It felt like a punch to the gut. My wife used the sales tracker app that I build for only one weekend, before telling me that she was going back to using a spreadsheet instead.
So, a spreadsheet was better than my app. Ouch!
The weird thing is, it shouldn’t have hurt at all, because she was right. It wasn’t very good, and I knew it.
The app is called Order Hand. It’s an app I’m writing to help people like my wife who sell via WhatsApp, keep track of orders. That way, they know who’s ordered what, who’s paid, and who’s received their items. No more chaos.
Anyway, I wrote the MVP in two weeks, part time, because I wanted to get it working in time for a market event we attended as sellers. Needless to say, it was the most minimal of MVPs you could imagine:
- The mobile layout was broken (bad for WhatsApp users)
- My wife had to log in again every time she used it
- You couldn’t edit or delete anything. So, if you make a mistake, sorry, you can’t fix it
- The only things it could do was add products, contacts, and record orders. That’s it
- Oh, and you could mark orders as paid and completed
This is the kind of MVP I’d only let someone like my wife try out. Because, it’s kind of embarrassing.
The real deal breaker was something small, though: order invoices were numbered differently from previous orders that we had in a spreadsheet. Which sounds like it wouldn’t be a big deal. But, we plan to import all previous orders into the app. Having orders numbered out of sequence is a problem. It can even have legal implications.
So the more orders she recorded in the app, the bigger the mess we’d have to clean up later.
By itself, no big deal. But on top of a broken mobile layout and having to log in again each time, that was enough to make this an “I’ll use it when you’ve fixed everything that’s wrong with it” app
Feedback like this is where you need to put your ego aside. I don’t know if hearing it from my wife made it easier or harder to take.
Either way, very valuable feedback. So I’ve been busy doing just that: fixing everything that’s wrong with it, and adding the minimal feature set that my wife needs:
The mobile layout and repeated login issues were the easiest to fix.
I’m part-way through adding the ability to edit and delete stuff. Editing contacts and orders is done. Editing and deleting products is still to-do (see the video above).
The hardest change surprised me: being able to set the order date. I’ll save you the gory details, and just say this: timezones and date formats are way more complicated than you think. Linux servers like to store dates in UTC, which is great if you live in that timezone. But not useful for the rest of the world.
Anyway, it’s done. You can now enter past orders into Order Hand, and set the invoice numbering correctly.
I’m this close to being able to import those old orders, and finally get my wife to switch to my app for real.
I’m looking forward to that.
This is just the beginning, though. I’ve got a ton of improvements planned. The next big milestone will be to have a public MVP for other WhatsApp sellers to use.