Thank you for raising this question, it’s indeed good to clarify, let me take the opportunity to give our view on where we would like Agenda to go, both as a product and as the team behind it.
Agenda was launched a year ago by @drewmccormack and myself together with designer @wrinklypea and support from long-time friend @cparnot. And that’s still your team today. In fact we have no plans to change this. Not because Agenda isn’t profitable (it is), or because we are not ambitious (we are), or have no ideas what to do next (ok, you get the point already), but because we are very conscious as to how we want to work on and mature Agenda: as a life-style business rather than a startup. This has a number of implications, which i’ll try to set out below.
After the successful first year of Agenda it would not be hard to go on a fundraising tour, and pitch Agenda as the hot new Evernote-killer-unicorn-potential startup in town. The benefits would be obvious: after raking in plenty of funding we would be expected to quickly grow the team and have a lot more hands to work on Agenda, allowing us – at least theoretically – to bring you everything on the wish list much faster. Plus we would probably start working on cross-platform apps and web-apps right away.
That sounds great, but the downsides are pretty big too alas. Once you go this route, growth becomes everything, because that’s all the investors would like to see in the end of the day; it will quickly dominate priority so that they can get their cash back when the Facebook’s of this world snatch Agenda up, or an Agenda IPO gong has rung. But there’s a more subtle effect too, a larger team inevitably means more overhead, less transparency, and less approachability. Once we need to manage a large team of people we probably would not have time to prototype new features, nor answer questions in this community ourselves. In such as setting it is hard to stay really connected to your users, to maintain an app with a certain feel and empathy, and to deliver an app that we ourselves would want to use every day (as we do). How do I know? I’ve been there, if you’re curious to hear more, I talk about it in my recent talk at DO-iOS.
It is why we decided to not go this route and instead stay small and independent. It means you are much more likely to see us with the same excitement and dedication to further improve and mature Agenda as you have seen in the past year. Also this has downsides though. It means having only two pair of hands at work, it means some features will take a lot longer than you might have hoped for, it can even mean some features might perhaps never make it despite the fact they are on our personal wish list too. Ultimately a day has only has 24 hours. This is the painful consequence of making the choice to stay small.
Just so you do not get me wrong, remarks like the above one, posted in the topic on adding support for tables are totally understandable; in the end of the day I try to see them a testimony that people like Agenda and would love to see it becoming an even better fit in their day-to-day lives. And yes, of course it is frustrating if you see us pick localization of Agenda in foreign languages as our next priority while you much rather would see us bring table support or one of the many other things we promised we will work on some day. I am a user of Agenda too and of other apps from small developer teams, and I have the same reaction, so I do understand. The only thing we can ask though is for patience and be honest that an ETA is simply impossible to give.
As the developers of Agenda we must also accept that some users will not be able to wait that long and will decide to move on. For each of us the decision whether to wait or to switch to a different tool will be based on different criteria. The only thing we can promise is that we will keep going at it, we love Agenda and what it means to people, this is what is motivating us, much more than growing the company or the number of developers working on.
@mhmoodz, probably not entirely the answer you might have expected to your question above, but I hope this gives a bit more insight into our thinking and what to expect.
Coming back to your original question, what can you and others do to help speeding up the development of Agenda? The number one thing we ask is to continue what many of you have been doing already; we have received so much help through this community already:
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by joining the beta programs for mac and iOS to help us test new releases.
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by submitting crash reports, and reporting bugs, sharing libraries or examples that helps us reproduce issues if needed.
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by submitting detailed feature requests, or ideally if it has been raised by others already, by voicing your support or adding thoughts to these existing topics so we keep the community clean and easy to navigate. And by being understandable if we cannot give a deadline yet for the feature you would like us to introduce most.
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by offering your help in translating Agenda in other languages so we can make it more approachable to users who speak the same language as you.
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by directly supporting us, which of course can mean buying the premium features, but also by leaving a nice review in the App Store, and by spreading the word to friends, colleagues, news and review sites, or other channels where people might not have heard about Agenda yet.
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and finally by helping other users and answering their questions in this community, to help them get up and running or solve issues they bump into. But also to help set their expectations of what they can and perhaps cannot expect from us when it comes to their wishes for Agenda.
Together this will help us to maintain a positive and energetic feel in the community, which in the end of the day is the biggest motivating factor for us to keep on pushing Agenda forward! Thank you all for your amazing support!