My family operates a pretty successful manufacturing business in Houston. I grew up going to installations with my Dad or Uncle; listening in to business negotiations, customer interactions, and in general being pretty passively involved with the business from its inception. As a kid, my dad let me feel connected to the family business by encouraging me to write “business software” which I did (though it was never used…it was still a learning experience). I learned accounting by setting up PeachTree and other accounting software, helping my mom do payroll, and eventually writing an accounting software program myself. I learned a lot about the operation of the business as I grew up, but by my late teen years and after I went to college, I didn’t involve myself much. That changed recently as I embarked on an app for my family business. The cool thing is since I actually knew their business pretty well I could product design the MVP pretty well.
I started by talking with my sister who is the GM of the company today and validating my thoughts on the priority features – product catalog, quotes, gallery, and some company info. I wanted to use iOS’ RoomScan tech to help get commercial space specs easier. I also knew my dad well enough to know he’d appreciate the Eagle logo with an embedded flying US flag. It’s corny but cool. Now came the hard part – I didn’t want to reinvent the data, but the tech their site ran on wasn’t known as an enterprise backend.
I first started with some POCs on accessing their site’s data. That took a few weeks because I have a full-time day job and had to reorient myself with the backend APIs the site used (it had been years since I looked at it). Then, I played around with a few concepts and user interactions. Within about a month, I had a basic, bare-bones app working. It didn’t look great, but it did work (mostly). The following month, I iterated and refined many areas and started sending out TestFlight’s so that my sister and family members had something to criticize and offer feedback. I also spent time hardening the security and improving some of the backend aspects, including figuring out better data transfer/storage methods because, let’s face it – people are going to upload large images, lidar scans, and more, and that has to work seamlessly without incurring too high a cost.
That leads us to where we are today. The app is ready, but the content is still being cleaned and prepared for publication. I’m using this time to refine, test out ideas, and polish a few more areas. Usually, I’d just release 1.0 and prepare for a fast follow based on feedback, but content is king, and we’ve got to wait for that.
Here are some of the screenshots that are currently in progress. I’ll try to make a few more posts about what I found interesting about the development process over the next few weeks.
