Reserverr 2.0 Development Commentary

The Reserverr 2.0 Development Commentary provides a general overview of Reserverr’s progress — changes, fixes, and new features.

Your Site’s Success Depends On Its Homepage

Reserverr has been using the same homepage for about a year. I threw it together myself with some of Andree’s design elements. Even though Reserverr’s homepage is functional, it’s about time for an upgrade. People would go to the website and still have questions about how Reserverr works.

A good homepage should:

• Answer what problem the website solves clearly and concisely 
• Explain the solution in simple & clear English (bonus points for a video)
• Show proof that it works (e.g. “Featured on TechCrunch”, “10,000+ reservations made”, testimonials)
• Give the user a clear method to sign up

The old homepage (below) doesn’t really explain any of these things well.

Original Reserverr Homepage

Austin told me that we needed a new homepage. It took a while to sink in. After I realized that people would read about how Reserverr works and still not understand the concept, I began to undertand that a new design was needed to explain the system.

We’re excited to be rolling out the new homepage, and we hope you’ll like it!

Lessons Learned from Client Work

I rarely do client work, and I have taken on quite a bit lately. I want to share some lessons I have learned from this experience. Perhaps this will help any aspiring freelancers.

• Do not marry your client. Do not offer to host their website, especially if things go awry.
• Never go outside of the agreed-to terms. If you go outside of the given terms once, clients will ask for more.
• Stop work if a payment is not prompt. Allow a day or two for checks to arrive, but do not continue a relationship if a check is over 4 weeks late.
• Bill hourly. If you’re billing hourly in an agreement (e.g. 20 hours/week), there is no way that you could possibly underestimate the work.

Hope these help.

Reserverr’s Launch

I’m sure you’ve heard enough about the development story of Reserverr. I decided to share it because, when watching websites grow, I’ve always been fascinated by the development and everything done beforehand.

As is true with all websites, after development comes beta testing, and concerning the beta period, I really haven’t shared much about it. We were shocked to receive as few bug reports as we had. This means one of two things. Either no one is using our application or it is working well. We prefer to believe the latter. 

Since our beta period was so constructive, we’re going to be rolling out Reserverr soon. The launch to a website is a critical point in the its life. In a successful launch, a website can win many users in a matter of minutes. In a failed launch, a website can turn off many prosprective users.

For marketing, we’ve always tried to be featured on as many websites as possible during the development period. Having just an idea with a prototype can be difficult to have featured. To help prospective users, we’ve used the following techniques:

• Explaining the idea & process behind it clearly using basic language
• Having a professionally shot video with an example use of the application (which was just $10)
• Clearly showing users how to enroll in pre-registration

In retrospect, I would have allowed users to preregister completely instead of just sending an email. This is because we had to send another email to the 500+ users to ask them to register. Unfortunately we were not able to capture all 500+ prospective registrations. Only about half have registered since.

After the private beta, we’ll be submitting Reserverr to a whole list of websites that feature startups. During this process, we will be writing a press release detailing the background of Reserverr and the development process. The agni has a great guide to make a successful startup launch.

I’ll do everything I can to answer questions and comments you may have.

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