On November 11, 2023, after more than a year of hard work, we launched the new version of CashControl.
Here is how that went, why we decided to rebuild, and the lessons we learned.
Some of our users have been with us for over a decade, but for everybody else, here’s a bit of history: we launched our first version of CashControl in 2011 with what was considered the modern technology and design of the time. Over the following years, we’ve added more and more features and slowly grew our community with users from all around the world; when we say “all around the world,” we mean that literally: we’ve had paying users from over 90 different countries on all continents (except Antarctica).
But all software ages and it was becoming difficult to maintain and add new features. Also, the application’s look and performance were no longer on par with the expectations of users, especially new ones, and caused our growth to slow.
So, we decided to rewrite the entire platform. We picked the technology (more on that in a future article) and made a plan. We would need to develop feature parity with the soon-to-be-old solution, so we looked at what features were actively used and landed on a list of almost all the features from the old version (spoiler alert, we had to build the rest eventually).
On the new design, we went for something modern, well-adapted to mobile devices (although we also had dedicated mobile apps), and with a series of improvements to the user experience based on our decade of experience with offering support on the product to our users.
After more than a year of hard work, including the rebuild of the web application, mobile applications (iOS & Android), account migration service, new infrastructure, new billing system, and new presentation websites, we were finally ready to go live on November 11, 2023.
The first lesson we learned was that no matter how much you test, there’s nothing like a user’s touch. We quickly discovered and fixed issues with the default currency selection, timezone-related filtering issues, and many smaller ones. Over the first weeks, we’ve had dozens of fixes that addressed everything our users reported who have been overwhelmingly supportive and patient with us.
The second lesson we learned was that users do not update their mobile apps, especially on Android. Although we had a built-in mechanism in the old mobile app that detected the launch of the new app and directed the users to update it, many of our users were on a years-old version. So those users ended up in support, complaining that the login was no longer working.
The third and most unexpected lesson we learned was that there’s no such thing as an unused feature. Even the most trivial and quirky feature had its small but fanatic user group. They quickly stormed support, so we started working on them and eventually built all these features.
The final lesson we learned was not surprising: some users don’t like change. No matter how nicer-looking, better adapted, and easier to use the new design was, some users wanted the old design back. On all objective metrics, the new design was better. However, for some who were using the old version for years, the update was an unwelcome change. Unfortunately, there was no way of having it both ways, so we explained our reasoning and hoped they would ultimately accept the new version; most did.
After the launch, we continued working on new features and have been delivering updates for the past ten months, thus making the product better every day.
Registrations started increasing, and, more importantly, the retention of users after registration has also seen a big boost.
We’re continuing to work on new features, which we’re rolling out regularly. If you’re not already a user, you can become one for free using the registration link in the header.