“Big-Ass File Uploads”

We’ve been talking to a couple of companies in the publishing industry about Approver.com. They seem pretty enthusiastic about it, which makes sense because a lot of Approver’s workflow was informed by my experience as a book author and reviewer. I could never fathom why the technical book publishers I worked with never put together a simple web-based workflow system for authors. Having to juggle multiple versions of multiple chapters and circulate them among multiple editors on a tight schedule was absolute hell — it was one of my least-favorite parts of writing books.

One valuable piece of feedback that we got from publisher-types was that a 4MB limit on file uploads won’t cut it. The 4MB limit happens to be our web server’s out-of-the-box limit, so we stuck with it initially. But last night on the couch I realized that I could increase that limit with a simple configuration change, so I went ahead and made the configuration change in production. The new limit is 15MB which should hopefully cover the vast majority of document scenarios we want to support. (Note that if you’re uploading a file in Approver today, the page still says that there’s a 4MB limit — this is inaccurate and will be updated when we do our launch push.)

I’m open to the idea of increasing the upload limit even further (particularly as an added benefit for paid customers). Bear in mind that there’ll always be some sort of limit on the size of uploaded files on Approver — if you just want to store big files, you probably want to try something like box.net. But the ultimate plan is to make the limit so large that you’ll almost never run into it.

Home Stretch

This week I’ll be putting a few finishing touches on Approver.com in anticipation of a formal launch later this week or early next. Basically all that remains to do is to polish the payment flow and make sure that usage limits work correctly for paid and unpaid users. I also want to give influencers a little advance notice of the launch and make myself available to answer questions. (This means: if you blog or report on software and want to chat with me about Approver this week, feel free to ping me at jeffrey at approver dot com at your earliest convenience. If typing email addresses causes you pain, you can use our handy feedback form, which comes directly to me. Feel free to leave comments here on the blog if that’s easier for you.)

It’s been a few years since I’ve launched a serious site that I coded myself. The question of when to launch, and with which feature set, is always an interesting one. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward, which compels you to wait until you’ve included most of the features in your product vision, but user feedback is always terrifically valuable, which makes you want to launch as soon as possible. But then, if you launch to a broad audience before your feature set is compelling, you run the risk of being known as “not ready for prime time”. Then there is the small matter of a business not making money until it has launched a product. Getting the balance right is a very tricky dilemma.

In most technology companies the business side of the organization hammers out some kind of partnership with the engineering side to determine when a product will ship. But when you’re both the CEO and the chief developer, you get to have these discussions with yourself. (The business side of my brain wishes we’d launched a month ago, while the developer in me wants to delay the launch for 10-20 years until we have a telepathy API that enables you to deliver documents straight from your brain to Approver.com and then receive telepathic alerts when your colleagues think good thoughts about your work.)

Making Approver.com into an iterative, responsive, organic thing, with a feature set and product roadmap driven primarily by user feedback, is one reason why I decided not to keep Approver.com a big secret (the site has been up and available to anyone for a while now). At the same time, I tried to carefully manage the number of people who use the site, keeping things on the down-low so I don’t accidentally get 10,000 users before we’re ready to help them.

I’d always envisioned that we’d have about 100 people kick the tires on the system before promoting it aggressively; we have about that many users now, which has been gratifying but also really helpful in a practical sense. Most of what’s good about the fit and finish of the system today came directly from user feedback, and many of the features that we’ll be adding shortly after launch (including a more capable API and support for larger file uploads) came from preview users. Thanks again to everyone who has signed up for Approver to date, particularly if you’ve gone through the whole flow of creating/uploading a document and leaving feedback.
I was tempted to officially launch the site before the family and I went to New York on vacation last week, but then I realized that I wouldn’t be in a terrific position to help new users and answer peoples’ questions (although I can and do use the site with my Treo 700w from pretty much anywhere). Plus I was having some interesting conversations with a few developers when I was in New York and I wanted to wait on launching the site until I’d spoken to them.

So: there’ll be more news later in the week. Hopefully things will get effervescent presently.

Bug fix 21. August 2006

I pushed a bug fix this evening to resolve a problem that a few users ran into involving uploading files using Internet Explorer.

As always if you run into any funnies, please leave feedback. We’ve typically been knocking out critical bugs like this on a same-day basis.

Production push 16 August 2006

New goodies tonight:

• The PayPal upgrade flow is done, although it’s not being linked to within the site for now because I want to kick the tires on it a bit more on Thursday. (PayPal should let you send money to yourself; it would increase their revenue from fees and make it easier to test this stuff.) You can go to the payment flow directly to see how it looks.
• In the list of reviewers in document.aspx, reviewers’ names are now being displayed properly when you invite them to review a document before they register. Previously if you invited an unregistered user you’d only ever see their email address.
• Fixed a problem with inviting users on certain mobile devices (Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile has this unfortunate thing where it selects the first member of a list control, making the page think that the user selected something when in fact they didn’t).
• Document names were not being escaped properly, which enabled certain humorous users (i.e., me) to create documents with amusing HTML tags in them (such as the perennial favorite, <BLINK>). Fixed.
• Fixed a problem where a user who was not authorized to view a document was seeing unhelpful information (not the document itself, but some user interface gibberish). Such users now receive a polite message telling them to mind their own business.

Unless I find something horrific in the next day or so, this will probably be the last production push for a week or so until I get back from New York. I’ll need the time away to recover from the agony of PayPal integration.

Close to Milestone 2 launch

We’re coming up to the conclusion of Milestone 2. M2 is a big’un, as they say in the southern U.S., because its completion means that Approver.com can decloak and we can start promoting the site a little more. I wanted to have a certain set of basic features in place before we opened the site up. When M2 is done, we’ll have that feature set.

