Curtain down. Old stack away. Rearrange furniture. Set up stage. Lights. Curtain up. This is the story about Lesson No. 1. Where we failed, why we failed, and what we’ve learned.

«The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The re­maining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.»
—Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

It’s been just about a year to the day since we went public with that trailer of Joinbox. The response to it was marvellous. We collected a pretty nice amount of invitation requests, which gave us a big rush on pushing things forward. Spring passed, we were close to releasing Joinbox to selected people. But we didn’t feel like our baby was ready to be presented. Front-end was nice, back-end merely okay—so, «let’s just fix this one». «Oh, but how about that other little flaw?». Thus, we kept on working. Just like Tom Cargill’s idea of Parkinson’s Law, we filled time with work. Since all of us work part time for a living, time flew. Already being summer, we spent the time with coding, bug fixing, and nagging.

In the meantime, we had great pleasure to participate in a lot of extraordinary events. We’ve been accepted to CTI Startup Coaching (long-term coaching sponsored by the Swiss Federal Commission of Technology and Innovation), we shared the love for data and an early alpha version of Joinbox at the NEXT Conference 2011 in Berlin, gathered profound feedback at MiniSeedcamp in beautiful Ljubljana, and were featured in different media.

How can it be we didn’t manage to release yet? You read it in all the books, you read it on Hacker News, you are told by serial entrepreneurs: «release early, release often». We should have known how (and what) to push forward in terms of developing. Instead, we had to regret repeatedly not letting users (who again and again asked to) lay hands on Joinbox.

The problem with software development is, it lacks an understanding what it means to be done. So how can a deadline be valid at all? The nasty thing with development is it’s organic. The recipe or blueprint never results in a definite product like a cake or building which cannot be changed in the essentials after it is made. That’s why we took a breathing time in fall and cleaned up the stage:

• We set a minimalistic feature description per version. This one was a tough one. What shall the very first version of Joinbox offer and look like? We cut off half of the features initially planned. A mindset we definitely had to learn. The main goal was now something like «runs on Google Chrome and doesn’t crash for 5 minutes».
• We set up a plan to release. Not an exact date. The idea was to make some friends a Christmas present. No matter if parts look bad, if it skyrockets the server’s CPU or makes the pay-per-traffic provider happy.
• We started to release often. Since Christmas time—when we sure enough released—we had two nice major and some minor releases on alpha.joinbox.com. We’re adding features step by step and suddenly it’s huge pleasure to see the basics grow on a daily basis.
• We try hard to make users happy. Already with the couple of first alpha testing users we set up a UserVoice feedback mask to gather ideas and bugs. We strictly focus on what users wish and implement own ideas and in-house feature requests secondarily.

This practice along with giving some shots on project management frameworks like Agile, Scrum and Lean Management made a great improvement on quality and performance of developing. We are happy now to be again on schedule. A new schedule.

Year 2011 was a crazy roller coaster. The emotionally most intense ride we have ever taken. Instead of listening better to professional advices and try harder, we just wanted—and needed—to hit that wall we’ve been running at. However, and most importantly, people are able to learn and we will fail better next time. How else could one become experienced?

It’s January 2012 now. New year, new luck. It’s close to impossible that we won’t launch beta later than February. Hopefully you too had an educational 2011 and are set for another adventurous roller coaster ride.

What’s the best way to streamline outbound communication cross-over different services?

If you wanted to share that sweet picture of your godson child to your domestic and oversea friends only fifteen years ago (just at the age we were child godsons)—you’d need to go to the print shop, copy the original, get some stamps, get envelopes, put down addresses, write some accompanying letters and look for to the closest post box.

Sharing on the Internet is not as much a big deal. But still exhausting: to show a picture from Tumblr, you probably need to copy and paste it to email (your mom doesn’t know Tumblr, right?), share it on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Different services equals multiple steps results in this can be done better.

