If you are just getting going with a startup, and especially if you’re considering developing apps, this post is for you.

We released Warmly, our first Google Play app for Android about a week ago and it’s definitely been a crazy ride.

For readers who may not be familiar with our work, we’re a small startup team that moves fast and likes to experiment. In the past year we’ve built 20+ online projects and shared them with the world for free. For the most part we go with our gut to get something working that we think is interesting, then listen to what users say and watch what they do.

If a project get a lot of traffic and interest, we rev on it and make it better. If no one gets excited, we move on. The approach keeps us from over-thinking and over-planning a fluffy idea; it also keeps us humble.

It’s common that we get mixed reviews when we put things out there. Some people are super excited and see the curious sparks behind a our quick-turn projects. Others expect everything to be robust from day-one and get upset that it won’t load in IE 6. But Chaos is currently just a couple people weaving together design and development as quickly as possible. We get excited about new perspectives and clever ways to do things, but we’re not Google or Apple or Microsoft. We’re not even Facebook or Twitter. We’re small, and we like it that way.

So when we put Warmly in the app store with a $2 price tag on it, we figured we’d do what we do best; make it exciting to us, then listen to what users think and iterate quickly.

But the feedback quickly escalated as many users had issues beyond what we could test on our small set of phones and tablets. The reviews took a turn for the worse and people we’re upset, throwing 1- and 2-star reviews at us in rapid succession.

One of the first bugs was an issue in waking up the phone from a sleep state (we used the recommended android activity flag, but that didn’t work on some devices and lock-screen configurations). That meant that for a few phones, it wouldn’t wake up and sound the alarm if the phone wasn’t active. Users set the alarm, some even testing it before bed, but the alarm didn’t go off! That totally sucked for everyone, so we refunded users who experienced the issue and feverishly worked to roll out an update. We also responded to the reviews and tried to engage everyone and let them know that we were working hard to make things better.

But the next update had another major problem. Since the update process on Android kills the currently running version of the app, the next morning a few alarms didn’t go off for another reason; the alarm wasn’t set after updating, and the phone auto-updated at night. Again, it bit us hard, and we made sure to include a call in the next (and all future) updates that checked if the alarm was set and re-enabled it as needed.

With the most critical show-stopper bugs behind us, we turned to working on features that users were requesting. Warmly is intended to be both extremely simple and experientially delightful. We purposely didn’t include things like a snooze button, multi-day scheduling, and multiple alarms because it makes the experience complicated and promotes objectively less healthy sleep practices (see this fun video by AsapSCIENCE).

But we’ve decided that the middle-ground of sticking to our design/experience direction while accommodating user desires is where we need to go. For example, one of the more recent updates allows for snoozing, but in a way that makes it secondary (it’s visually light and small). We’ve also started tuning sounds and improving weather accuracy by listening to reviews and talking with users. Additionally we’ve found that being very specific in the app description about what the focus of Warmly is (and isn’t) has helped to set expectations before people press buy.

Which brings us to today. Five days and five updates later, our user feedback has turned 180 degrees. Sure there’s the occasional comment from a user that runs into a snag, but for the most part our users are loving that we’re making improvements so quickly. Even a handful of the negative reviews have been updated by users to reflect their appreciation for pushing updates that make things better.

In fact, we even made it on the top apps page for Health and Fitness, as well as the Google Play homepage. No ads and no gimmicks, just lots of work, sweat, and discussion with users.

It also seems important to note that waiting another two weeks before putting Warmly in the store probably wouldn’t have changed much. The first critical bug only happened on particular android builds and hardware. The second critical bug was tied to updating the app via the play store (maybe this one would have been caught, but still). Everything else has hinged on user comments and discussion. We took some heat, but it was worth it.

Of course, it has lead us to a pretty bifurcated set of reviews so far, but hey, things are looking up. :)

Only time can tell what future users may think of Warmly, but I know that we’ll be doing everything we can to make it awesome. The feedback from reviews (both positive and negative) has enabled us to find edge-cases incredibly quickly, and we’ll continue to listen carefully and push updates as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

$2 is real money (I could have had a coffee), and purchasing something that doesn’t work as well as you had hoped is a bummer. But the app world has great potential to re-frame what buying something really means. It wasn’t $2 for a static program in a box, it was a one-time payment of $2 for an evolving app that keeps getting better everyday. I wish my coffee could do that.

TL;DR: Continually improving your app wins hearts (and purchases). Make it good, get it out there, then be ready to lose sleep chasing down bugs and talking with your users. It’s awesome.

Posted by chaoscollective