Product Updates: September 2022

I’m feeling grateful for all the constructive feedback I’ve been receiving over the past couple of months. All those messages ultimately turned into a pretty massive to-do list that I’ve been continuing to work through as fast as I can! As a result, September was another month of focusing on fundamentals with a bit of time to handle larger improvements.

Another big focus of September was preparing for some marketing partnerships by adding promotional functionality to Happyfeed. More on that below 👇

Promotions with Happyfeed

As part of recent partnerships, we’ve been adding more and more functionality to support promotions. These include:

• Support one-time promo codes for events like EVENTNAME2022 that can give attendees a discount, e.g. a free month of Plus.
• Customer-specific promotional codes. As part of larger campaigns, we can generate a unique list of promo codes to send to a list of customers. These allow for conversion tracking and more flexible benefits.

If you think your organization or members could benefit from a promotional offer, I’d be happy to chat through some of the options. Please reach out to me directly at [email protected].

Overall Updates

• 📲 Cross-platform subscription support - Previously, subscriptions were split between iOS and Android. Neither app had the functionality to check the validity of a subscription from the other platform and thus, couldn’t support that subscription. Now, both apps can look for an existing subscription on your account - regardless of where it originated! One subscription, one account, any device.
• 👨‍🔧 Fixed random pod assignment - The Random Pod assignment script had two big issues: (1) not checking if you were already in a pod and (2) not generating new groups if needed. Now you can leave a pod and you won’t be accidentally dropped back into that same pod.
• 🗑 Soft delete pods - Before this month, you could only delete a Pod if it had 2 people or fewer. I was concerned that people might accidentally delete a Pod with 100 people and have no way to recover it! Now Pods are “soft” deleted. Existing members can still see past shares but no new posts will be allowed - it’s less jarring and more recoverable in case of a mistake.
• 🤗 Follows-only filter - In the navigation bar dropdown on the Pods screen, there’s a new option to see just posts from followers and people you follow. Perfect for people who “follow” as a way to “favorite.”
• 🌀 Go back 5 years - A small adjustment, but the calendar now allows Plus subscribers to go back 5 years prior to their Happyfeed start date (thanks to more feedback from you!)

iOS

• 🧠 Memory management - There’s a LONG running issue with Happyfeed that can cause the app to freeze up if you’ve been using it for a really long time. Basically, all the photos take up too much space and need to be cleared out. The iOS app handles this automatically now and photos are re-downloaded as needed. (No data is lost in the process.)

Android

• ⚡️ Performance Updates - An assortment of bug fixes and improvements mostly involving photo uploading and Pod screen sorting options.

Coming Up Next

I’ve been talking about video for a couple of months now. It’s still the plan but I’d rather have an app that does text and photos perfectly than a subpar job at those plus video. To plan this new medium in the best way possible, I’ve been looking at every video app I can and trying to distill down ideas to the simplest solution for Happyfeed. We don’t have “core values” but if we did, “keep it simple” might be the first one.