How to build a true social platform. From sketch to function, from dream to real-life, and everything in between.
We added additional localizations to our platform. We are now available in 21 languages and we serve many markets, including the Netherlands, US, Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Ukraine, Finland, Norway, Italy, Argentina, Brazil and many more.
Whilst finishing the app we took up an addional project. We have not been able to focus much on the app since Oktober 2022. Fortunalty there were just some finishing touches that made the app good enough to put out there. We made the app free and almost free for the comming season. Now we have set a course to introduce Spoxies to the world. We aim to promote it this summer and add extra features.
And there it is, Droid in the Playstore!!
Sure, we need to see things in perspective. We are trending in the Dutch part of the paid social apps. There isn't much competition there, but a success is a success. Cheers to the future! Let's see what happens when we actually start promoting.
App in the app store!!! We have put in an AR element for good measure, since that was and is the envisioned direction.
Bootstrapping is demanding and isn't efficient in terms of focus and actual progress. But we power through.
We had a month of intense typing and planning, to produce detailed plans and strategy to help onboard a senior member to help with pitches, marketing, sales, etc. I turned out differently. The info provided was not read and I was not understood that "confedential" means not sending plans to an other app company/startup. Being self critical it left us quite confused wondering if are just disillusioned or that we are infact delusional and it is us.
But we learned things. One is that many love to jump on a boat that is already floating, but few like to help build that boat. But this is the startup life we choose, and we are proud to be amongst the people of this era, that are capable and willing to be more than opinioned luxury passengers, but do the work and aim to make change happen.
So here we go again, having produced another tech solution we and saying bye to a good career/perspective. See how fast we can go during this pandemic thing. Stickies still stick where we have put them 1.5 years ago. There are some to-dos that need doing.
We need to generate some income, and hopefully have some time besides that. Many things happend and many things we explored, from selling the app to getting addional finance but it got complicated and quite a long stretch. Where are we at; Multi-language support and a whole lot of testing and fixes done.
Dark mode is becomming a thing and we have implemented it. We wasted time looking for funds and we wished we had spend that time on just building an bootstrapping.
Lets continiue to burn the resources and see how far we can go, to be honest it is taking much longer then we hoped.
It has been in the making for a while, it also has been crunch time for quite a while. I have chosen to develop the backend logic in NodeJS. The backend functionality is exposed via a REST API, allowing for seamless integration with various frontend applications.
To have security and privacy in the fiber of the application, user data is separated and isolated on a per user level. Data interaction between users is achieved by implementing a combination of the Publish-Subscribe and Mediator design patterns, which enables security at the cost of efficienty but minimizing potential vulnerabilities through the abstraction and separation.
Life happened with all its unforeseen surprises, and I'm not sure if we should be proud or ashamed that the vision of what is becoming reality started all the way back in 2013. Currently looking at these "sketches" when the idea first came to mind. Let us make a serious effort and burn what we got and see what we get.
