Introduction

UltimatePOS crossed the 2000+ sale milestone this week. It’s fantastic to see a side project which started small 3 years back, grew big with a good number of sales, and become our flagship project.

More than us, our customers celebrated the 2000 milestone. Here are 2 emails we received from our customers:

Email-1 from customer

Email-2 from customer

Thanks to our customer for being the first to inform us, before we even noticed.

UltimatePOS Background:

UltimatePOS started as a side project, working a few hours per week, to full fill one of my family retail business need. Looking at the source code management system here are some of the stats:

Initial development Started on: July 5, 2017
After working on it for 6 months initial version released on January 18, 2018, in codecanyon.

So far we have released 56 major+minor updates in 30 months of time, which is huge. I must admit, this is a lot of updates and can be overwhelming to users, but mostly during the initial months, we were releasing frequent updates to make it feature-rich.

Here I’m listing some of the things which worked for us:

What worked for us?

1. Scratching my own itch

In simple terms – solving my own problem.

Before starting the development I was looking for retail management software (also called a point of sales, barcoding software, inventory management software, etc) after looking into many software most of them lacks some of the simple features I was looking for or was too complicated or was too expensive to fit our need. And many of them were even not customizable to fit my need.

So, I decided to make something for myself and the development begins.

2. Start small

UltimatePOS’s initial version fitted our needs but lacked many features important for different businesses. Instead of having many features, we made sure the initially released feature was truly complete.

With customer’s suggestions regularly we started improving and adding new features.

At this point, we have 6 ready-to-use modules (Plugins or extension) for UltimatePOS, 2 under development, mobile app & desktop software are under development, and many features in our idea board.

Modules:

  1. SaaS & Superadmin module
  2. Essentials & HRM module
  3. WooCommerce module
  4. Manufacturing module
  5. Project management module
  6. Repair module
  7. CRM module (Coming soon)
  8. Asset management module (coming soon)

We’re also working on a mobile app and desktop software for it.

We’re also working on making this module creation easy for other developers, so anyone can develop a new module for UltimatePOS.

Looking back we never planned for any of those. If we would have planned for all of this from the beginning I doubt the initial version would have taken more than double or thrice the time.

3. Support

With self-hosted software, support is very important. We have made sure our support is reliable & fast.

At this point, we use email(a simple form that sends email and auto-respond to the customer) as the support system). Gmail interface saves a lot of time navigating between tickets, love it. But email has many drawbacks, we have already started building our own support software (scratching our own itch) which will save up to 50% of support time and make things easy for customers & support agents. (Subscribe to get the update)

A lot of time actually goes in support, but a few customers understand the importance of our time and renew there support. (if you’re our customer please renew support)

4. Documentation

Documenting the steps for using all features is important. What might feel obvious to you may not be easy for end-users to understand.

The step-by-step document helps customers understand features, instead of always relying on support, documents give them instant help.

A good document helps reduce the support tickets, saves customers time, saves support agents time. So is very important.

Keeping the document updated and adding more information to it as per customer’s queries in support, make the document more informative.

5. UI Design

Good design simply works, everyone loves using a system with a good interface. Over the year we have tweaked our design to make it better but it is a never-ending process. Starting a project with a good template helps.

Thank you

Thank you & congratulations to everyone involved!!

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Next milestone… 3000 sales 😇

UltimatePOS link: Ultimate POS – Advance

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Let us know your thoughts, what worked / what didn’t for you?

If I can be of any help, feel free to comment below.