I badly want Weather Permitting to be popular and successful, to provide a helpful tool to the soaring community. Before I started Weather Permitting, I was working on another website, which had great prospects for being a successful business. I have a notebook1 full of business ideas. I also have a full time job running my Hosting company. If Weather Permitting is not a success, I will be sad, but have a whole list of other projects just waiting to be worked on.
So with that in mind and with no guarantee that Weather Permitting will become successful, I try to limit how carried away I get with coding new features. In order to do that, I tie new features to quantifiable milestones, such as "reach 100 users", or "reach 50 sites", and try to stick to it. You can see some examples on the Weather Permitting Roadmap2.
Weather Permitting needs more users, so that I can add more features
My thoughts are constantly going back to how I attract more users. At the moment, I'm not at the stage where I can think about accommodating non-UK pilots, which means that BARCS is the biggest place I can use to tell people about Weather Permitting. It's no good touting the site on RC Groups for example, if 95% of the readers can't use the site.
As I discussed in last week's newsletter, I've started work on the "Clubs" feature, which is 90% complete, but I've decided to hold off on launching that until the site "deserves" it. I'm going to get out there and market the site until I hit the milestone I've set for "Club Information". Until the site hits 50 users and 50 sites, no more features.
What if I just bribe people to spread the word?
Now, don't go thinking that I'm going to throw money about. I'm thinking more along the lines of Weather Permitting t-shirts, or swag of some other nature. I'm open to ideas.
If you have any ideas for spreading the word, please let me know.
1 Literally, my wife bought it for me, it's green and has a little holder for a pen, which is also green
2 Milestone based Roadmaps SaaS is another project that I plan to work on in the future