Krazier, Author at Krazier Inc.

Sunshine Social: Early Bird Lifetime Access

by Krazier | Dec 23, 2020 | Sunshine Social

We acquired Sunshine.Social back in August of 2019. Since then we added some minor upgrades to the site and then ultimately shut the site down for several reasons. Today we are working to bring it back better than ever!

Background

When we acquired Sunshine Social, it was a simple social network in which you only saw posts by those who you followed and you only saw one post at a time. You then had to decide what kind of action to take on each post (like it, comment on it or just skip it), the idea was to reduce the constant noise you find on other networks like Twitter.

In theory this is a pretty interesting idea, but after exploring the site deeper and discussing the future of the platform. It was clear this concept wasn’t going to work very well, the interactions would become very tedious if you follow a lot of people, plus, who wants yet another social network? We decided to step back from it for nearly a year, debating how and if it was worth it to move forward.

This is basically what the site looked like before we stopped pushing out updates…

A New Beginning

After many months, lots of ideas and no progress; we finally decided to make a new service, from the ground up but it needed to be fairly simple and quick to build.

Sunshine Social is going to be a place for you to organize all of your social media, websites, blog posts and other links into a centralized location. This will allow you to share just one link, or link to one comprehensive page from your various social media profile settings so people can easily discover and follow or connect with you across all your social profiles and services.

As an example, here at Krazier.com we build lots of different SAAS products which means we have lots of links to share and keep track of. To give you some perspective here are some stats for you, we have…

Twitter Accounts: 21
Instagram Accounts: 14
Facebook Pages: 25
LinkedIn Pages: 8
Websites: 50+

To be fair, we are not necessarily super active on all these accounts but we use a lot of them. If you have looked at the homepage of krazier.com, it sort of acts like our “central” location for a bunch of our services. It works but it could be better and more interesting, and that is the purpose of Sunshine Social.

Phase One

We are actually still building out the full site at the moment, but just recently launched a new landing page for early pre-registrations.

The full service will likely cost between $6 & $8 per month once we go live, with an annual option as well (I think). With that said, our “Early Bird Lifetime Access” is priced at only $24, for lifetime access!. If this service looks useful to you, it will be well worth spending the money now on the early bird special.

Get Lifetime Access

Not only do you get a great price, you will also receive some additional features…

Larger Tile Size
Custom Profile Background
Multiple Collections
Remove Footer Icon Bar
All Future Features

We’ll be continually adding new features, but want to start with the basics first and grow from there. So that list above will continue to grow and you won’t have to pay to get the new features.

We are not quite ready to show off the main UI and UX for the app, but here are some screenshots of some areas we are working on at the moment…

This first image is part of our onboarding process, we all have a lot of social accounts that often have the same or similar usernames. This screen will allow you to very rapidly add all those usernames in on some of the more popular social networks…

This next image is similar to the one above, but is intended for more fine tuned additions of what we call “Flares”. We will have 30+ different services and options you can add to your profile page when we launch.

This final image roughly shows how the add/edit Flare screen will look like, this will of course change based on the type of Flare you are adding, the goal is to keep it as simple and easy to use as possible.

Collections

As I mentioned above, we have lots of SAAS projects, companies and social accounts. It doesn’t really make sense to group all these links into one big section on a page. It really makes sense to be able to break them up into different sections or as we call them “Collections”.

Pro accounts will be able to add as many collections as they wish, with as many links within each one as they choose as well. Here are some examples of how we are using collections, you’ll be able to name each collection how you see fit…

“Personal”
This is where I keep all my personal profiles, like my personal Twitter profile, my Facebook page, my LinkedIn page, my website, etc. Basically anything that relates to me personally, not one of my businesses.

“Retrospect.team“
This is where I would add links for our Retrospect Team website.

“Home Pro Partners“
Again, this is where we would add links for that website.

“Wild Fox Painting“
I also own and run a house painting company, so I would add relevant links to that service in this collection.

And so on and so forth. Sunshine Social will be great for people like us (Indie Makers) who have lots of accounts, services and websites.

Phase Two

When we go live with the actual new site, this will be our Phase 2. We’ll have more to discuss, more to show and you’ll be able to start creating your Sunshine Social profile. For now, get your Pro Lifetime Access!

Get Lifetime Access

Retrospect V2

by Krazier | Jul 5, 2020 | Retrospect

Retrospect.team was first launched in June of 2018, a little over two years ago! Hard to believe it’s been that long already. Today we are officially announcing all the new updates and features and calling it version 2 of Retrospect. Read on to learn more…

Introduction

For those of you not familiar with Retrospect.team, Retrospect is a real-time collaboration tool for Retrospectives, Tasks and Ideas. It’s a Kanban board of Sections (topics), Cards (ideas/thoughts) which you create and share with your team members, friends, family or keep it private to yourself.

