Product Updates: September 2022
Improving cross-platform subscription support, building new promotional options, and adding small enhancements to group sharing in Pods.
I’m feeling grateful for all the constructive feedback I’ve been receiving over the past couple of months. All those messages ultimately turned into a pretty massive to-do list that I’ve been continuing to work through as fast as I can! As a result, September was another month of focusing on fundamentals with a bit of time to handle larger improvements.
Another big focus of September was preparing for some marketing partnerships by adding promotional functionality to Happyfeed. More on that below 👇
Promotions with Happyfeed
As part of recent partnerships, we’ve been adding more and more functionality to support promotions. These include:
- Support one-time promo codes for events like EVENTNAME2022 that can give attendees a discount, e.g. a free month of Plus.
- Customer-specific promotional codes. As part of larger campaigns, we can generate a unique list of promo codes to send to a list of customers. These allow for conversion tracking and more flexible benefits.
If you think your organization or members could benefit from a promotional offer, I’d be happy to chat through some of the options. Please reach out to me directly at [email protected].
Overall Updates
- 📲 Cross-platform subscription support - Previously, subscriptions were split between iOS and Android. Neither app had the functionality to check the validity of a subscription from the other platform and thus, couldn’t support that subscription. Now, both apps can look for an existing subscription on your account - regardless of where it originated! One subscription, one account, any device.
- 👨🔧 Fixed random pod assignment - The Random Pod assignment script had two big issues: (1) not checking if you were already in a pod and (2) not generating new groups if needed. Now you can leave a pod and you won’t be accidentally dropped back into that same pod.
- 🗑 Soft delete pods - Before this month, you could only delete a Pod if it had 2 people or fewer. I was concerned that people might accidentally delete a Pod with 100 people and have no way to recover it! Now Pods are “soft” deleted. Existing members can still see past shares but no new posts will be allowed - it’s less jarring and more recoverable in case of a mistake.
- 🤗 Follows-only filter - In the navigation bar dropdown on the Pods screen, there’s a new option to see just posts from followers and people you follow. Perfect for people who “follow” as a way to “favorite.”
- 🌀 Go back 5 years - A small adjustment, but the calendar now allows Plus subscribers to go back 5 years prior to their Happyfeed start date (thanks to more feedback from you!)
iOS
- 🧠 Memory management - There’s a LONG running issue with Happyfeed that can cause the app to freeze up if you’ve been using it for a really long time. Basically, all the photos take up too much space and need to be cleared out. The iOS app handles this automatically now and photos are re-downloaded as needed. (No data is lost in the process.)
Android
- ⚡️ Performance Updates - An assortment of bug fixes and improvements mostly involving photo uploading and Pod screen sorting options.
Coming Up Next
I’ve been talking about video for a couple of months now. It’s still the plan but I’d rather have an app that does text and photos perfectly than a subpar job at those plus video. To plan this new medium in the best way possible, I’ve been looking at every video app I can and trying to distill down ideas to the simplest solution for Happyfeed. We don’t have “core values” but if we did, “keep it simple” might be the first one.