It’s been a year since we’ve launched our first iOS app, Dress Measurement. What’s happened since then?

First, we’ve reached over 4000 downloads, with no advertising (well, no advertising after the first week). This is also with no SEO, which is to my chagrin, because we’re a company that specializes in Search Engine Optimization. This time last year, when we launched Dress Measurement, Aeeiee only had two employees, and of them, I was the only software engineer. Since December 2016, we’ve added a paid marketing intern to our ranks.

Though Dress Measurement is one of our own pet projects, the majority of our time – like 99% of it – is spent making and managing software for our clients. We’ve been swamped in new projects since September 2016, and entirely focused on building strong relationships with our clients. As a result, Dress Measurement has been our lowest priority. We haven’t had time to improve the app. We haven’t had time to market it, and we haven’t even had time to work on SEO. I’ve only just this week had time to update the look and feel of aeeiee.com!

But that’s all about to change! We have some good news for Dress Measurement users.

We hear you

Over the past 12 months, dozens of users have given us feedback about which features they would like added to Dress Measurement to improve the app and make managing profiles and customers easier. Here’s what you’ve all asked for, in order of popularity:

1. An Android version of Dress Measurement
2. Cloud syncing for Dress Measurement, so your profiles can follow you around regardless of the device you use, and you can easily restore data to a new device in the event your phone is damaged or stolen.
3. The ability to add your own custom measurements, since many tailoring shops take very specialized measurements and what gets measured is very subjective.
4. A notes section for each profile, so that you can add in custom information about that customer
5. The ability to change the directory picture to a photo of a client, as well as the ability to attach photographs to profiles (e.g. front, back, and side).
6. The ability to edit the names of body parts measured, so that you can write them in languages other than English or a multi-language update to the app (e.g. Spanish, German, Italian)
7. The ability to create folders and/or tag profiles so you can easily filter per customer, company, or department.
8. Create a child profile and avatar.
9. Add more color options to the avatars.

What comes next

First, Aeeiee is hiring! We’re looking to hire 2-3 new software engineers, which will help us tackle more projects at once, and afford us the time to make improvements to our app.

Next, we’re improving SEO. Our app gets 10-15 downloads a day with us doing absolutely nothing. This past year we’ve averaged 11.2 downloads a day. Over the past six months, I’ve been training our marketing intern on Web and SEO and together we’ve been developing an organic marketing strategy for Dress Measurement.

We have one simple goal: have DressMeasurement.com rank #1 for the search “Dress Measurement” on Google. Right now we’re not even listed on the first 100 pages on Google. Why, you might ask? It’s because even though we have the perfect domain, and we’ve got SSL encryption, and our site is mobile friendly, for the past twelve months it was still a single page site. Quite simply, single page sites just don’t rank well on search engines unless they have thousands of backlinks. Moreover, on that single page, we had less written copy than on this blog post.

Due to the traffic the keyword “Dress Measurement” receives on Google daily, I believe it can bump us up from 10-15 downloads a day to 10 times that at a minimum. More demand for Dress Measurement makes a better case for us to dedicate development time to the app, and prepares us to push our updates to a wider audience.

After that, we’ll be updating the app. The next planned update to DM will incorporate the following features:

• Cloud syncing (2)
• Custom measurements (3, 6)
• Notes section for each profile (4)
• Attach photos to profiles + change directory picture (5)

So this means we’re going to tackle items 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 on your list. When is this going to happen? As customers have contacted us over the last 12 months, I was overly optimistic about when I’d have time fore continued development of DM. I gave answers of 30-45 days, only to have new projects come up and responsibilities continue to overrule our app.

So here’s what has to happen first. I need to hire the software engineers and that will take time, probably a month or two to find the right people. Then after that, we’ll need to finish a big project we’re working on right now. We’ve given one of our clients our exclusive attention for the next few months as we work on fulfilling their needs (meaning we’re not accepting any new work for the next few months).

Once I’ve got a good software engineering team, and once we’re done with our big client project, we’ll get right back to work on Dress Measurement. So we’re planning to be back on some serious iOS development by September this year. We appreciate your support and feedback, and we haven’t forgotten about you guys! When we start back up, we’ll let you know right on this blog!