users are equally ambitious!
Immediate Lessons From the Gameplan Launch
bySo we launched Gameplan on Monday at around 1400SGT on Twitter and Facebook after three months of pretty hard work. Andy and I gave ourselves a small round of applause, but we both realise the hard part is only beginning. We followed up the Monday launch with some bug fixes and tweaks to the user experience based on feedback from our friends (lot of whom I’d like to point out are from the Singapore Ruby Brigade, reinforcing my belief that it is a kickass community and probably the best developer community in this region). Yesterday we launched our email campaign (powered by the awesome Campaign Monitor service), which led to more signups yesterday.
Week 14 – Takeoff
byIt seems that as you approach a product launch the list of things you have to do before you launch seems to get longer and longer. We spent last week furiously testing, going through user flows, sending ourselves email, entering nonsense into forms and generally kicking the tires.
Week 13 – Design & Revving the Engines
byLast week was another find-defect-open-issue-resolve-smile-smugly-rinse-and-repeat week. While going through all the issues, we ran into some interesting problems and solutions.
State Machines (again)
Gameplan requires league managers to invite clubs to play in their leagues (invites being emails sent to persons designated as managers of a club). This invite can thus be in multiple states: pending, invited, accepted and rejected. We had tried to model this behavior by using our internal ‘status’ variable and changing status whenever the status of the invite changed. What we realized was we were writing way too much code to keep track of state and change it, so we quickly switched over to using pluginaweek’s state_machine gem. It has a very nice API and our code is a lot cleaner after making the switch.