Having compiled a list of suggested improvements for Responster based on user feedback, as well as our own thoughts, , we knew that we could take Responster to the next level. However, we also realized that we had to find another developer in order to do this.
Adam Tibbing, an old friend of mine, was my number one target. In 2009, we set up a service together to study for the Swedish version of the SATs called Högskoleprovet (The Higher Education Test). We were basically coding PHP/HTML/CSS every hour during the day, when we weren’t working elsewhere to be able to support our living. The result was great and we decided to offer it to students for free.
Adam was intrigued by the new service we were building and impressed that, as a half-finished product, companies were already showing a lot of interest to use Responster. He quickly joined our team and took the role as CTO in the company.
Development under Adam surged and Responster tripled its features over just a few months. The core was rewritten and optimized to handle more traffic and the website was secured to prevent hacking and MySQL injections that could possibly ruin collected data. We also implemented features like offline storage of data collected with our iOS app, making it possible to use Responster even when WiFi wasn’t reliable or even available.
At the time, we also found our first office, which was a great leap forward for our work morale and efficiency. Now we had a place for everyone to meet up at, and we could also store hardware that we later provided our new customers with.
During this time, we gained new customers and became even more confident that Responster had potential to grow even bigger. However, having bootstrapped our business since the launch we now needed an investment to be able to boost the service even faster.
The future of feedback is a 10-part series on how Responster grew into what it has become today.
Every week I’ll publish a new post where I tell you about the life of a startup, the Responster-team and how a product is born.
I hope that you’ll find these posts interesting. If you have a startup of your own or have experience in software similar to Responster, I’d love hearing from you. You can drop me a line whenever you want at [email protected].
Tune in next week to find out what happened after we improved Responster’s core functionality.
Take care,
Hjalmar