It’s perfect for remote, distributed teams who need an easy way to quickly collaborate on ideas and to easily run retrospectives after sprints. It’s also flexible enough to use for personal use as a task list, note system, daily planner and countless other uses. We’d love to know how you end up using it.

Board Templates and Pricing

To make it easy to get started, we offer 6 board templates to choose from. Don’t worry though, you can completely customize it to your needs after the board has been created.

We recently released a Pro feature which allows you to save your own custom board templates that you can re-use over and over, makes your life much easier!

We believe in providing quality tools at an affordable price, to get you started we offer a Free Account in which you get 3 boards, unlimited sections and cards. Use this level of account for as long as you want, when ready, you can upgrade to our Pro Account.

For a limited time, we are offering a Pro Lifetime Account for a one time payment of $48. This gives you unlimited boards, advanced permissions and all current and future upgrades. It’s a great value that you shouldn’t pass up!

Members and Organizations

Over the past two years we have continued to steadily grow, we are happy to announce that we now have over 6,000 members and organizations who utilize our services. Over the next two years, we expect to grow significantly faster as more and more people discover us and bring their entire teams onto the platform. We are excited to learn from our customers and always encourage you to provide feedback.

Public Boards

We released the ability to make any of your boards publicly discoverable, this allows anyone to find your board from our site and if you allow them, they can login and modify your board with their own content and updates.

Have a cool list of resources you want to share with people? Just add them to a board, make it public and share the link. The the type of content you can quickly share with anyone is nearly limitless, we hope you take advantage of this functionality.

My Board

The most important piece of Retrospect of course is your Board, each board contains Sections and Cards which you can modify as needed. We have worked hard to improve the experience and design of this page to make it easier to use while adding new functionality without cluttering up the workflow.

Some new functionality includes:

More Permissions for Pro Users
Re-arrange Sections
Save Board as a Custom Template
Export to Excel with ability to Import back into the Board
Toggle Edit Mode, which allows you to hide the editor if you want a larger area to show content. Great for presentations.
Downvote card option.
Lots of other little refinements with more to come!

Permissions

Pro users have the ability to adjust permissions for each board, this includes Section and Card level permissions. We also provide you with a private URL you can send to anyone or make the board public for all to see.

Team Upgrades

This is one of my favorite additions we have added – Team Upgrades. Let’s say you are the manager of a team and you have 10 team members, if you upgrade yourself to our Pro Lifetime plan for $48, you then unlock the ability to upgrade your team members as well and for a much lower price of just $12 each. Each team member you upgrade needs to already be a free member, once they are, simply add their email address/s and then checkout and pay. The next time the login, they will have a Pro account, it’s easy!

Wrapping Up

That is a quick overview of some of the changes we have made over the past couple of years, there are lots of things we have improved and added and will continue to do so moving forward.

Added Markdown Support
Re-arrange Board Sections
Date Modified Ordered Boards
Improved Advanced Permissions
“Downvote” option on Cards
Toggle Edit Mode
Save Custom Board Templates
Added 10X Planner Template
Export and Import Full Boards
Improved UI and UX
Public Boards

We encourage to swing over and give it a spin, whether you are on a team or need it for personal use, we are certain that you can find a use for Retrospect.

Thank you!

Podcast Interview with Milestone Hackers

by Krazier | Jan 27, 2020 | Interviews, Krazier, Podcast

Recently I was interviewed for the Milestone Hackers Podcast where we talk about working on Side Projects | Exploring Time Management, Ideas, Validation, Marketing and Growth.

About Milestone Hackers: “A host (meee), Paolo interviewing various types of entrepreneurs or founders both technical and non-technical. Each entrepreneur has their own unique story that resulted in learning or experiencing something that can benefit the audience who may be in a similiar position! Check out the Milestone Hackers website for additional interviews.

Have a listen to my interview below…

How to Collect User Feedback using BugFeedr

by Krazier | Jan 26, 2020 | BugFeedr

As developers it can be difficult to collect feedback from our clients and users in a structured, meaningful and actionable way. BugFeedr makes this process much more simple, read more to learn how to use BugFeedr.

First Visit

When you first come to BugFeedr you are presented with a simple, one-page site outlining the features, screenshot of the submission form and details regarding pricing.

BugFeedr is geared towards developers, makers, entrepreneurs who are building both client software and SAAS applications for a larger audience. We have integrations with Slack, Trello, Jira, Asana and Azure DevOps to make it easy to push feedback from your users back into the tools your teams use every day.