One of the last new features to go into M2 is the PayPal flow, which lets paying users store more documents online and invite more reviewers. I am here to say that while I love PayPal’s product and what they make available for integrators is terrific, it’s still way harder than it should be. Simply putting all their information into one big downloadable cross-indexed document set and providing a language-specific step-by-step checklist for integrators (like we did over at eBay when I was there) would be a huge time-saver.

I am taking Tom’s advice and including a monthly subscription in addition to the annual (cheap!) and two-year (super-cheap!) subscription options. It isn’t that much more work, and it’ll be good to give people some flexibility. My sense is that if they use the system as a paid user for a month, they’re probably going to use it indefinitely, so the monthly subscription rate will cost some folks more in the long run — hopefully paid users will do the math and figure out what works best for them.

In addition to PayPal madness, I’m working on fixing a few remaining bugs with the system, most of which are things that nobody but me has ever run into, and some of which are sort of hypothetical potential bugs and usability problems. It’s fun to see the bug list shrink as you get closer to shipping (and I have to take this opportunity to say that Trac is a righteous issue tracker).

On the business front, I’ve had a bunch of conversations with prospective investors and partners in the past few weeks, which is always fun — it’s super gratifying to see people “get” the Approver idea and immediately contribute their feedback and suggestions. (It’s even more gratifying when their suggestions are already on our roadmap.) Many of the features that made it into M2 are in there as a direct result of the preview users’ feedback — thanks, guys.

Preview users are now signing up at the rate of one or two each weekday, which is nice considering I haven’t been talking about Approver very much. Nearly all the users who have signed up are people who I’ve invited to use the system personally in face-to-face conversations; with the exception of the extremely indirect reference to Approver I made on my blog (that got us 14 signups in one day which is a record). Hopefully this means that when we take the gloves off and start promoting Approver more openly, the number of new registrations per day will go way up.

I’m going to try and do the big M2 push on Thursday before I leave to spend a week in New York. If we don’t push M2 on Thursday, it’s PayPal’s fault. :)

Production push 8 August 2006

Just did a push. It looks like everything’s working well but as always please leave feedback if you see any funnies.

Two new things in this push:

• Automatic grouping of “attention required,” “created by you” and “completed” documents on the My Documents page (as described in my post earlier today)
• Fixed a problem where a newly-registered user would get a “Welcome” document that was already marked as read

The last feature I’m going to add before our August 15 launch date is a PayPal payment flow. A couple people have asked me how I want to charge for Approver; my thinking at this point is anybody can review/approve any number of documents for free, anybody can create one document and invite a few people to review it for free, but if you want to create a bunch of documents or if you want to invite a bunch of people you’ll have to pay some no-brainer annual subscription fee just to keep the lights on. Does this seem draconian to anybody? There are lots of variables we can fiddle with here, of course, but I really want this site to sustain itself economically, particularly once a bunch of people discover it.

That said, if you’ve already registered on the system and you’ve been using it, you will not likely have to pay anything. At least not right away. Unless you want to. Winkety wink.

New “My Documents” page

I shared a mockup of this with some of you a few days ago, I’m happy to report that after grinding away for a couple of days this is now working on my dev box.

(Click on the image to see it in full resolution.)

I was really surprised at how much easier/faster Approver became once I gave the My Documents page a rethink. Once this goes live, there’ll be no more scrolling down the page and parsing text to figure out what you’re supposed to do. Thanks to Doug and Julie who reviewed the mockup ahead of time and gave their seals of approval.
I’m eager to have people start playing with this, so I’ll likely push this up to production in the next day or two.

“Social Workflow”

I’m linking to Casey’s post about Approver.com not just because it’s the first blog post to name-check the site (woo HOO), but because he nails what Approver is about by referring to it as “social workflow”. I plan to steal that phrase and use it in the Approver.com elevator pitch; maybe I will use it to replace the phrase “sucks less” in version 0.5 of the pitch.

I demoed the site from my mobile phone for Om Malik prior to WordCamp on Friday; his first question was “Is there a social networking aspect to this?” The answer to this is, of course, yes (this is what we call “My Contacts”). This made me extremely happy/lucky that I’d thought to work on the social aspects of Approver a few weeks back. (I’m also happy that I resisted the temptation to add so much Ajax crap to the site that it stopped working on mobile phones.)

Also: For the four readers of this blog who don’t also read my personal blog, I formally announced that I left my day job and am going to work on Approver and consulting full-time. It sorta feels like stepping off the ledge, but in a good way (more like a blind date than a step into a dark flaming chasm).

I have two new features that I want to add to Approver before we start promoting the site more aggressively — a revamp of the My Documents page and a PayPal payment flow (both of which are half-done). I’m going to do my best to get this stuff done by the middle of this month — I can’t guarantee August 15, but it should be around there.

Until then, we need more testers. If you’re reading this, feel free to invite whoever you like to Approver.com. I’ve found that the best way to get someone in the groove is to send them a document — make it part of your normal workflow and (one hopes) they’ll figure it out naturally.

Production push 6 Aug 2006

Did a very minor push today to fix a problem with users who turn Javascript off completely or use tools like the Firefox NoScript extension. Blocking Javacript causes certain features of Approver.com to work unpredictably, but the user doesn’t get an error message or anything when things go wrong. So now when you log in to Approver.com and Javascript is turned off, you get a big bright shiny notice on every page warning you that bad things will happen unless you turn Javascript on.

(Thanks to Dave N. for discovering this.)

Also on my personal blog I released a little chunk of Approver.com code that I’m calling Ago.NET. This class does relative date formatting (“three weeks ago,” etc.) in C#.