Following my gut with Hill Valleu

If you have read my previous entry or perhaps follow me on Twitter, you may know that I am currently working on a web app, Hill Valleu. Yes, the last update was a few months ago, but a lot has changed since then.

When I published that post, I was using a working copy of Hill Valleu in a beta stage. Within a week of launching it I had some friends and colleagues using the app. Feedback was good and the users seemed to like it. I knew a few items were missing and the limited users who were in all confirmed this by suggesting a few of the same enhancements. So, I got to work on these and within a couple of days I had a few new features launched to the small user base.

Everything seemed to be going great. A few app users, no major issues…so I planned to give it a couple of weeks before getting more users into the system and then a few more weeks before launching it for real. But over this period of time I noticed that my own usage of the app had dropped. This was not a good sign, when an app I was supposed to be building for myself was was not even being used by me…and it turned out the beta users had pretty much all stopped using it.

Why?

Now that’s a good question. I am not sure why others stopped using. A few said they were using other services, which is fair enough. I am trying to break into a crowded market – hard going if you do the basics, but miss a lot of features of the bigger apps.

The main question I needed to answer was why did I stop using a service I built to fill a need for myself?

After sitting down and working out the issue, I discovered the problem was I had stopped building the app for myself and started building it based on what others said they wanted. To get my heart back into the project, I made a big decision to go back to the root of why I started out on this path to begin with. To fill my need, and build something I would use everyday.

I deleted all the content and beta user data and started afresh. My next plan was to get back to where I wanted to be to start with. I ripped out a load of code, reworked the design and features to drastically reduce the complexity I had built in.

Within the week I had a skelton app but up online and I have been using it everyday since, slowly tweaking little bits here and there, adding couple new little enhancments, and have a list of the basic feature set I want in the app before I let anyone else in to the system.

To see the current state and to get a preview of the all new reworked Hill Valleu, go over to the website – and if you like what you see and would like to hear when I launch the app drop your email in the box at the bottom of the page.