Epiloge

With a community size of close to 500 registered users and several thousand page impressions in the last 30 days (thanks Google Analytics) we now finally started our active marketing on other platforms. First stop Product Hunt! As part of putting up a Product Hunt site, we got some statistical data on well received PH launches and wrote up an article, that might be useful to others too: https://www.epiloge.com/how-much-time-should-you-actually-invest-into-your-product-hunt-launch-9a810e

Growth as with most apps was slow, but steady. We got to 250 signups in December, some users were just one time signed up people, some filled out there profiles and checked back in and we got also some "early adopters", the ones you always hear in marketing classes and read about in articles - those fascinated with what Epiloge was about.

During all these early months we still got tons of feedback on features, bugs etc. So a lot to do on the coding site as well.

After a sweaty summer ironing out all UX design problems, completely redoing static pages and the frontpage and taking into account all initial user feedback and bugs etc. we still found, we finally launched Epiloge to the public. Our aim was to get an initial small community of users into the app with our contacts and friends to get real-world feedback of a live app, not just a test launch.

And that's what we got, some really interested users, some who just checked Epiloge out and others who came back to active status once we sent out activity emails.

We finally got our vue.js frontend a stable node.js backend plus our mongoDB/elasticsearch database ready and could launch Epiloge to friends and family as a test case.

Well good that we kept this a private beta launch, we got interesting feedback, but mostly people reported that they weren't 100% sure after signing up what they should do next. We clearly had to work on the UX design and flow.

It took us way to long... also using the wrong coding tools (Angular 1) to put a webapp together that worked as the first prototype that people could sign up to and create accounts plus write rather short project descriptions. We knew at this point that getting ready to launch a prototype within weeks won't work out with what we had set out to do...

My brother and I were playing tennis and in between we talked about why all transactions, projects, papers we had worked on were pretty much forgotten, the teams not credited and no information was easily accessible online.

And that's how Epiloge got started. Subsequently it morphed into a community focused on students and professionals who want to connect with people in the same field of interest... not by just showing where they study or work, but also by augmenting their profiles with what they have actually done with a Medium.com style multimedia editor.