Here are some things that didn't make it into the video (camera's weren't running 24/7, so it was hard to catch all of our 'moments'):
-We had just completed a major release of our software that included a new dashboard, so doing a dashboard product was definitely a contender for the 30-day project. We were almost ready to rule it out, though, when we saw a dashboard product (Dashku) on the Hacker News home page getting some love. This influenced us by leading us to believe the demand could be there.
-At the exact same time, there was another story on the HN homepage by a developer who wrote about why he would never develop an app for the Twitter platform. This influenced us a bit, too, as an Android Twitter client was a leading contender on our list — which we subsequently dropped.
-It took a solid week to come up with the name Dashzen, and we probably wasted too much time and involved too many people with the naming early on.
-In the past, Axosoft has done 30-day projects like this, but only involving developers. By including marketing and QA, we were able to build more solid products that also had better UIs and branding compared to what we've done in the past.
-Even though both products' home pages describe our pricing models, there is no charging mechanism built yet. Until we build one, both products are actually free.
-If we decide to film the event again next year, we'll do a few things differently, like: set up a "camera room" where anyone can go in and record their thoughts at any time; set up daily scheduled meetings; and possibly incorporate some kind of pitch event.
"many is the day where I've done in 100 lines through sheer luck what should have taken 1,000 lines and had my boss complain my work rate is too low.
Never mind the fact that it's a highly efficient loop which has saved us hours of work..."
Which is quite typical and unfortunate with bosses/organizations that can't grasp the big picture.
Yeah... we know... totally our bad. We were focused on scaling supply chain, mfr and coming up with great product. Unfortunately, made the rookie mistake of building in flash. That will change for sure. Sooner the better...
I would put that VERY low on your priority list (with the possible exception of the iPad impact). Don't let techno-elites drive you the wrong direction.
I would put it high on the list. Building this thing in Flash in 2012 is just dumb. We saw how the launch went. As noted, their missing out on the tablet users. Building in HTML5 is not much harder (might even be easier). Flash is dead-end.
Agree flash is a dead end! And we will be migrating. However, we discovered the performance issues today were not caused by our flash app but due to config settings on our Apache servers. Again, apologies for the poor experience...
I'm not sure that people browsing on iPhones, iPads, and most (all?) Android devices in 2012 count as 'techno-elites'. The site should at least degrade gracefully to give an idea of what the company's about on Flashless platforms.
Doing it because they have a significant group of customers who can't access it: The right reason
Doing it because people on HN bitch and moan that the technology: The wrong reason
I'm all for dumping flash for the right reasons (and, personally, I wouldn't have built it using flash). Dumping it for the wrong reasons, though, is an unnecessary distraction that doesn't build business value.
I am happy that you added the ability to generate WordPress themes...
This is going to kick ass once it's polished.
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Adding an example of the two different options on the pricing page (or somewhere) would help a bit. People would have a better idea of what your blogging platform has to offer.
Thanks,