Delight. Integrity. Discipline
They D.I.D IT
On some fortunate occasions, after meeting someone, I walk away with a connection and a lasting impression of that person. The folks over at Socialize have this effect and it makes itself very evident in their product.
Never before have I seen such warm and attentive customer responsiveness at all levels (developer support to C level executives… and yes I mean CEO).
Socialize provides app developers with a user community platform, enabling an app to have a social backend as well as a sleek and dazzling user interface. Socialize allows the app developer to focus on developing an idea and not worry about developing a scalable user management backend. The Socialize service provides a user & content management backend, a dashboard & analytics portal, client SKDs ripe with the user interfaces for both iOS and Android, beautiful documentation (it’s actually fun to read through their docs), and the list goes on… and on.
What this means to an app developer is mo downloads, mo installs … mo money.
So, what do I mean by “They D.I.D IT” ?
D – Delight
I – Integrity
D – Discipline
Delight – There needs to be a “WOW moment”. The Wow factor.
Elegant User Interface : Let the user interfaces do all the explaining
Seamless Integration : heck, they even provided a migration path for beta adopters using the beta 0.x versions where methods were indeed deprecated, with due notice.
Useful documentation : Developers peruse through a lot of documentation. Many a time, any kind of documentation online may be out of date, not specific to a certain version of a product, or just plain wrong. Other times, we developers get lucky and find a forum post that somehow solves a problem that we’d been toying with for hours – that’s always a nice feeling. With Socialize, the documentation is clean, friendly, useful, simple, straight to the point, and actually a joy to read. It’s all on github and they do indeed version their documentation just like they do their codebase. In fact, all the source code is on GitHub as well.
Service: I feel that the product folks at Socialize really “think” about their product and attempt to internalize the pain points of indie developers hacking away at their laptops. They really “think” about the end users of mobile apps and just “get it”. They get that users may want to comment on certain content in a mobile app, be it anonymous or via Facebook. They get that users may want to share content but not necessarily share it to their social network.
Integrity – Do what you say you’ll do.
The Socialize team does what they say they’ll do. Case in point – the CTO replied to a user’s question on their GetSat forum regarding the ETA for an update on the latest Socialize Android SDK. The reply was along the lines of “soon”. A couple hours later and the Socialize Android 1.3 SDK went live, ripe with documentation. I come from a QA background so I naturally questioned the quality of a quick ad-hoc release. I tested it and so far so good. No issues and integration was absolutely seamless.
Discipline – The team is prolific and their sheer output is militaristic.
They’re always updating their SDK, posting new and quirky funny blog posts, enancing the backend, adding new features like SmartAlerts, and more. This persistence and longevity is a rarity, a true gem in the tech industry especially where startups come and go as the wind blows.
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