The Rise and Fall of Everest (The App)
medium.comSorry be frank, but reading that I really didn't get the feeling this company was doing things right and "just missed."
The premise seems wrong. I thought the current thinking that building a group you as the "social accountability" of your goals just produces anxiety and procrastination.
And I don't see offline sync as a "nice to have." I (and others) have dropped products when they dropped the feature.
"We had office space in the Presidio, instead of being with all the other startups in SoMa, Mission or FiDi."
Does that really matter so much? I've never heard of South Bay startups agonizing that they were in Sunnyvale instead of Palo Alto, and the distances involved would be quite a bit larger.
Quick read and valuable feedback. No idea how they were featured on the App Store for EVERY release, that's pretty insane. Sounds like they couldn't get retention down, but had solid acquisition.
Apple seems to favor apps with a good design, or simply a good use of some new feature in iOS. I'd guess it was something along those lines.
Obviously design was a high priority, as they said, even inter-office documents had a high standard.
I think when you have a designer leading the team, design becomes the most important thing. When you have a programmer leading the team, the code becomes the most important thing. When you have a business person leading the team, it's the metrics, etc, etc. in reality the customer is the most important thing.
When the customer leads the team...you have a packed preference pane...?
Hehe, perhaps! Ideally whoever leads the team knows how to give customers what they want, even when they don't know exactly what it is that they do want!
I originally heard of this app a few years ago from a friend who was an advisor for the company at the time. My big gripe with this app is that it did not address the underlying psychology of setting and reaching goals. Research has shown that sharing your goals with other people actually diminishes the likelihood that you will complete them.
At the time my friend brushed off my comments and it looks like this post-mortem doesn't cover half of what it needs to. The premise of the app completely missed the mark for the problem it was attempting to solve.
Title is missing a word.
Thanks, fixed.
Again, never heard of it.