Android client for Asana.com or how I met the founder of Facebook

Preamble

When the new and ambitious, and now the most fashionable in the valley, the asana.com task management system, created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovits , entered my life tightly, in the fall of 2011 , of course I tried to find a client for my Android smartphone. Unfortunately, in the Google Market (at that time), apart from yoga applications, asana was not found for the keyword. However, the asana mobile web interface was quite original and innovative, but not very functional and difficult to operate.




The first question that arose with me, and how often do we, finding a new Internet service, look for a mobile application for it? I don’t know about you, but if there is even a small chance that I will use some kind of tool in the future, I will definitely do a search on Google Play. Based on this logic, I suggested that if you create any mobile application for a popular service that has not yet done it, then popularity and setups are guaranteed regardless of the quality of the latter. In my reasoning, I went further, and what if this is a very popular service and what if you make a simple hook - make an interlayer mobile client, which will be just a browser window to the mobile web interface and, let's say, take money for it (oh, how can you say so well) . Thought - doneappsgeyser.ru was created in Novosibirsk and has an older brother ' .com ' from the same company, which, by the way, is the leader of simple web interface packers in apk for Android. An hour after the venture, I was ready:

• A mobile application for asana.com that opened their native mobile interface
• A set of icons, skin shots and descriptions for this application
• Developer account on Google Market (Play)

Putting everything together, I just applied for a placement with a price of $ 0.99 (it would have been possible less, I would have done less). Even then, I wanted to know how much people need a mobile client for asana.
As it happens, the experiments before bedtime in the morning were forgotten and I remembered about this application only after a few days. Imagine my surprise when I discovered more than 40 purchases in 3 days.
A freebie in the form of sales in someone else's glory turned out to be quite real, but this is not for us and I began to look - who are those geniuses who bought a raw and useless application. Here I was even more surprised - one of the very first customers was the founder of asana.com - Dustin Moskovitz, apparently google alerts for the right words he is configured.

What as a result

When someone bought something from Google Market, you can contact him through a special email alias, so without hesitation, I wrote Dustin a letter saying that this is so, I, like many others, really need a mobile client when to wait. The answer came right away, Dustin said that the mobile client is not a priority, but he will be interested to see the statistics of the installations.



In order not to profit and not to sell the useless app, I made the forever free application and returned the money (made a refund) to all buyers, after which the installation curve went up as a revenue forecast in any business plan. For some time we corresponded with Dustin, I showed him how quickly I dialed the first thousand installations, how the client is in demand and that they say guys, change the priority in your backlogs, people want to. He thanked evasively for the cause, but at the expense of the client was unshakable. Several months passed and when the number of active setups approached 10k, and in total about 40 thousand customers tried the application and the application got into the top 300 G Market , Dustin himself began to writeI thought about that, they thought and decided it was time to make a mobile client and asked to rename the application to unofficial, because the reviews were bad (still, their mobile interface was still inferior, but I had no interest in how to improve the application (API It wasn’t there yet.)

I asked for official comments on the launch dates of the application and promised that in the near future I would remove the application altogether, and now, the insider was fished out - they promised to do it by the end of the year .

Conclusions and facts:

• if you are already popular, do not forget about your users, monitor the demand for mobile clients and do not wait until someone starts earning money on you
• ways to get direct emails and personal contacts with successful people in your industry are always mysterious
• you can always achieve a change of priorities in the backlog of your favorite service, if you approach the issue with fiction and imagination

And what stories did you have of an unusual meeting interesting people in the industry?

PS since the statistical report for Dustin, the number of installations has exceeded 10k. In order not to upset users, a week after this post, I will remove the application from Google Play.