August 2022 - Hit 100+ User Signups on Lazztech.Hub App 🎉

This has been another productive month for both user base growth, & feature shipping. My growth goal for the month was to break the 100 user signup mark, from ~80 at the beginning of the month. This was met and exceeded, now sitting at ~137 user signups.

I've shipped a number of new features focused on helping users communicate with each other. These have already been received with positive feedback from new and existing users about how the app is helping them connect & gather. This has also come with a continued steady flow of feature requests and input which is encouraging.

New Communication & Social Phonebook Feature

I've shipped support for users to optionally enter their phone number on registration or later in their profile settings. This is then exposed as phone call & SMS shortcut links to other members of Hubs you've both joined.

This so far seems to be a well-received solution to facilitating communication between Hub & Event members. One of the nice benefits of this solution for users is that they're able to use their existing SMS preferred app, & don't have just another place where have to keep track of chats. It also has the added benefit of reducing the maintenance burden on my end as chat & voice calling is offloaded to the users existing telecom services.

Along with this, I've also played off this "Social Phonebook" feature by alphabetizing the people page. I really like this combination of features as it puts the power of communication & contact management back in the users' hands instead of trying to monopolize communication.

These features are shipped & available today on both iOS & Android.

What's Next

• Shareable invite links/join requests
• Notification preferences
• Media sharing for communities & events
• Testing on a physical Android device to reconcile non-functioning background geofence check-in/checkout (I've gotten a newer pixel phone to test with)

Here's a sneak preview of the upcoming Shareable invite links feature

This is another feature that I think is going to both be very valuable to users and also something that requires some care and thought. Right now invites are very unintuitive, requiring users to know the email address of other existing users to invite them. This becomes easier once they have people in their network of communities, as the UI exposes them as a simple checklist for invites to other events or Hubs. Though the initial cold invite scenario is painful, requiring that "onboarding" for new users to make their account and then share their signup email address.

I think that sharable "universal links" or deep links to the unlisted address for the communities and Hubs will make this process much easier for new users.