Happy new year from the HappyMoose team!
We hope that you made a safe transition into the futuristic year of 2017 and have many happy memories to print! This year we're going to spend most of our time in three directions: more polished UI and physical products, more customisation options and more sturdy, much nicer packagings.
For more specific details, read on ...
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Improve, perfect, and customise all our products. Rather than focusing on new products this year, we want to better our existing ones. e.g. offer more detailed specs and product photos, more mounting options across all sizes, even better apps for you to put orders through, etc.
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Better unboxing experience. Truth be told, the packages you received from us today are ... embarrassing. Yes, they worked. Compared to last year, the glass breakage rate has dropped from 2% to under 0.5%. But those bare minimum packages that we taped together disappoint many first time customers.
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Reduce the production time to one business day. This was the item #1 on our 2016 resolution list but our average turnaround time in 2016 has, in fact, deteriorated from 2 days to near four days. Being an online only business, we can and should do better. Our goal is, still, to become the world's first company who offers next business day turnaround service.
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Introduce "My Projects" and "My Photos" to the website. With the new products, we launched in late 2016, mainly the collage posters and square collage frames, more and more customers want a permanent place to store and share the "projects" they are working on before they are ready to order. We also want to support the workflow where the customers can upload their photos first, then select the products they want to create.
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Upload directly from your Facebook and Google Drive (Google Photos) accounts. We launched Instagram and Dropbox support in 2016, and many of you wrote to us to say that you love them. Facebook and Google Drive are the next two most demanded services.
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More templates and better tools for collage prints. We were happily surprised by how well the collage posters are selling, despite the limitations we currently have. So this year, we want to provide more templates, sizes choices and layout options; We also want to offer better tools to arrange the photos and to make it easy for our customers to create an awesome poster with their mobile phone pictures. E.g. equalise the contrast/brightness of different images in the same collage so we won't have really dark photos among bright ones.
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More face-to-face time with our customers. Being an online business, we always feel the itch to go out and meet our customers face to face; to sit down and see how you use the website so we can improve it; to see where you put the prints in your home or office so we might come up with more product ideas. We don't know what we might do but we do have a few ideas: to go around the country in a Caravan or go to conferences, craft shows. We're looking forward to seeing you in person!
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Post on our blog every month. Another item we inherited from 2016. Here are the topics we'd cover: photo related crafts tips, Print Perfect for pro/hobby photographers, Interviews with artists and photographers, our view on entrepreneurship in New Zealand, feature updates and pretty anything that interests us.
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A secret project.. .... We have been quietly working on a couple of interesting projects in the background. It's still too early to tell which one we should release to the world first but it should come in the 3rd quarter.
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Stay independent. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Never waver from putting our customers’ needs first. This year we'll start hiring helpers and even full-time employee so this is a great line to keep in our minds.
Thanks forever.
Alex and the HappyMoose team
P.S. To show how serious we take our new year's resolution, here's our 2016 list revisited. (C stands for "Completed", H for "Half completed and we're still working on it", and F means "Failed miserably that we want to cry.")
- F Reduce the production time to one business day. - We'll try harder this year. See above.
- H Improve the packaging. - We switched to much faster and reliable Courier provider and used better protection material. 2017's goal will be better designed.
- C Launch four new products. - Well, we actually launched eight new products.
- C Much faster upload speed. - We moved the server from Singapore to Sydney. Not exactly NZ but the speed lift has improved over 500%.
- C Launch a user account system. - Yup. Will certainly do more in 2017.
- H Support printing photos directly from your Instagram, Dropbox, Google Photos and Facebook. - Need to include Google Drive and Facebook.
- C Launch the Inspiration Gallery. - Have you checked out our many #ideabooks?
- H Post on our blog at least once every week. - Much much harder than we thought. We'll try a monthly schedule in 2017.
- C Stay small. Stay independent. Stay humble.
