What are we working on? Lemme tell ya!
Good morning everyone and welcome to your ScribeCount update for Aug 31st.
It’s been a while since I last gave you an inside look at what we’re doing so I thought I would do so today.
As you know, we’ve been adding new platforms and services at a rapid rate. (Four in the last month) This was due to many factors. We had a pretty aggressive schedule already, and then opportunity stuck. Damon at BookFunnel reached out to us, and since BookFunnel was high on your wish-list, we wedged it into the schedule. I’m happy to say that BookFunnel, which is outstanding by-the-way, is now fully integrated and running smoothly. I have to give credit to Damon and our developers working together to get that done. If only all platforms were that easy to add.
Speaking of those platforms. Ingram is now up and running. Those of you who use Ingram can probably imagine the complexity of adding this platform. Its still a bit server intensive and we’ll be revisiting it and tinkering to get the process smoother, but for now it pulls everything we have access to. We’ll see if we can improve on that after the next trade show. Right now the verification code is being augmented and should be pushed as soon as we have tested it thoroughly.
Next up is Amazon Ads, which is ready for deployment but we chose to wait until after the end of the month so as not to throw everyone off just as they were receiving their end-of-month figures. That, and August is maintenance month for many of the platforms. B&N, Amazon, and Kobo have all pushed updates to their systems in the last two weeks which forced us to find them and write code to work with them.
We’ll be pushing Amazon Ads to the dashboard sometime next week. So watch for that. Hopefully Amazon is done tinkering with their reporting by then and we’ll have few bugs to deal with.
Then we get to the important stuff. I know tickets have suffered due to the aggressive production schedule and I apologize for that. It’s a constant battle over where to delegate our development resources.
To use a writer analogy its like having several authors working on a few books at once. One group is working on Ad Tracking (a mystery) while this other one is working on Ingram (a horror novel) while the third group is working on Tickets (a textbook). Then, sOmeThiNg happens and I have to pull a mystery writer away and tell them they write horror now. They LOVE IT when I do this!/s
I’m amazed I’m still alive.
Where was I going with this?
The Schedule! Elizabeth and I have penned a 12 page “User Interface and Functions” document and mailed it out to all the developers. Starting This Week we will stop all development projects and work on nothing but that list*. It was compiled from your ticket input and your feature suggestions and is quite in-depth. You can expect the features to become as bullet-proof as we can make them. You’ll see a major facelift to the dashboards as well.
There’s an asterisk, Randall. What’s that all about?
There is ONE platform that I will allow into the production schedule. I can’t say what it is yet, you’ll just have to find a way to be patient.
So that’s what’s on our plates for the coming weeks.
Ad Tracking
User Interface and Functions
NINC Conference (Elizabeth and I will be there! Will you?)
More Dashboard tools and improvements.
20Books Conference
More Platforms and Ad Tracking (Google Ads and BookBub)
While I’m here I’d like to thank all of you for the support. Without you we wouldn’t be able to keep growing and providing the service. They say “entrepreneurs might do start-ups but it’s the early adopters that keep them going” and that is certainly true here. So thanks for sticking with us through the glitches and bugs and silences while we build this monster. Some days I lose sleep and hair, but most days I’m excited about what we have done and where its going. So thanks again for the help.
This concludes your ScribeCount update. I’ll check on this thread today if you have any questions. Gnow go right duh wurds.
Randall