Frustrated user to our own beta: Now Push the story so far...

So my first post here and I wanted to share the journey we have been on over the past few months at Now Push.

So the story starts as a long time user of a certain (shall remain nameless) app, one that we had loved for a long time, several months ago we ran into a big problem the app had been removed from the App Store by the development team behind the app, reason for its removal where due to certain requirements Apple had set, that the team behind the app no longer wanted to support. Initially this wasn’t a huge issue but as time went on the unsupported app was becoming more unstable and it ended up being deleted from our devices, after several years of use. I myself then decided to see if I was the only one still in need of such an app and this is where the journey really begins...

We started to reach out to people on Twitter, and on Reddit asking was a similar type of app still needed in 2020 and what level of interest was there for it. We set up a sign up page, outlined the basics of what we will build and posted it online towards the end of April, and things started good, at least in our minds, we had set a goal of around 100 sign ups would be enough for us to start building and we got around 50 sign ups in the first few days, this was relatively exciting, we were happy, then after a little more posting around Reddit towards the end of that first week we hit 200, then 300, then 500, then 800 sign ups, panic set in, some late nights could be foreseen and pressure to deliver was already upon us, before we had been live 2 weeks we had over 1000 sign ups (this is still growing today, and we passed 1300 sign ups this week!).

So as we had such a overwhelming response in people wanting to use this app we got to work on the app, several weeks of hard work, late nights, design work, development work, technical decisions product decisions, working with external developers, some failures, some successes, lots of learning and of course COVID-19. This has been a blast so far and we launched the beta on iOS and Android around 6 weeks ago.

We have had around 900 users in the first month and things are going well, decent daily users numbers and currently (quality issues aside) we are on the right path. We have shipped several updates to our mobile apps adding new features and improvements as we go. As the use case for the product goes beyond mobile we had to get out a Chrome Extension too, not something we are at all familiar with (as mainly mobile developers) but we have just shipped our Chrome Extentision at the start of the week.

We are still in an open beta phase, and will be for a while longer as we solidify things, getting the quality and feature set fit for a wider user base and also give us more time to iron out any issues.

That’s it for now just wanted to give the background to Now Push, how we came to be and where we are right now.

We are Now Push - https://nowpush.app

You can get of the beta links below:

Chrome: (http://share.workanywhere.io/AAS8ew)

iOS (TestFlight) : (http://share.workanywhere.io/bZjdU8)

Android (Google Play) : (http://share.workanywhere.io/uV1pWX)

We welcome everyone to share these links with friends, family and colleagues and to get in touch please email [email protected] or directly on our subreddit r/nowpush to give us any feedback, ideas and issues.