Hitting the reset button is scary and refreshing at the same time. For HelloBox, this was a decision that was made carefully, if not a little too carefully.
We set out to make the most useful community software in 2014 and 6 years feels like a lifetime in software industry, but we're still here today, serving many of customers (some who have been with us since the beginning).
Over the past few years, we tried several times to upgrade & re-design HelloBox only to come short on that objective each time we tried. We've built many features, some perhaps a little too complex for us to decouple and think afresh. In the end, for each upgrade attempt, we didn't product-manage it properly to see it through.
But thankfully, our platform continued to grow and it something that we could not ignore. So at the start of this year, we decided yet again to try the upgrade for one last time.
This time, we divided the entire application into a few manageable chunks, dedicating a focused period of time to make sure they all transition to the new underlying tools and platforms. Fast forward 8 months, we are here. Finally.
Well, not quite done yet though - as many say at this point, it's only the start.
Over the next few weeks, we are focusing on making sure that all communities have transitioned over properly. We are talking to individual users and also to re-build some of the features we turned off for the upgrade.
What's really exciting for us though is what lies ahead! There are so many things ti build and our original passion in improving the state of community software is very much alive and burning and now with this new design, we are super excited.
More to come. We'll log our journey here.