The moment has arrived. As you sit, breathless, on the edge of your chair, you finally see it. A WhatsApp status. An email. A new Stanza post! With trembling fingers, you navigate to this page on your cellular device or computer. Surely, you think, this will be the one! The big post. The world shaker. The Stanza post to rule them all. Perhaps they’ll announce the app’s launch date. Perhaps they’ll tell us the names of those Mennonite-famous authors they say they’ve been signing up.” But no. It’s yet another post by that writer guy just talking about a few behind-the-scenes details.
Such is the way of things. Today’s fast-paced lifestyle has programmed us to desire dramatic change, the quick fix, the big news event, the gratification without the wait. Alas, life is a process, and progress is often measured in small steps that seem to barely move us toward our goal. But many small steps make up a great distance, and all that matters is that we continue to take those small steps. As it is in life, so it is with building an app. We began with great strides of purpose, but before many months we were down to a slow walk. However, this is a journey we are on, not a race, so we are not discouraged.
Here are a few steps, some smaller and some larger, that we have taken over the past few weeks.
In the last post I mentioned briefly that Kent had hired another guy to work on making our admin panel more usable. After a week and a half, Kent realized that it wasn’t going to work out and that he could be doing better work himself. So we let the new guy go, and recently Kent himself has been doing a lot of work on our admin panel. Work has also continued on the test version of Stanza, and it is functioning much better than it was (read: it doesn’t break whenever you try to open it or click on a song). Once again, this is mostly thanks to Kent. What would we ever do without him?
We’ve been talking some this past week about in-app purchases. Normally Apple takes a 30% cut of all purchases made through their apps. This would mean that it would be better if subscriptions were paid through our website, not the app. However, it looks like we will qualify for Apple’s small business program. If a business has a yearly income of less than $1 million, it can apply for the program and Apple will only take a 15% cut. We have applied for the App Store Small Business Program and we think we will be approved.
We’re also looking into buying more cups for you guys. As has been mentioned, we will need more money before this is all over, and the cup idea went over quite well. We may also reset our donation goal higher, but we haven’t decided how high it needs to be yet.
That’s about all from this corner of the internet. Thank you all so much for being interested in Stanza and letting us know that you support us. As always, we welcome your comments, questions, and concerns. Contact us anytime.
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