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I remember it well when we decided to start development of the PokerStrategy.com Elephant back in late 2007. Althought today it seems like a natural decision, we were hesitant to do so at first.
For one, there already was a decent product – PokerTracker – which we back then offered to all our members that successfully gathered 2,000 StrategyPoints. Secondly, we did make the experience that offering a really good software was not easy: besides interesting, valuable features you always have to make sure the quality is good. A software that crashes or is hard to handle / hard to install will not be a product welcomed by the community.
But still, there were some reasons to try: if we had development under our control, we could easier implement the community's favourite features – whereas convincing an indepentend partner to do so was really hard, even though we were their biggest customers.
Additionally, with a software of our own, we can make sure people get their licenses quick and get a long-term support. So its easier for our members and less risk for us all.
So we tried. And if I look at the Elephant today, we succeeded. After less than a year of development, it is a full-fledged tool with less and less weaknesses. I'm very much convinced it will be the #1 tool in all important areas in 2009.
But of course not everything is too bright: to make sure we get the right amount of feedback to fuel our development and bug removal process, we decided to make an early alpha release. The following months were of course still full of not-working features, performance problems and annoying bugs. And as most people don't have too much time, they rightfully don't want to give a piece of software more than one or two chances. If it annoys them with bugs the first time they try to use it, they don't like it. And this opinion stays.
So today, we have a much better product – but still a large bunch of members that had too bad experiences with the Elephant to try it again. To us, that means double effort: to convince them, we need to make the Elephant so good that new people using it talk in the highest tones of it. Only if we convince those using the programme, we will be able to get back the users lost to bugs.
