Vacation Tracker

After many months of hard work, we've launched the beta of our Microsoft Teams integration of Vacation Tracker.

Along with the Teams integration, we did a major conceptual overhaul of the product by adding locations and other frequently requested features.

We didn't do anything majorly creative to get our first batch of beta customers.

The first thing we did was create a small landing page with a video and ran some small Google Adwords and Facebook campaigns to see how many people would sign up for the beta.

Our CTO also wrote a couple of articles that were published on Smashing Magazine and Hackernoon, and he mentioned Vacation Tracker while he was speaking at conferences.

When we launched, we had about 50 emails on our list and we notified all of them. About 30 actually signed up and tested the product. And this is where the feedback started pouring in and we started planning our roadmap around what users were asking for.

We had a hackathon inside our company Cloud Horizon and we decided to try to solve a problem the company was having by developing a software solution for it. Because at the time we were struggling keeping track of who was off and when, we decided to tackle this problem. And we came up with a crude prototype in 1 day of development where our whole team worked on this one idea.

And then we completely forgot about it.

Fast forward 1 year, and the opportunity finally arose for us to put 1 full time person on a product idea. So we decided to pull the Vacation Tracker product off the shelf and rework it, since we were still struggling with keeping track of when our team was off.

We decided we didn't want our team to use another tool and have to remember another website, so we basically scrapped everything we worked on during the hackathon and started from scratch. The major difference in our approach was that in the new version, requests, approvals and notifications would be done in Slack so our team could make and approve requests in their existing workflow.

Six months later, we launched the public beta of the product.

So our main company Cloud Horizon was having a hard time keeping track of who was off when, and how many days they had left each year. We tried some solutions but we were not happy with them. And then we decided to build it ourselves and into our existing workflow in Slack. So that people can make and approve requests directly in the chat.

We built a barebones version of the Slackbot and a small web dashboard and launched the product. Since then, we've been building new features based on the feedback we've been getting from the teams using Vacation Tracker.