Registration / Login

Throughout the homepage there are numerous ways to get to the registration page, we have very simple requirements to join. Simply enter your Name, Company Name, Email and Password and then Register.

If you prefer, we also offer the option to join with a Google or Microsoft account.

After you have registered and return to the site, it’s quick to Login as well.

1. Clients

There are essentially 3 primary steps to get setup to start accepting Tickets for your project. The first step is to create a new “Client”.

The Client is who “Owns” the project, so you may be a freelance developer who has several Clients you work with, you would enter their information on this Add Client screen so that you can easily reference their information later. (Nothing is sent to your client, this is for simply for you.) Alternately, the Client could be You, maybe you are an indie maker and you build a bunch of projects, you would be your own client in this case.

The “Vanity Name” is included in the Feedback Form Url, so it’s important to put a value here that is relevant to the client. Also keep in mind, one client may have multiple projects under them.

First Client

The screenshot below shows what the screen looks like after you have added your first client.

The icon on the far left allows you to edit client information. Then you can see the company name, email, client name, vanity url and how many projects and tickets each client has.

2. Projects

Once you have added a Client, it’s now time to add a Project under that Client.

On the Projects page click “Add a Project”, from here you can select a Client from the drop down list. Next, add a title for the project, this might be the name of the website, or code name you are using.

We’ll automatically generate a “Feedback form Url” for you, this url is what you will use to access the feedback form for this project. In some instances you may want to generate a new Url due to people leaving the team and you no long want them accessing the feedback form again, or maybe spammers got a hold of the url and you are getting junk feedback. Simply come back to this page, click the Generate new Url button and use that going forward.

Here you can see the form populated with content and how your first project looks on the page.

If you look below, there is a column titled “Feedback Form”, this icon will open a new window and display the feedback form for your project, this is the url you will send to your client, embed as a link on your site or use in an iFrame to embed on a site directly.

Feedback Form

Shown below is what our feedback form currently looks like…

First we show the “Project Title” so you and your users know that they are using the correct form for the correct site.
Next we have some basic fields, Title of the Ticket, their Email Address so you can follow up with the user about their ticket if needed.
Next we have a couple drop downs to help define the type of ticket. The user can submit a Bug, New Task, Enhancement, Question or other. They can also define it’s Priority so you have a general idea of how urgent the ticket is.
The next section allows the user to enter step-by-step directions on how to reproduce the issue, they can add as many steps as they want and even re-order if they had to add something they forgot when they started.
We also provide an HTML Rich text area to allow the user to add free-form comments that may be helpful to you.
Lastly, the user can attach screenshots to help you better understand the issues they are seeing.

Once, the user has completed the form, they simply click “Submit Ticket” and it’s sent to you for review. The user can continue submitting additional tickets if needed.

There are many ways to actually use the form, you can send a link to your client through an email, you can add a link someplace on your site (we often add it to the footer), you can use an iFrame and embed the form directly on your site, or if you have a native app, you could use a Webview and embed the form directly in the app.

Here you can see an example submission before it has been submitted.

3. Tickets

Once Tickets have been submitted, you will see them on the Tickets page. You can filter Tickets by specific projects so you can focus a bit easier. You can select multiple tickets at once if you want to bulk export them or bulk delete them.

You can use the “Eye” icon to go look at the Ticket in detail, we also show the Ticket number and date it was submitted. We also show a few more specific details plus a link to download all the attachments attached to the Ticket.

Ticket Details

The Ticket Details page shows a few auto-generated details like the Date and Ticket Id, along with all the specific information the user submitted through the feedback form.

At the very bottom, you can also see the attachments the user added, if you click on them the open up in a larger view.

Integrations

There are multiple ways to deal with Tickets one they have come in, you can simply view them and fix the related bug and then simply delete the Ticket from the system. You could export the Tickets to Excel and then remove from the system.

If you are part of a team, your best option is likely to setup Integrations with the tools your team is already using. We offer 5 common Ticket tracking tool to integrate with, Trello, Asana, Jira, Slack and Azure Dev Ops.

To make a connection, simple click the “Connect to…” button for the service you want to connect with, authorize the connection and that’s it!

If you no longer want the integration, simply click the “Remove Integration” button.

How to Use an Integration

Now that you have connected to your 3rd Party Integration, it’s time to actually use it, to do that, you need to go back to your Tickets page.

On the Tickets screen (assuming you have a ticket), you will see a new column called “Integrations”, from here you can select the integration you want to use for that specific Ticket. Can could, in theory setup all 5 integrations if your company uses them.

