Happy Friday!

First, let me wish you a happy holidays. I hope you've enjoyed some delicious food, enjoyed friends and family, and maybe even got some rest.

Second, thank you to everyone who downloaded reko.day! These earliest days are the hardest since we don't have rekos and farmers set up everywhere yet. If you want reko.day to grow in your area, though, reply back to me, and I'll work with you so you can get it bootstrapped where you live.

Also, if you've downloaded the app and have some feedback, reply back and let me know the good and the bad.

So, with the holidays, what have I been working on? I have two areas of focus; the first is the first experience you have when you start the app. This is commonly called onboarding. The second area of focus is around notifications.

Because reko.day is new, explaining it and how it works is tricky. Believe me, I went to lots of farmer's markets and had hundreds of conversations, and even after all of that practice, I don't have a foolproof explanation of how it works. So if it's hard for me to explain it in person, it'll be harder to figure out in the app.

That's where onboarding comes in. My plan for right now is to draw more attention to the help pages I have sprinkled throughout the app and add links to videos explaining things in more depth. I also want to send a set of email to people when they sign up with some help and tutorials as well.

What I don't want to do is add a wizard. A wizard is a set of screens that pop up when you first launch the app and explain things to you before you get to use it. While it sounds like a good idea, I've seen enough mobile apps abandoned because wizards prevent people from getting into the app. Kind of ironic, but it makes sense in a way. If you download an app, you want to get in and use it, not tap through a bunch of reading material first.

Notifications are a big part of this as well. I want to send a welcome email to users who sign up. Maybe another if they subscribe. Also, there are plenty of things that benefit from notifications as well, like your refund status or if you're selling that an order was placed. Also, if you skip a pickup, you should be notified as well. I already have calendar events for the rekos themselves, but another little notification that says, "Hey, remember to pick up your order tomorrow" is something I think a lot of people will appreciate.

I'm hoping I'll have a new app version with some of this in the next two weeks.

But anyway, I hope you're doing well and let me know what you think about onboarding or notifications!

Sincerely,

Ryan