Tour Buddy founder to speak at Refresh Savannah

Tour Buddy founder to speak at Refresh Savannah

Building Software Products is hard!

As a mobile app product company, we in a constant state of developing new products and features.  On Tuesday night, our Founder and CEO will speak at Refresh Savannah and share some insights for creating technology based products.  She will also offer specific examples of decisions we’ve made along the way in creating Tour Buddy’s apps – and some mistakes that have taught us valuable lessons.  After all with an 1.IOS mobile app, 2.Android mobile app and 3. a web based platform (application) to aid our clients with creating, publishing and managing those mobile apps we are constantly launching a feature or version for one of our applications.  Our approach is that our clients (those who pay for our products) know best so we prefer to launch a minimum functional version of a new product or feature (MVP – minimum viable product) and let user feedback shape how we will further develop and integrate it into our existing platform – or not in some cases.

Why the MVP?

It was once the accepted practice that when businesses created new features or products, they would put a lot of time and resources into planning, building, testing and tweaking before finally launching when everything was perfect.  Well, this worked fabulously for some products but for many others, they missed the mark and sometimes failed completely.  Why?  because no matter how much up front planning we do, we cannot anticipate customers’ needs or their reactions to our products.  Once a product is put out to the paying public, its real utility and value become apparent as well as what features it needs to fulfill its destiny.  Or in some many sad cases, we discover that the idea is a flop and  can redirect those resources to a more successful product/feature.

Tour Buddy Pipeline

For example, we are currently in the process of *rebuilding* our IOS app in order to fully take advantage of iOS7 instead of just modifying our existing app to run on iOS7.  We are taking this opportunity to revamp the navigation and UI of our app and add a bunch of cool new features that customers have always asked for.  Once we have launched our beta (we always test features on tour buddy apps not our client apps!) and received enough feedback we will slowly roll it out for all of our clients and then start working on the Android app and build out the UI nf our web application to fully support those new features – during which time we’ll probably be working on the next set of improvements for the IOS app.  And why do we always build for IOS first?  Well because it is the easiest (and fastest) way to test new features and get to the point that paying customers can give us feedback.

Want to hear more?  Come to Refresh on Tuesday night at 6 PM and enjoy hearing the good the bad and the expensive in creating an MVP.