State of Vemedio
From the outside it may look like things are slowing down a bit. New features in Instacast have not been released in a month and Snowtape desperately needs some updates on Mac and iPhone. That's why I would like to take the time and give you guys some feedback what's going on. And I want to begin with the current state of the company.
Vemedio has been founded in spring 2009 after I left equinux. At first I worked from my home office. I had a really short way going to work and I could work the whole day straight through and stay late or start earlier if I had to. And I had only one project I could spend my whole time with: Snowtape for Mac. These are the right circumstances that speed up development if you are a one man shop.
After one year of growing the customer base and improving Snowtape, I thought I should step up the game and get a real office and some co-workers. I was piled up with work and thought I really could use some help. So I spend some hard earned money and got office space in town and found my first employee. In that time we produced Snowtape for iPhone and Jubilee for iPad. Snowtape for iPhone was a great success, Jubilee not so much. I totally misjudged the state of the greeting cards market on iOS and was not able to understand the main audience upfront. So the app had a lot of nice looking features that were not that usable for the power users that actually used the app. I lost a lot of money that six months, because it was not just my working time anymore but I had to pay an iOS developer and a graphic designer. It was a risk I was willing to take. However it did not turn out very well and I was forced to let go again of my first employee. That was a hard time for me and it was bundled with self-doubt and fear of the future.
I already had some plans in place that involved having interns. I wasn't really happy about that anymore but I thought I give it a try. Six more months passed working together with an intern until early this year. The good thing about interns is that they do not cost a lot of money. The bad thing is that you have to spend a lot of time training them in order to give them a job that is actually usable to you and your company. I had the fortune that my intern was a quick learner and that he could do some decent stuff after a not so long learning period. Another problem is that you can't really rely on intern's work, because the development pace and the software quality is not comparable to a professional's work and can't be, of course.
Since March this year I've been working alone again and I think that it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Let's face it, I am a descent programmer with taste for good software, but I am not a great marketer or a great entrepreneur. I studied computer science and not business. I am great with algorithms and math, but I am really bad with managing people. And I am not such a great writer though I am giving my best.
So why is everything taking so long right now? The short answer is, I don't know. There is simply not much time in the day anymore. I have a three months old baby girl now who wants to see her daddy from time to time. I now live 20 mins away from my office. I piled up a lot of administrative work in the past, beginning with the maintenance of online databases to the management of version control systems, server and business infrastructure. I need to scale everything down again in order to be able to set the main focus on product development again. This process has already begun, but will take some time. I recently started by changing the support. What used to take me 4 hours will now take me only one hour thanks to TextExpander and Gmail. I still try to answer every email, but I am not so fond any more of giving long and detailed answers. Most emails I try to reply with one or two precise sentences now. It saves a lot of time for me and you.
Also I am not sitting still only doing administrative work. I am currently testing Cloud Sync for Instacast (another server infrastructure that needs to be maintained, sigh). I am also implementing Instacast for iPad. It looks great and feels nice, but it is still far from finished (not even in beta yet).
I hope I could shed some light and give you a little more inside about what's going on and why everything is taking a bit longer these days. Rock on!
May 27th, 2011 • Permalink
More articles about Blog Posts
05/09/2012 - New Specs on Podlove.org
05/09/2012 - Excellent Write-up of Instacast 2.0
05/07/2012 - Instacast 2.0 Available
05/06/2012 - Instacast HD Rejected over Flattr Integration
05/02/2012 - Multi-Format Podcast Feeds
04/26/2012 - Instacast 2.0 First Impressions
04/05/2012 - Patching iCloud Sync
03/29/2012 - The Podlove Initiative
03/28/2012 - Auphonic now Open for the Public
03/26/2012 - What's next with Instacast?
03/26/2012 - State of Support and iCloud