A Big Decision - Founders Update #30

Joel and I finally had that talk.

The one we've been avoiding while onboarding our first paying clients and improving our app.

The r word no product person wants to hear.... rebuild.

How we got here

When this project first started, a talented freelancer helped pulled together the prototype in record speed. This let us get started with the beta quickly.

But as we've added to it since, we've had challenges with bugs and performance.

For example, sometimes sync gets screwy and some messages or goals go missing - having to be manually (and painfully) restored from backups.

Or we're now getting clients with longer chat and goal histories, our database queries are getting slower.

This means that we're spending lots of time on debugging or "hacking" than we would like - especially given our big plans for the product this year.

We're trying to run fast, but on a shaky foundation.

Biting the bullet

So... we've decided to bite the bullet and do a full rebuild! 😬

This time architected for stability, performance and feature flexibility - as well as implementing a much better form of user data entry (the current UI is a leftover of our prototype, we have plans to make it much better).

Practically, this means new features and marketing will be on hold while Joel rebuilds from the ground up.

No regrets

Whilst it's frustrating, especially on the marketing front when we were starting to really learn a lot and get the word out, it's the right call. Especially given we're still early, and a relatively short delay now will translate to much faster progress later.

In hindsight no regrets about starting first with the rough prototype. It helped us get real customer feedback (which turned out vastly different from the first test which was delivered over email).

It helped us validate our product-client fit, and also know what changes we needed to make (several of which are done already)

That was better than trying to anticipate everything and to architect something that we weren't sure would even fly.

So... now we begin! 🌱

Simon & Joel
Co-founders, GoalsWon​​​‍

ps - for our clients, the current service and coaching in the meantime is unaffected. We'll still be doing that fully during this time, then switching over to the new version once ready.