Applicom

Apollo: going forward, and enjoying the ride!

When we started working on Apollo, we didn't quite know what to expect. We had several possible scenarios, but nothing was set in stone. We launched Apollo on the 27th of July, and we have been sending invites out ever since. For us, having Apollo as an invite-only application was important so that we could establish some kind of contact with our users; for each one of them, we tried to start a conversation. Yes, we did receive thousands of invite requests, and yes, we did have conversations (some short, some quite long) with a few hundred people.

We come from the interesting world of custom-build software, where you tend to talk to 3 or 4 people at the most at any one time. With Apollo, things are very different: there is only one piece of software, but several hundred (fantastic) users who write to you to give us advice and support us. I love that! If I had known, I would have started developing SaaS much earlier!

(As a side note, from the very beginning we have received several offers of help to make Apollo available in other languages; to simplify the translation process as much as possible, we developed a soon-to-be-released onine application just for translators.)

So, these first 5 months have been thrilling and rewarding; more importantly, this time helped us a lot define the priorities for next months to come.

We'll lift the invite code requirement in the next few days, so that anybody will be able to create a workspace without emailing us first. At the same time, we are shaping the plans we'll start offering sometime Q1 next year.

Also in these regards, our early users played an important role in shaping Apollo: we had quite a few conversations on this topic, with lots of interesting insights.

Good news for our early adopters friends: you will be looked after with a lifetime discount on your workspace!

Throughout next year, we will work on all those features that you are expecting to see in Apollo (we know what they are, that's why we spent so much energy talking to you!). There is surely a lot to be done, and even when all of those features will be ready, Apollo won't be finished of course: a piece of software is never finished! We'll keep working on Apollo, listening to you, as always and taking new directions -- leaving Apollo's core what we all know.

Thank you everybody. I will talk to you soon!