On February 12, 2010, Apps Magnet completed its first year of operations. We launched the Reports module for activeCollab just a year ago – but it seems like long time!

So what have we achieved in the last year? Here are some numbers.

Statistics

Y1 Revenue Breakup of Apps Magnet

• 9 products, plus some defunct and some under development!
• 850+ customers
• 55% customers purchased more than one product
• 300+ topics on our GetSatisfaction support forums, 340+ customers participating
• 2 main focus areas – activeCollab and Basecamp
• 28 product updates
• 2 People Team, both with day jobs (yes!)

I also did a revenue contribution breakdown. Planning module is our best selling product. activeCollab business gives us more than 80% revenues. But both our Planning tools – Planning module for activeCollab and PlannerX for Basecamp together claim 77% of the business. That is what gave us the success – solving one problem really well.

Thank you for your love and support. We couldn’t make it without you – our customers.

The year was eventful and I have many stories to tell. Like why we closed down our iPhone unit, why we are building only extensions and not full products, how I goofed up in one version of Planning module, and how my itch to know daily sales led to creation of Putler. Let me know if you would like to hear some!

Onward..

:Nirav

I was skeptical about money back guarantees when we started Apps Magnet a year back. Since we were selling installable software, it is easy for people to just buy one copy, ask for a refund, and continue using it.

It was difficult for me, when someone said they wanted a refund. It was difficult to hear that they were getting errors, while I wasn’t! It sunk my heart when someone said they did not find the product suitable / found it disappointing.

We do not advertise a money back assurance for any of our products. Although we provided refunds to anyone who asked for it. I did that reluctantly at the beginning.

Now I am very happy to provide refunds. I don’t know why! Probably it’s because we have received so much praise for our products, it’s easy to hear an occasional rant. Partly also because the % of people asking for refunds is very low. And it felt right to provide refunds – it was giving respect to customers.

I am happy to announce that a 30-day money back guarantee is now standard on all our products. We will update our site / promotional material to include this over the next few days.

We believe our products can provide radical productivity improvements. And we are backing it up with a money back guarantee!

Go ahead, buy one today.

And all our existing customers, thank you for your support and faith!

:Nirav

How do you upgrade Reports Module for activeCollab?

Here are the basic steps in upgrading Reports Module for activeCollab.

1. Ensure you have the latest version of Reports module.
2. Unzip the module on your computer. You should see a folder named “for-upload”.
3. Go to your activeCollab installation website. Go to administration panel.
4. Click on “Modules”, then “Reports Module”.
5. Click “Uninstall” to remove the current version of Reports Module.
6. Upload files from the “for-upload” folder to your server via FTP / SCP. Overwrite existing Reports module files in activecollab/application/modules/reports/ and public/assets/modules/reports/ folders. Make sure you upload files to the right locations and are not overwriting any folders other than the two above.
7. Go back to activeCollab administration screen -> Modules -> Reports Module.
8. Click “Install”. This will taken a snapshot of your data again and set up the Reports module.
9. Confirm that “can_use_reports” permission is enabled on appropriate System Roles as you need.
10. Upgrade is complete! You can now enjoy the fresh new Reports module!

Background

PlannerX allows rearranging / reordering items. Either using Tab / Shift / Indent / Unindent or via Drag & Drop. Everything works just perfect when you are creating a new plan. But when you worked with items in an existing plan, things started to break. Reordering to-do lists and to-do items was not much of a problem, since Basecamp APIs support that. But if you reordered milestones, that won’t stick since Basecamp always sorts them by due date again. Yet, the biggest issue is promoting or demoting an existing item.

Cause

When you convert a milestone into a to-do list or to-do item, we can create a new item for it. But what should we do with the milestone? We could just delete the milestone. But what if that milestone had comments? And attachments with those comments? If we deleted the milestone, comments would be deleted as well. And that would be bad.

Enter Zombies!

Zombies are defunct items (milestones or to-do items) that are still there in the system only because they have some comment. Their original item was moved around in a planning session with PlannerX. And since there are no Basecamp API to attach comments with another item, we had to keep old items hanging in with their comments. We mark them as [zombie], complete them and also add a new comment explaining their zombie status.

Can I remove zombies?

If you no longer need the comments / attachments associated with a zombie item, you can delete it. Deleting normal / zombie to-do items with time entries on them does not delete time entries though.

Is there no better way?

We thought a lot before coming to this solution. If you have a better solution, do let us know. We are all ready to improve.

I don’t like the word [zombie]!

We thought a lot about this too. We considered defunct, archived, removed, zombie and a few others. But felt zombie was the closest to our situation. Have another suggestion? Feel free to comment!

I still have problems.

We tested our code with many test cases. It should work well in most cases – though it may take slightly longer to save since we have to check for comments on almost every item. If you face any other issues, do report them with as many details as possible. We will try and fix them at the earliest!

What next?

Keep planning with PlannerX and let us know your feedback! Thank you!

Hours

How many hours is your team spending on projects every week? Hours chart shows a bar chart of hours spent by all people on projects.

Put this to use!
As you may expect, this will give you a quick analysis if team is over-worked or under-worked. When you correlate the amount of hours worked with iteration or burndown chart, you can see what category of work could have taken time each week. A sudden fall in hours may indicate team reduction or vacation. A sudden rise may mean increase in team or overtime!

We have kept provision for estimated hours in the system, but you won’t see any data for it now. It’ll come in another module!