Pulling myself away from everything for a moment to write this. I think it’s important for my own personal mental health to digest all the moving parts of the Anthology project, as well as possibly help other entrepreneurs learn from my experiences going through this learning curve for the first time.
This forum will be a #BuildInPublic retrospective, so to speak. My goal here is to announce all the changes, the wins, and the losses - and most importantly, what I’ve learned along the way. It’ll be from my own point of view, disconnected from the business itself (official updates will come through the Anthology blog channel and email list).
This first issue may be a bit long as it’s a timeline review, but future ones will be shorter and more focused on the work of the week.
Reflection is the best path forward to continued succession. So whether you’re on your own venture to build a website or an app, or maybe a different business entirely, these insights might leave something to learn and launch from.
Housekeeping - The Timeline of Anthology (To Date)
The Beginning Stages
I think some housekeeping and explanations may be in order. I first came up with the yellow notepad/napkin sketch for Anthology towards the end of 2019. My co-founder and I eventually kicked off the formal planning phase in March 2020 and we wrapped that up pretty quickly — by May we were prospecting some software development studios to help us build a clickable prototype (neither one of us was from the mobile app or software space).
Advice #1 — don’t do this. This process took several months to complete and it cost a decent chunk of funds. Tools like Figma are widely available now for free - and there are a host of videos that can teach you how to use it quickly.
Development Starts
In late October 2020 we formally kicked off development of the first version of our app and website. It was very exciting! (I sometimes longed for that excitement again before recently).
Instead of choosing to find a Technical Co-Founder (a CTO perhaps), we ultimately chose to go back to the same development studio that worked on our clickable prototype. Neither choice is really right or wrong, but based on my personal experience — if I could go back in time, I’d look for a Technical Co-Founder. The reasoning is simple:
Finding a co-founder that develops your project with you means they are dedicated to making your project succeed. They succeed if the company succeeds (or at the least, they should feel this way assuming you find the right person). Going the route of a studio means they are working with you along with other clients. Sure, the same argument can be made that they’d like to see you succeed because that makes them succeed, but at the end of the day, your project is just a line item to them on a Profit and Loss statement.
Advice #2 - build a team around you that will have the same motivations and passions as you do for your project.
2021 - Extensively Long Development Cycles
This studio first built our app natively. If you don’t know what that means, it’s just that there is one true codebase dedicated to Apple mobile devices (iOS), and another codebase dedicated to the web. We didn’t have an Android build at that moment in time. It means that you need a bigger development team or suffer from lengthier builds as each codebase will need work independently of the other.
Doing my end-of-the-year review (something I’ll write about one day), this is where I noticed our first roadblock.
New updates and builds were taking way too long, half of our app wasn’t built yet, and we hadn’t even started working on an Android build yet.
While none of the work itself was incorrect, and I can’t fault the studio for building things wrongly, we really weren’t being advised properly based on our business stage and goals (see Advice #3 below). Especially when I learned later about different technologies that could have been used to make this entire process more efficient.
Advice #3 - Maintain startup mentality. Regardless of who you are working with. Make sure your project is being completed as minimally and cost effectively as possible to get the point across to your future customers/users.
2022 - New Studio, New Technologies, Similar(?) Results
Starting in 2022 I was on the hunt for a new development team. And I had found a group. It was through them that I learned about cross-platform technologies — meaning that one true codebase can be used across the web, iOS, and Android devices.
That means we could work with a smaller development team, plus target all three markets at the same time.
It was great - and I dove all in. Work started in February and continued throughout the year, until recently. Once again I did my year end review and started noticing some troubling signs:
• we had been building on top of architecture that was pre-existing instead of aligning to our new strategy
• new developers had a hard time being situated with onboarding due to a chaotic development environment
• builds were taking extremely long to complete
• the app’s performance suffered tremendously over this period and there were bugs that were consistently plaguing the experience
I’ll be honest, this made it extremely challenging to stay motivated on this project. Just a month ago I had gotten into a pretty dark funk about it… so much money and time had been invested into this and at the end of the day I couldn’t feel comfortable sharing this with anyone else. Luckily there was hope and we persevered through it with a new plan.
Advice #4 - Don’t let the “startup mentality” get you too comfortable with expectations. In this phase, teams are really close knit and small. It’s easy to lose sight of expectations amongst the friendships and relationships that grow out of the weeks of work. I learned this the hard way 🫤
2023 - A Path Forward, Light At the End of The Tunnel, Current Timeline
Luckily, one of the developers that had been onboarded to our team previously pitched to me one day his desire to rebuild the whole app from the ground up - this way doing it the right way with the correct technologies, better performance, and no bugs.
He claimed it would take just as much time doing it this way as it would continuing to support the older system of fixing ongoing issues.
It was a private pitch, and something about his passion while explaining it made me wholeheartedly believe him. It was then that we made another quick pivot, changed development teams (to one he was managing), and now we are on the path to re-releasing a product that our team will be happy to promote.
Advice #5 - Leverage passion to drive results. I recognized this was a seemingly radical idea… to completely redo everything? But, when you recognize that ember burning in an employee or a partner, foster that into an actionable plan to make everyone succeed.
Current Timeline - Build Statuses
This section will be copied and updated each week to the next post. Updates in future posts will appear at the top.
#build-1 | development / internal testing | Feb. 10, 2023
setup new technology stacks for backend and databases
completed user authentication screens & functionality
migrated data from previous system into new system associated with user Profile page
#build-2 | development / internal testing | Feb. 17, 2023
completed first edition of user Profile page using migrated data
migrated images uploaded in previous system into new system and connected them with our new tech architecture
completed first edition of Social page using migrated image data
migrated Followers and Following data from prev. build
completed showing Followers/Following page access when on a user Profile
#build-3 | development / internal testing | Feb. 24, 2023
completed all profile data migration
added new functionality on Social page to route the viewer to Portfolios
added a new 'detailed view' of an image on Social Feed - showing a list of those who liked the image
Added 'Create New Portfolio' functionality on Profile page
migrated existing data for Portfolio categories
Created and completed screens for listing Portfolio Categories
Added 'Create New Category' functionality with new animations
Future Timeline & Plans
The work I’ve listed above has re-energized my passion for this project again. That level of excitement I had in the beginning is here again. The quality of the new test builds is amazing. Things are faster, more responsive, and it brings so many seemingly minor thought-out details that strengthen the overall user experience. We’re in full startup mentality mode again and the it’s exciting.
The plan for this build is as follows:
complete the remaining screens and functionality for Flash Challenges, Notifications, Search, and Explore
Market and grow the company’s brand awareness through the content division. We recently started a low-tech, website driven monthly photo contest for $$$, and my wife and I have also started a digital photo ‘zine called This Month’s Anthology. These programs are designed to draw more attention to the company, and will ultimately be used to keep our growing community engaged while we finished rebuilding the app
Launch the app and GROW!
We will be releasing an update to the app when all is done on the App Stores, and users wouldn’t even know what happened if it weren’t for the messaging here. But I believe strongly in transparency and openness.
In the meantime, however, there may be an opportunity to shift from internal testing to live, public tests with individuals who have been with us from the start. Because of how different systems operate, this would only be doable for Android users of the app. And it would be an environment that is completely disconnected from the future public release - so any images, data, etc. that you choose to upload and use on there will only stay on that private testing environment.
If you do have an Android, and want to help us test these features out when it’s available (hopefully in the next week or two), let me know in the comments below ⬇️
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