SpotShot

We did a little promotion and started a Christmas challenge on SpotShot. We asked users to be creative and bake the most awesome Christmas cookies. The winner with the most votes would win a Nintendo Switch and a Mario game! We had the highest activity ever and many new users registered on our platform. We are looking forward to some nice new features to retain these users!

The release of the app into the app stores made it easier to download SpotShot and become a user. As of today, there are 125 challenges that were created on and 812 user entries that were uploaded to SpotShot. Our next goal is to implement video functionality into the app which we realized is an absolutely must-have feature in a social media app.

We knew we had to release our app into the app store to gain more users faster and easier. We also knew we had to release an Android version of the app to access a larger pool of potential users. And we did just that! Not only did we release in the iOS store and therefore dropped the Testflight churn, but we released the Android version as well.
To celebrate all this we had a launch party with DJ, drinks and food from the grill and invited users and friends. We had test booths were users could participate in challenges and therefore test the app. It was quite fun and the feedback was great!

After launching our app on iOS Testflight we had invited people to join the alpha and test our app. This was quite the challenge as we only had the iOS version out, so no Android version at that time. In addition to that Testflight itself was quite the user churner. People had to install it first before installing the app. Even some friends didn't want to bother with the whole process and needed a lot of convincing to try it out. We still managed to gain a hundred users despite all the hurdles! 🎉

In the idea stage, you imagine your product in a perfect, finished way and with lots of features that are utterly unrealistic if you want to ever create the first version. We had to cut a lot to create a minimal viable product. This was a really painful process because we had to postpone so many features that made the idea of SpotShot so great.
At the time we only had our front end developer Marcel that never created or published an app before. His challenge was to build a cross-platform app based on the designes our designer Jakob created. Marcel mastered the challenge by becoming a full stack dev that used the ionic framework to create SpotsShot for both Android and iOS.
After months of hard work, we finally released our first app into Apple's Testflight store and we invited friends and family to be our first testers.

SpotShot around this time was still in the concept stage and we only had an early prototype in the form of an InVision click dummy, but we wanted to commit more and decided to found a company and put more time and effort into it. Maybe we could even find an investor for our journey (haha, so naive).
During the founding process, the team had to decide on a CEO for the company. To my own surprise, I was unanimously picked as the first CEO of SpotShot.
After the founding, we decided that we needed to start development on a real MVP if we wanted to gain an investor or real user feedback.

During the early days of SpotShot, while it was in the idea stage, the team held meetups with friends and family to present the idea and gain some valuable feedback. I was part of a group that got invited to one of these feedback meetings.
I was very impressed by the idea and I saw a lot of potential in the project. When asked for feedback I couldn't shut up. I was going on and on about how good the idea is, how much potential it has and what it could evolve to. The team liked my enthusiasm and the ideas I added and invited me to more meetings afterward. After a few meetings I was invited to fully join the team and I said yes!