Hello friends,
These last ten days have been… stressful and awesome. We received the tremendous honor of being named a “New and Noteworthy” application by Apple and some retickr artwork has been placed front and center in the app store. I still cannot believe it. I am embarrassed to admit that over the course of the last week I seem to have developed Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) which basically means that I grind my teeth so much that my face hurts. Basically, I will probably start graying next year and will be dead at forty. At least I know that I will not die alone… when I announced to the team that my dad diagnosed me with TMJ, Josh said “oh, I have that too!”
On a side-note, I present to you all the Josh Colt Marlow quote of the week:
“I will never be intimate enough with another human to share my root password.”
We just reached the 10,000 user mark which is really exciting and a huge milestone for us. In my opinion 1k, 10k, 50k, and 100k are relatively big achievements for us and while I have my sights firmly set at that 100k mark, I am allowing myself nine seconds to enjoy this.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Back to work.
We had 1,200 new users sign up for retickr yesterday which is incredible and the retickr team would like to say thank you to everyone that is giving us a try. Unfortunately, due to all of our new users we are experiencing some errors and lag-time within are service and we are really sorry about the problems that some of you have been having. We are working hard to make some changes, re-purpose some hardware, and get everything running back to normal. This is our system’s first true test and while everything is going ok it still isn’t nearly good enough for where we need to be. We are learning a lot and our infrastructure will soon become more robust, resilient, and error-free because of this surge in traffic. Thank you all for taking the time to provide us with feedback via Twitter and Email and it truly helps us solve problems and figure out how we can best serve you in the the long run. We have a long way to go before we are happy with retickr’s performance and design and I promise you all that what we have coming is going to be incredible.
Our redesign is beautiful, simple, and most importantly intuitive… retickr will simply “make sense” to a first time user. We are working with a world-class designer and we hope to bring you “retickr 2.0″ soon. Personally, I am shooting for the first week of January but we will see how everything plays out. I cannot stress enough how great it is going to look and feel. I am staring at the mock-ups right now for our refined registration process and it hurts me that it cannot go live tomorrow. Patience is by far my worst virtue but we are taking our time doing it right this time around and it will be worth it. Here is a sneak peek… don’t tell Bekka.
Regarding the differences between 1.0 and 2.0, here is how I see it…
Basically, when we built retickr 1.0 we didn’t really know exactly what we wanted and more importantly we didn’t really know what our users wanted. So, long story short we added a bunch of features and kind of just “threw them into retickr.” This was my fault. Now, we are going back and looking at what worked and what didn’t. It is soooo much easier doing it this way, I just wish I had the ability to “do it right” the first time around.
Also, in the upcoming months expect a re-designed website that will be a lot easier on the eyes and it will do a much better job explaining what retickr actually is. We have been extremely busy and have neglected taking care of our website which I would like to apologize for. We are going to get our shine on in 2012.
In summary, thank you all. We have spent the last year figuring out a better way for people to get their news and we feel like we are on the right track.
Until next time,
Travis
