Slamdot

We’ve been getting some flak lately for neglecting our blog, and especially for failing to provide updates about the new Slamdot rollout. In fact, I just got off of a live chat session with a potential customer who said (in a nutshell) that our recent blog stagnation has deterred him from signing up with us. Totally understandable.

Where we’re at with Slamdot 2.0

Okay, so this is what everyone wants to know. The truth is that we thought we were closer to being finished with the new version than we actually were. We had been utilizing a third-party billing and support application behind the scenes to handle those respective aspects of Slamdot 1.0. We did this through an API integration that allowed us to implement our own customer interfaces, while offloading the heavy billing and support lifting elsewhere. While that worked well for a while, we realized that this just wasn’t going to fly any more if we were going to accomplish everything slated for Slamdot 2.0.

We built our own billing system

So, we ended up building our own central billing system. The best part about this endeavor was that we got the opportunity to build it our way; the way we wanted it. So many inefficiencies existed in our old way of doing things that creating this software was a breath of fresh air. The remaining work to do before we can launch the new Slamdot involves hooking it into our new billing system and weeding out the old stuff.

Other distractions

Some other things delaying our relaunch have been tons of recent client work and a content management system that we developed to manage that workload. The good news is that we’ll be publicly releasing that CMS, which will include a free plan. Our new billing system streamlines the invoicing and account management processes of any future apps (like this one) that we decide to build.

When do we go live?

We don’t know yet, but we’re hoping to get everything launched by the end of this year or early next year. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the best we can do for now. We will start sharing screenshots and some of the things that we’ve learned throughout the development process. We apologize for the lack of updates and we’ll try to do better from now on. Thanks for hanging in there!