…is probably the best way to describe the last 7-10 days of Notice Technologies.  We released the first beta of our app a few weeks ago, got a lot of great feedback, then filled our plate with things to do like a starving man at Thanksgiving dinner.

Joking aside, but feedback from our now 70 installs of the app has really overwhelmed us.  We got 100+ bugs, 37 major feature requests/changes, and a host of annoyances.  We made a command decision to fix the most severe feature issues first — but unfortunately many of the issues we’re facing right now are very, very hairy.  It may have made more sense to fix simpler issues first, but we think the time we’ve spent will make the app much easier to use.

Similarly we made the command decision to *not* take a healthy round of angel investment from an old colleague.  I told this colleague about our company and our plans just before leaving Microsoft.  A week later, he tells me that he’d like to invest.  It was a very tempting offer — it’s a lot easier to get something started with some investment in the bank.  But I told him that we didn’t know what our problems were.  Even though I could put together a business plan and a loosely substantiated spreadsheet with out proposed use of funds, it didn’t make sense to take his hard earned money only to have trouble changing direction later.  And if you think investment dollars come without strings attached, you are sadly mistaken.

So here we are — we expect to launch what is essentially v 1.4 with the new feature set this week — that feature set gets us a lot closer to what we think we can take to market confidently.  On the business side, we now can tell a prospective investor exactly what $500k or $1m will do for us — how we would build a business, what people would do, what new product features would afford us new marketing opportunity, and how that would provide an attractive ROI.  So we’ve come a long way in 6 weeks.

If anyone out there knows any talented ASP.NET developers looking for some fun, please send them my way!