What to Expect from AppPresser in 2019

Here at AppPresser, we are really busy behind the scenes furiously writing code and answering the constant stream of support and pre-sales questions.

One thing we haven’t been busy doing is updating you by writing on our blog. We have been talking with dozens of our customers on the phone, and a couple times we got asked: “Are you guys still releasing stuff? It doesn’t seem like much is going on with AppPresser.”

That hurts. But we understand. We are pouring our hearts out behind the scenes, but how could you know that if we don’t update the blog?

Like many businesses we planned to write, we wanted to write, but then the reality of feature development for AppPresser and support hit us and…well note the gaps in the dates between posts.

This post is our first step in fixing that, we want to apologize for not updating you more often. We are going to explain what we’ve been doing, and what’s coming next.

Focusing on our customers

My name is Curtis McHale. I’m here to help with marketing and building content that helps the customers of AppPresser get to know the product better. Our goal is to provide you with the education and tools you need to create awesome apps with AppPresser.

In January we started this process by talking to you, the clients of AppPresser. Between Scott and I, we’ve talked to over 30 of you about what you need from AppPresser. We talked BuddyPress, WooCommerce, frustrations with app submission and notifications, and about how to market apps to your customers.

Out of these great conversations we’ve identified three main groups of customers.

1. Business Owner wearing many hats trying to get their app out
2. Freelancer adding app services to their website builds
3. Agencies doing some really impressive technical work

With the diversity in those three groups, you all said almost the same thing.

You said that you didn’t hear from us enough on the blog. You said that it was frustrating for us to go months between updating you on anything that was happening behind the scenes with our development.

What we are working on in 2019

We heard you, and we are making improvements based on your feedback. Here’s what’s already in the works for 2019.

More Blog Updates

You can expect an update on the second Tuesday of the month going forward to tell you about what we’re working on. You should also get extra unplanned updates from our team when something strikes us as worth sharing.

No, we may not be ready to ship some of the stuff we’re talking about. No, it all won’t be some amazing user feature. Yes, we’ll tell you about the bugs we’re squashing and the things we’re struggling through so that we can ship new AppPresser features to you.

More Product Development

We already have Matt working basically all day every day working to fix bugs and add new features. Scott also works on new integrations, for example he just finished up our new WooCommerce integration AppCommerce. He is also putting the finishing touches on our In App Purchase integration, which is already being tested by a few customers.

Many of you said that we needed more BuddyPress features in our AppCommunity integration. We agree so we’ve hired Renato Alves, who is building out the open source BuddyPress REST API. He’ll be working on our AppCommunity integrations with BuddyPress, building more features for your apps.

We also hired Mario Shtika as our newest developer, welcome Mario! Mario is going to help move our product development forward.

We have some big plans for our product that are not ready to announce yet, but know that new stuff is already in the pipeline to be released later this year.

More Educational Content

Every customer from our highly technical agencies, to our business owners said that they needed more how to content. While you enjoyed our webinar when we released AppPresser 3, it was a lot to ask of you to watch a 50 minute webinar to see if your question was answered at minute 12 or 35. You can expect more content that’s answering a single question so you can dive in and add a feature to your app.

For example, we recently released this video on how to use a custom post type in AppPresser, using Tribe’s Events Calendar plugin as an example: https://youtu.be/Gfr5kC72xvg

We also have a new ebook about mobile apps and AppPresser, download it below…

You also asked for more featured apps from our customers to help you understand what you could do with AppPresser. But you don’t just want case studies. You want us to go deep and show you how the app was built so that you can add similar features to the apps you’re building.

We’re on the lookout for cool apps and developers we can talk to and feature. If you think you may have an app that would fit, let us know in the comments.

Support Improvements

So far I’ve only brought up the things we need to do better, but that wasn’t all we talked about. You also told us that support was pretty dang good. Most of you could name our support people and were really happy with how completely they answered your questions. Hearing that they were mentioned by name as awesome made the support team happy, I’m sure at least one of them danced like no one was watching.

Of course sometimes support gets bogged down, and we don’t reply as fast as you’d like. We are working on streamlining our support processes to get you help faster, and we may hire another support technician this year.

When we asked you why you picked AppPresser over other options, you told us that you knew WordPress and that nothing offered the features that AppPresser does with the tight WordPress integration that we have. You told us for the price AppPresser and WordPress just can’t be beat for your apps.

Thanks for your input

To everyone that got on a call with us, thanks so much for your time. The calls were fun and we learned so much about what you needed to build awesome apps with AppPresser. If you didn’t get chance to weigh in over the phone, feel free to leave a comment below. We’d love to hear what content you need from AppPresser so that you can launch awesome apps to your users. We want to hear about the struggles you’re having, so we can produce content that can help you deliver awesome apps to your customers.

Like everything, it’s going to take time to get all the content you need out. Our list of articles to write is long, and while we’d love to say that we’ll publish daily, that’s probably setting us up for failure and you up for disappointment. Expect something weekly from us to help you understand how to use AppPresser better so that you can build awesome apps for your users.