Hey everyone, we launched Thrive for iOS at the end of July after several months of hard work. I'd love feedback from all business owners and especially if you own a brick and mortar small business.
Unread indicator is always wrong, especially when you use multiple devices. Seems very I characteristic of google. It's been that way since they released the app.
We actually talked to a few insurance people and the consensus was that insurance company didn't want something like it. It's not in their interest for you to make claims. Our response from users was basically that it was valuable whenever they needed to make claims or inventory to buy insurance but otherwise wouldn't use it often. That was key for us. As a free service, we didn't see a way to monetize if users didn't come back.
We consulted a few small companies. I'm not sure I'd categorize the companies as startups hoping to be acquired. They had been around for a while and made money. I think many companies lease machines so the need to track those assets didn't exist.
We were in the middle of working on an iOS app for users to scan stuff around their house and we'd lookup those items to add to our inventory list. When we decided to pivot, we wanted to use that scanning functionality to scan asset tags. Obviously, we didn't pursue it any further but we were heading in that direction.
Not sure if we're gonna release the code but was written using django/mysql. I don't remember how much code we wrote. I'm guessing something in the area of 10k lines.
And to be completely honest, as my post mentioned, our day jobs were more important at the time so we tried to find the target audience but not hard enough.
Thanks. We're putting some effort into creating an inventory management system for Square users. https://shopventory.com if you're interested in just checking it out.
As with any consumer type app, monetization is key and unfortunately it's something I feel businesses should have a clear path to but many do not. This is part of the reason why we wanted to pivot toward a B2B type service.
We actually never modified the codebase to handle business assets. We were in the discovery phase to find out if we can repurpose the code. When we shut it down, it was still a product for managing personal assets.
I think there should be more of these stories. Many people starting companies learn much from success stories through books and blogs but I think there may be more lessons to learn about how not to fail from people that have.
I should emphasize that the connection was already secure, but creating a user session on the server side took a long time so this graphic was displayed to users. So don't worry!
I used to work for a major online tax software provider. I won't name them but I'm sure you can guess. Not sure if it's still there but right after you log in, there are some redirects that take you to the app servers hosting the product and you get the same type of loading image though no secure connections were being established.