The itasveer Blog

iTasveer: A mini retrospective

March 16th, 2009

Our relative silence in this space makes me feel a bit uneasy. So I just thought maybe we should throw some light on what we’ve been up to and what’s happening under the veils of this prolonged silence (mwahahaha! the evil laughter means we are onto something substantial). For those of you who don’t know us, we’re a (almost) three year old startup (or rather a small business now, three years is quite a time). But the term startup gets across the essence of our business and work culture pretty well so I’ll stick to it.

Let me put some more background to this post. Basically when we started off, we were a bunch of half learned, not too good engineers (and knew even less about running a business). Infact, that is putting it modestly.. we were outright poor in a lot of aspects (i know, yikes!). But one thing that we knew well was getting things done. So inspite of the fact that we made the poorest of design choices, we made sure everything worked well enough! And I can only say all that in retrospect as we were mighty sure we were doing things right all along at that time :) I also think that belief and confidence contributed in large parts to getting things to work as well! But as we’ve learned our crafts and business along the way, we’ve come to know that those bad decisions have started weighing us down in a lot of ways that hamper productivity/scalability of our day to day operations. We’ve also learned the various shortcomings of our service by all the generous feedback that you guys have always sent our way. We’ve continued to make incremental improvements, but we’ve grown more ambitious now and we think its time for something bigger.

Luckily we’ve put ourselves in a position where we can afford to look at everything from scratch and get to the drawing board. By the way, the lucky position being that we are an operationally profitable business now. And there’s no venture funding baggage with us yet.. so we can afford to think in a free manner about how we’d like to evolve iTasveer in the future. So admirers and haters, this might be a great time to chime in with any more feedback you have for us. We promise to listen to it all and we’ll try and make the right decisions. We promise to keep the user at the center of all our design decisions and will not hamper user experience at the cost of doing something cheaply or easily, to the best of our ability.

Work has been on on all this since the past 6 months and is moving along at a fair pace.. the new stuff will start arriving 2-3 months down the line. The changes will most likely be incremental and not a sudden unveiling. First up in line is a revamped Doodlepad.

That’s all folks.. wish us luck, and ofcourse, tell us if you have a wishlist :)

Obligatory nutty picture: Nishant and Ashish at war at one of the drawing boards.. the sketch pen is mightier than the sword

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