09/02/2018
Hey guys,
We have been getting quite a few requests for a bit of “behind the scenes” information.
And we shall deliver!
The idea for Vegman came to the vegan founder of yoozoo when he had to travel a lot and got tired of being unable to find good vegan food places.
We had already been doing yearly charity projects, so after discussing it with the team, we decided to make the Vegman website our new project.
The core features: A dynamic database that is maintained by the users.
Every action gives KarmaPoints, and the more KarmaPoints, the more options for the user.
In 2011 yoozoo temporarily joined up with a company that was developing apps. They were looking for a test project for their trainee, we suggested a Vegman app. And so it happened.
After launching the Vegman iOS app, Apple contacted us with an offer to promote it. This brought us an incredible 60k downloads within 2 weeks!
As you might be aware the app was read-only, so the only way for you to add content was through the website.
We decided to change this and hired an app developer in the USA. Unfortunately, this person managed to scam us out of 6000 Euros and disappeared with the source code.
After another year of saving up resources we hired another developer, this time from Kyrgyzstan. We even got her to meet up with us in Berlin to discuss the work. Long story short, she disappeared as well and left us an old source code.
Then iOS11 happened. The system changed to 64 bit and the Vegman app died.
A few months ago our boss had an epiphany in the bath tub - and we decided to invest again.
This time we had the perfect, trustworthy developer at hand who already worked with us on several other projects: Vitaly.
While Vitaly was rebuilding the original (read-only) app for a fair price, the app started disappearing from your phones as you guys updated to iOS11. Anna, our customer support agent, was drowning in messages and requests about the missing app.
We quickly launched the remade app and came to an agreement with Vitaly to continue developing and finally turn the app interactive, as we had planned all along. See, Vitaly might not be Vegan, but he is definitely doing a lot to support our cause!
So here we are. The Vegman App v3 was launched a few days ago and FINALLY we are all able to rate, upload images, flag content, and suggest new restaurants!
As for the question, “Is this the end of Vegman?” we can say “No. But it was damn close.”
We have not made a single cent with this app, but we believe in it. For the sake of animals everywhere.
With the release of v3 we will face a new challenge, since trolls will be able to spam us with 1* ratings and incorrectly flag content.
But we will prevail!
If you want to support us, we are always looking for volunteers to help us with blogging, coming up with ideas, data maintenance and of course creative work. Just drop us a quick message on the yoozoo page.
That’s also where we will keep sharing behind-the-scenes updates for Vegman. So if you’re interested, why not give us a like!
