GetQd

Road to the App Store

As many of you know, we’ve recently (yesterday) launched our new application in the App Store and on Google Play. As our last post was the launch party at Cowboys Nightclub you may think it was a quick skip and a jump from one to the other. The fact is, the yellow brick road between then and now was actually a lot farther than what we anticipated. I wanted to write something to connect the dots between each of those milestones.

It all began with a lot of positive feedback from the community, including investors, business owners and most importantly, the average joes.  After the initial launch party we took a step back for a week. Thought of logistics, how to expand, best way to do it, easiest, frictionless way to do it. We needed the major bars. So after going ahead and finding places interested, we went to the drawing board.

An app. We needed one.

Number one, registration at Apple as developers. May not seem that difficult, but now requires a D&B number these days - I still don’t know what it does. Crap - we don’t have one. We applied and waited for the response. We got a response in about 6 business days, ahead of the quoted 30 (which would have killed us). Only problem was we were one digit short. Thats right, THEY forgot to include the final number of our much needed D&B number. Oh well. Our hand was forced. We had to ram through our account registration at Apple. This means that we registered without a D&B number. There’s no option for this on the page, but we made it happen through a couple tweaks and tricks. We got excited! We were one step further to getting our app uploaded, then we got the call. The call I’m referring to, was from Apple. The gargantuan company that always pushes around the little guys. Joking. Long story short, they said we needed to re-register because of what they called ‘maintenance.’ We knew there was not maintenance we forced our registration through, and they couldn’t make sense on how. I’m sure in there eyes, we needed to be punished for getting past their defensive walls of magic.

After Apple sorted us out. They gave us more time to work with. We went back to the drawing board. Had some fun. We redesigned our icons. Re-engineered our registration process, on boarded a couple more customers, and attended one of the most glamorous housewarmings we’ve ever imagined.

This borrowed time, (call it a ‘time out’ - like the ones your parents used to give you - except this was from Apple) gave us the ability to work out bugs, talk to some well educated gurus in the area, and get more customers. By this point 100 hours a week is a slow week. The next week or so flew by with more customers, more investors, more designing, more coding, and a couple removed wisdom teeth. Before we knew it, we had a viable product for the app store.

YES!

It was a pain to make everything work the way it does, and deploy in on multiple platforms in such a short time. Here we are though. Go to the app store, download it, thank us later.

I want to thank the staff at Cowboys Calgary, and the folks at Ranchmans Cookhouse. I’m also going to give a pre-thanks to the owners at Ranch Roadhouse, Union Hall, and Whiskey Rock in Edmonton. You’re going to be the base of our success and likely the ones we get to work most intimately with.

We started with a good team, and a product that people would use, that solves a common problem for a large audience. From there, it should matter what you’ve got, if you treat the customer well and have those 3 things I believe you should succeed.