“Oh, *now* you want to talk!”

In the past few months we’ve been unusually, almost eerily quiet.

As lots of you have nudged Lisa & I (Andy) in email to update the blog, I’m pleased to say big things are afoot!

“Happy Birthday to Us, Happy Birthday to…”

Well not quite yet!

But the 15th September will be the SIXTH anniversary of ActiveInbox’s first donation (which came a few weeks after I first released GTDGmail as a weekend project)… and gave us our first real taste of momentum. Momentum that is about to return like never before.

We’re now a team of five based here in our community working space in Brighton (England), hopefully with a sixth on the way. Lisa is chief in charge of defending all of you (she captains support@, the forum and making sure I never overlook your requests!); Pete is the designer with a very artistic temperament (I haven’t seen him for a few weeks since I insulted his bike); Mark is doing wonders in paving the way for exciting future feature development; and Dan has just joined to help us grow faster as a company.

Some of you have been with us for years and have seen us grow, others are a bit more new to the fold. So, let me tell a bit more about us the team, how we got started and our journey to present day: “Now this is a story all about how my life got flip turned upside down”… (Another time eh Andy — Ed).

In order to grow, like any team, we need resources and investment. We are appealing to our “Active” community to help us, not with cash (but that would be great!) but most importantly with your time and your product knowledge.

Help Us Perfect ActiveInbox

We’re about to embark once more on a huge set of refinements (don’t worry, we won’t be making any dramatic changes to existing features – ActiveInbox is now a maturing product). And I say “refinements” because if anything, I want to make ActiveInbox a lighter product, not a bigger one!

I’ve synthesised all your requests from the last few years into a roadmap for the next 6-12 months of product development… And I will be regularly releasing sneak previews and beta versions here on the blog. But what we produce will not be perfect – so keep on giving us feedback as we release updates and I will use it to improve us further!

(And yes, the roadmap includes our first stab at mobile… more on that in the coming months!).

Tell Us A Story!

If you would like to help us out please let us know, if:

* You have an interesting story about how using AIB helped you on a project
* How a team member finally had a “lightbulb” moment when they you managed to persuade them to start using us. Anything really, we’re after your stories, a clear FAQ, feedback and your views on how we can help you aside from stamping out those darn bugs!!

Just email Dan (danf@activeinboxhq.com) and he will be all sweet and charming with you, as is his way.

Growing Up

Support queries, now will be answered within 24hrs unless really mission critical (like on New Years Eve last year, when I had to scramble to find a wifi connection in Berlin to fix up our servers!). It’ll always be Lisa you’re speaking to unless I manage to sneak in ahead of her 🙂

To keep the load down for our still tiny team, please always look at the forum first as questions may have been asked or even answered already. Plus the forum is somewhere you could help out if you want to share your knowledge and tips with other people!

I (Andy) will still be working round the clock, but tucked away out of sight in the AIB Lab, so not so much on a day to day support function. I need to put some time into pushing ActiveInbox further ready for the big news and September celebration. My most visible days will be Tuesday, when I’m most likely to be available for customer interviews (to help us improve!), and Wednesday, which is non-critical bug fixing day.

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell