Releasing a 1.0 product is an interesting, exciting, and exhausting experience for a software developer. I can’t remember a time where I worked as many hours in such a small time span and was not only willing to do it, but couldn’t wait to jump out of bed every morning to get started. The craziest time had to be the 48 hours on each side of the release.
I was sharing with my family that if I had any idea about the amount of work involved with developing and releasing a 1.0 software product back when I started development, I probably would never have started down this path. I think it’s a good thing that most entrepreneurs have no idea what they are getting themselves into. The learning curve was more like a sheer cliff then a curve. But, the great thing is now that I have been through it and have a sense of what needs to be done, I would jump at the chance to do it all over again.
Response to the LicenseKeeper 1.0 release was much greater than I ever expected. Both from the media and from new and potential customers. LicenseKeeper began life as a small project to serve a personal need. To find that so many around the world have the same need and appreciate a polished tool to solve it is very encouraging. I received hundreds of emails with all kinds of encouragement, praise, and great suggestions for improving LicenseKeeper.
Some of the requests coincide with my earliest vision of where LicenseKeeper would evolve. But the best suggestions were for needs that I had never even considered. This got me really excited. Now I see all kinds of new opportunities for both improvement and market growth.
Of course not everything went as planned. There were several bugs discovered with LicenseKeeper 1.0 that should not have made it out the door. Ideally they would have been discovered and fixed long before release. The two most serious of these can cause unexpected crashes. One was my fault, the other exists inside Apple’s framework. Maybe, I’ll write more about them in a later post, but for now rest assured that I have fixed them in the LicenseKeeper code base. The next release is currently going through a short testing phase and if all goes well should be released sometime in the next day or so.
Just to round out the recap, here’s a short list of some of the major media outlets that covered the LicenseKeeper release since last tuesday (March 6, 2007).