Month 1, October 2010: In the month of October, I was in Belarus. Weather sucked there as well as my personal life. Therefore, it was a good time to start prototyping. On top of this, Serge approached me to go to Google Developer Day in Moscow. The spirit of GDD blew our minds. The events of that day prompted us to say to ourselves “f it, we are doing our own thing”. We had a number of ideas for startup apps but decided to go with the simplest one – proposal software. Of course, it turned into a more complicated thing than we imagined at first. We needed this kind of software ourselves to streamline sales operations.
Month 2, November 2010: A number of extremely wild and cruel fights lead us to the first versions of the design concept and prototypes. Serge, our lead designer Alex, and I spent a bunch of evenings arguing and yelling at each other about the location of buttons on the pages. Despite the nasty process, the result was quite attractive. See for yourself at www.quoteroller.com [that was unhidden advertisement, wasn’t it?]. Another big key to the development was that Serge approached two extremely experienced Python/Django developers to join our team. They were quite expensive but, as time has shown, it was totally worth it.
Month 3, December 2010: We decided to put the app on RackSpace Cloud and signed up for an account. Hard core programming, coding and other development-related activities had begun. At this time I flew over to the US to take care of some ongoing projects.
Month 4, January 2011: Development on the project tremendously progressed. By the end of the month we had the first beta of the application - software to create business proposals. That was when we applied for a place at a Launch conference. A few weeks later, we got a response saying that we had passed the first selection round. Someone from the Launch interviewed me over Skype. They were quite positive about our startup, which was promising. I also had some business in San Francisco so everything was perfectly coming together.
Month 5, Feb 2011: On Feb 10th , I received an email from one of the Launch founders (7 days before the conference) saying that they have to decline our application. This was extremely unfortunate, because I already had tickets to SF in my hands. That was a bummer, but, on the other hand, we’ve been getting lots of positive feedback on the app design and usability. We decided to continue to put as much effort as possible into the project, regardless of whatever conference :)
Quote Roller’s beta was ready and we started to test the application. The quantity of improvement requests by beta testers was tremendous. We had over 400 issues opened in redmine to be addressed.
Month 6, March 2011: We’ve addressed most of the requests and launched the first version of the app. We received some tweets from Smashing Magazine and Speckyboy ~ 1000 visitors a day. In two weeks we’ve had about 400 hundred registered users (yes, we know your Facebook app got 10 times more than that, but, cmon, consider Quote Roller as a business software). We’ve set a goal to get 2k registrations by July 1st.
And then there is April when I wrote this article. My mood is great, and I feel quite awesome. Work on Quote Roller was a real enjoyment. We are really excited about the future of Quote Roller - software as a service that helps to create, send and track business proposals.