ABLE's Q1 and Q2 of 2022 in a short review

The plans we started the year with.

We started Q1 2022 with plans to start MVP/Concept testing at the beginning of April (Q2 2022). We've overestimated our ability to deliver in this timeframe a bit, but not too much. But life never goes as planned.

The war.

On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine.

We are a team of 4 people, 3 of us are Ukrainians, located in Kyiv. With the beginning of the war, we stopped product design. We were shocked and scared. Fled from the bombs and rockets, looking for a safer place to settle. And even when we found such places - we still could not get back to normal. Our world just turned upside-down on us in one night, the fear for the loved ones in dangerous zones was driving us crazy. And reading the news became our main activity for some time. We were looking for ways to help Ukraine - by volunteering and helping to arrange humanitarian aid. We still do, and it takes some part of our time slowing us down on this project.

We returned to work on ABLE in the last weeks of April, losing almost two months, and it took us nearly a month to regain some tempo. We're still not full speed, but we're moving forward, and it makes us happy.

Before the war, we were partially remote, enjoying our great office and each other's company, and now we are 100% remote, but we miss those office meetings, discussions, work and evenings together. And we hope we can get back to the office and see each other soon.

The progress.

Meanwhile, our developer, who's not in Ukraine, continued to develop the browsing experience. His progress was much slower, of course, without the support of the rest of the ABLE team, but he managed to advance, and we really appreciate that he didn't let the flag fall. He delivered an early concept of the browsing experience for us to test internally in late April, which helped us get back to work. We iterated several times on this early experience, bringing it to some acceptable state of usability. At the end of June, we moved on to the next part of the product: designing the basic knowledge base and the integrated experience of both elements. This work is still in progress.

As for some small wins: in the meanwhile, although we stopped virtually all the marketing efforts, our waitlist grew 20% on its own, while organic traffic saw a remarkable 2000% growth.

What we plan for the near future.

During Q3 22, we plan to design and develop the initial versions of the knowledge base and integrated experience. So that in Q4 22, we hope to start MVP/Concept testing with a limited set of pre-alpha users and iterate on improving the product getting ready for alpha testing of ABLE by the end of the year.

We are six months late at the moment. So we will do our best to try to win that time back.