In addition to Lorelle's comments I wanted to chime in and provide additional feedback. Since everyone has been open and forthcoming with their commentary I hope you will indulge me in the same manner.
I think its important that we stop for a moment and recognize that Woopra has been in closed beta now for only 90 days. The service was originally destined for only 200 people, and we are now monitoring for 25,000 with somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million page views per day. Very few applications in history have grown at this rate.
I also notice that of the 10-15 folks who have provided feedback here, all have been using Woopra for less than 60 days, and that means that you guys are all in the batch of people who were eager to gain access to the system. So, we’ve put a lot of our limited resources into scaling the architecture up to accommodate you guys.
At this time, we have a healthy list of bugs that are currently being worked, in addition to a long list of feature requests. Meanwhile, we have been working on bringing the team together, handling legal, financial and organizational tasks... all while continuing development and testing.
Just to respond to a few of the previous comments:
"the bugs in the program seem to be multiplying instead of decreasing"
I assure you, the number and severity of bugs has decreased.
Out of hundreds of features in the application there are some that certain people use more than others, so when a particular component you pay attention to is messed up I understand that it leaves this general impression.
Remember, the Woopra you are using now is very different from where it is going to be in 60-90 days. (Or where it was 60-90 days ago.)
I don't know how much work would be involved in responding to the forums but a half-hour a day does not seem unreasonable.
I agree that we need to step up the responses a bit, but it takes a lot longer than one half hour per day. A response to a single thread can sometimes take a half hour of research and response time. This time comes out of our development and bug fix “bucket”.
As we work through some funding issues we hope to add resources to help handle client support and responses. (Like the community manager idea previously mentioned.) We are way over the number of Beta testers we originally expected, so we really need a little patience from you guys as we work towards resolution in all of these areas.
By the way, we are also receiving 50-100 e-mails per day in addition to the messages on the forums, and these compound our issues with responding.
Woopra may be beta, but it's not free! This will be a PAID subscription program!
This is not true for the vast majority of users. As I've stated repeatedly, the service should be free for most users as we go forward. Upgrades will be available.
They were too busy enjoying Las Vegas, promoting a product that doesn't quite work.
There was no promotion of the service involved in the trip. We were meeting with our primary hosting provider, and Elie and Jad just arrived in the US for several months of meetings. Development, bug testing and support issues have continued as much as possible.
Finally, I must add that I take exception to the comments that portray Woopra as “broken”. 99% or more of the feature functionality is working at any given time for 20,000 plus users. I recognize that the additional 1% is frustrating, but the temporary pain will all be worth it as the service matures.
So, we will have some internal discussions as a team and take all of this constructive feedback into account in order to see if we can make a few changes to the way in which we are communicating with you guys and rolling out updates. (Which I think is what you're looking for, right?)
In return I’m just going to ask you for a little more positive, constructive sort of feedback, and a little less “doom and gloom”. Come on guys, keep the faith! We’re working hard to bring you the finest analytics application the world has ever seen.
Cheers,
John P.
not a support question
