On September 1st we've launched FlightFacts for iOS and Android, our first publicly available app. But we're just at the beginning of something completely new.

A little backstory, the company I'm working for has a long history of working the the aviation sector. Up until now all of our products have been B2B, meaning we usually were in close contact with our customers getting direct feedback. But as you can imagine the global pandemic hit the industry hard and the aviation sector still needs to recover. We're still confident in our products and wanted to present them to a larger audience. Thus the idea to create a publicly available app was born.

Work on this project began around April/May 2021 and we've successfully launched at the beginning of September. The engineering part was straight forward, since the app is based on existing products, most of the engineering work was on the app itself, which was build from scratch because the new audience demanded a simplified, more intuitiv experience.

Our biggest learnings so far are:

Marketing is hard

Up until now, we've had few big customers, but now we're trying to reach thousands of individuals. This has had the steepest learning curve so far and it's a continuous effort.

Don't underestimate analytics

As stated before the close contact to our customers, made analytic data collection somewhat needless, because we've rarely needed to observe the actual user behaviour. Now, without analytic data we would have been nearly completely unaware of our users behaviour and problems.

We've still got big plans for our app and I will continue to write about our journey. You've got any questions? Or have some insights to share? Please use the comment function below or reach me on twitter.