Integration Pop-Up

Once you have selected an Integration option from the drop down, you will be presented with a modal pop-up that will allow you to select where within that Integration you want to send the Ticket.

You can first select or create a new Board, then you can select or create a new List, once your options have been defined, simply click the “Create Card” button and off it will go to your other tool.

Integration Preview

If you jump over to your external Integration provider, for instance Trello in this case. You will see the newly created card with all the same Ticket details that you get in the “Ticket Details” page within BugFeedr. Now you can assign it to the appropriate developer to keep the process moving forward in the tools your team is used to working with.

Here is the Trello Card expanded to show the Ticket details you passed from BugFeedr. Something to keep in mind, the Ticket still remains inside of BugFeedr at this point, you will still have to manually delete it if you no longer need it in BugFeedr.

Notifications

What good is user feedback if you don’t know it exists? If you go to your Profile Settings page, we have a section regarding how often you will receive notifications regarding submitted tickets.

We offer 3 options, 1. You can get notified immediately after the ticket has been submitted. 2. You can get notified once per day, this will give you a summary of all tickets once per day. 3. You can turn off notifications completely, we don’t recommend this unless you are consistently using BugFeedr everyday (which would be cool 🙂

Pricing

We understand that you have countless other tools and services that you subscribe to and likely paying lots of money for to use those services. We see ourselves as a compliment to those tools and have priced BugFeedr affordably so that we are not a drag on your budget.

You can give BugFeedr a try for free for 1 Client and 1 Project for as long as you want. When you are ready to expand, it’s easy to upgrade to our $24 Per Year Plan, that’s only $2 per month.

We personally use BugFeedr on all of our projects, it’s been a helpful tool in collecting feedback from our clients and users. We hope you find it useful as well. Come give BugFeedr a try!

10 Scrum Retrospective Tools for Distributed Agile Teams in 2020.

by Krazier | Dec 29, 2019 | Retrospect

2020 brings some new Scrum Retrospective tools for software development teams to try out. We have collected a new top 10 list of tools for Agile teams…

Retrospect.team

Retrospect is a simple, real-time Kanban Collaboration Tool created by us, Krazier Inc. It’s easy to create a board, share it publicly or privately with your team members or friends, add cards and take action. Retrospect offers 6 default templates to choose from, including a 10X Planner for your daily life. One unique feature of Retrospect is that it offers you the ability to use Markdown within each Card, allowing for styled content that’s easier to read and understand. 2020 will bring additional improvements geared toward teams.

Cost: 3 Free Active Boards / $16 per year upgrade.

Outro

A retrospective is a candid, team-wide discussion about how the team is doing, both the accomplishments and the challenges. When done right, it creates more effective, more close-knit teams. Outro was created in NYC by Taylor Crane & Danny Pirajan. They have hosted retros weekly since 2011 (across many teams), and have seen over and over again the positive change it creates. This compelled us to turn what we love about retros into a beautiful product for any team to use.

Cost: 4 Free Boards / $10 per month upgrade.

Retroly

A fun simple tool for agile retrospectives. Retroly is a tool for teams that want to flourish and have impactful retros every single time. It helps improve remote or co-located teams improve their performance with retrospectives.

Cost: Free During Beta.

Sprintlio

Sprintlio is a powerful and intelligent retrospectives tool built to seamlessly fit between Slack and Jira for modern agile teams. Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Agile-ish, Waterfall – if you run retrospectives, this is the tool for you.

Cost: 30 day free trial / $25 per month

Metro Retro

Metro Retro is a free web app that helps teams run productive, engaging and fun retrospectives. It uses real-time updates, adaptable templates and a quirky sense of humor to riff on the classic paper based retrospective but taking advantage of modern tech!

Cost: Free

Neatro

Neatro helps your team grow with a selection of effective and industry-proven retrospectives. Whether you’re leading a remote or in-person retrospective, pick the activity that matches your team’s context. Create action items and assign owners in realtime.

Cost: Free During Beta.

bttr

The agile retrospective tool. Organize your retrospective in an efficient manner. Constantly collect feedback. Focus on important topics. Improve sprint by sprint.

Cost: 1 Board Free, 10 Boards 25€

Parabol

Parabol is a free, open-source web app for running engaging & effective retrospective check-in meetings that can run in realtime or asynchronously. Integrations with Atlassian Jira & GitHub and forwardable meeting summaries make follow-up a snap.

Cost: Free for Personal, Unlimited $6 per month

Self-Retrospective

Self-Retrospective. Do a self-retrospective to create a plan for improvements in different parts of your life. Get an email after a selected time period to track and improve your personal development.