While displaying aggregated information (a.k.a. the inbox) is primarily a challenge of visual usability, interaction with friends, walls, posts, comments, and emails is a much trickier subject.

We think there are three distinguishable types of outbound communication: quick and short reacting to messages (e.g. Facebook comments), middle-sized posting (own and original content or shareables), and larger messages (e.g. some business emails, hello-I’m-overseas-and-still-alive-read-what-great-days-I-have-messages, etc.). Most of your time you spend on minor communication matters. For this, Joinbox is by far your most comfy solution.

We try hard to make Joinbox a great and consistent user experience. Therefore, we think it shouldn’t be up to you caring about the source of the message you want to interact with. Have a look at the following image: commenting a Facebook message works pretty much the same as replying a Tweet. Even emails: a quick reply lets you answer the message in a second. In the back end, Joinbox copies and quotes the whole email and places your quick reply on top, just like most mail clients do.

The second way of outbound communication, those slightly longer messages that you mostly initiate yourself, needs more space and options. The challenge here is aggregating dozens of (multiple) contacts without overloading your very own Joinbox address book. On the other hand, there are big differences between the services. Twitter, Facebook, and email for example handle contacts in a completely different way. To make the address book pretty and easy to use, we handle your own walls (or timeline) as contacts.

As a result, you post your message across all your services in only one step. In the example of pictures, you send it to Joinbox and we attach it to an email, push it to your Facebook wall or forward it to a Twitter image hosting service. Your friends and followers will get your message just as if you had sent it to them on your own.

This is your area for outbound communication. You access it on the very top of your browser window no matter what you’re up to. Consider it your personal post man in front of the door waiting for your photos. He’ll do the copying, the bagging, the addressing, and the stamp licking for you.

The inbox. Our key answer to your information overload.

Imagine having not one but dozens of mailboxes on the fence around your cottage house. Crazy vision? Bet ya, we actually do have lots of post boxes around our online homes: we’ve got Facebook, private mail, LinkedIn, NYT, Engadget, work mail, Twitter—you name it—and they all have their own boxes.

Now it’s a heck of a walk to get your mail, and loads of time to spend separating out the relevant pieces. It’s where Joinbox comes in handy: it clears your mailboxes for you and presents you the letters in one inbox, chronologically sorted and carefully condensed, wherever and whenever you need them.

It’s not our goal to replace anything. We think it’s fun to spend some time on Facebook, Twitter and news sites, and that no new media has ever replaced an existing one (still writing post cards, right?). Giving you a simple and real time index of the news around you, of the news that concern you—that’s Joinbox. It takes you to the source when you’d like to dive deep into a story. Sounds good? Sure, but how exactly do we do it?

We believe the essence of every short information update lies in three attributes: time, source, and content (the beginning of the whole news; the title at best). You can sort out a big lot of messages as good or bad ones by just reading the first couple of sentences. Ask heavy Twitter users who take it to the max: they scan the first few words of each tweet while scrolling down their timeline.

Based on these thoughts, we designed Joinbox: it’s the messages from all your services, reduced to the min, i.e. showing source (service and writer) and preview (content), while time is the order (latest on top). Just have a look at the beauty of this thought when implemented:

On a rough scale, Joinbox sorts your messages into three different classes: Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), emails, and news and blogs (everything that supports RSS) and color-codes it. You get a sweet mix in one—repeat, one—stream. Our inbox just doesn’t allow for multiple columns with creepy horizontal scrolling. If your Joinbox timeline seems too long, just blank out a class or two. Still too much or not what you intended? Check off some particular sources inside a class and you’re good to go.

That’s about the inbox. And before you ask for Insight No. 2 article about its sister, the outbox, let us tell you that they’re so much alike that the outbox shares some of its functionality with the inbox. Where reasonable (it’s us judging, but your wish is our command), you can respond to a message directly from the inbox, from within the message itself: quick-reply to an email, comment on a Facebook post or answer a tweet.

Now: wish!