Ciboulette.net
Veggies sales SAAS
I received an email out of the blue, from a former software developer that became an organic farmer. He found my website, not sure how, and started using it. He also wrote to me to explain who he was, what were his motivations and ask some questions.
He's been great at giving feedback, his 20 years in the software industry mean he can make a bug report that super easy to follow, offer constructive criticism and has no problem handling the different tools i use for project management like Trello.
He's still the first person to give feedback on product evolution proposal and the source of many good ideas for the app.
A friend of my mother had some homemade software to handle their orders. This software was hacked together by some friend of them and not really meant to go any further than one customer. In contrast, I had worked very hard on the usability and customer experience for the customers, which made the switch to my product quite easy for this farmers couple and their customers.
They got great feedback from their customers, and had some requests on the product that I happily implemented. However, they had a worse internet access than my parents, and some adjustments were necessary.
This farm also had way more customers than my mother, and they still are the first to notice performance problem, as they have a large customer base, long history of orders, bad internet connection and relatively slow computer .
They've been a great addition to my "beta" customer base in that sense.
One year after the deployment of the first version of the project, the app needed to be rebuild from scratch to keep the data on the server and not on the client. I picked MeteorJS as a framework, followed some tutorials and got some prototype quickly. I deployed on that day and migrated my first and only customer at the time, aka my mom.
The first MVP was based on angular 1.x and a mongoDB/node backend. The front end pulled all historical data at page load and therefore had acceptable performance for 1-2 months before it started getting seriously laggy. It was hosted on heroku.
Having almost all the logic in one place helped me iterate quickly though.
I was a university student at the time and needed a project to define with my group of students for a class about project management. We decided to analyse the need of my mother concerning an online ordering system for vegetables.
The teacher asked us for our group name, and i answered jokingly "cyberlégume", which means "cyber vegetables". It was an intentional bad name, but it became the official name of the project for 5+ years.
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