Method Apps Blog

Well, we just finished our first video for the Method Lab. Check it out here.

“An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.” —Paul Valéry

Launching a product like Method Apps is an interesting endeavor—it’s scary and fun; it’s stressful and exciting. There’s so much that goes into it: planning, discussion, more planning, scrapping of those plans, new plans, design, development, more back-to-the-drawing-board planning, more design, and even more development. From user experience to back-end stability and security, there’s just so much to think about—and then do.

But the problem isn’t that there’s so much to do, the problem is that if you let yourself, you’ll keep doing it forever. It’s easy to let a large project like Method perpetually grow and grow, and balloon into what you hope will become an incredible, useful product, but if you’re not careful, you’ll never finish.

There will always be more features, better functionality and greater value that you could have added to the release of a platform like Method, but at some point you have to say this is great, it can be better and it will be, but for now, this is where it is at feature-wise. It’s an inexact science at best, and, more likely, it’s art. You have to have something that you—and more importantly, the people who you want to pay your salary—feel is worth the time and money you’re asking your customers to spend. But you have to stop—or abandon—work on this version at some point before it disappears into irrelevant oblivion. There are a few ways to do this, and what we did was set a deadline.

The 28th of July was the start of Echo Conference, a media conference for forward thinking churches, and a great gathering of some brilliant artists, thinkers and worshipers. There would be hundreds of people swarming about for three days looking at all kinds of technologies to better enable them to do what they do best—minister to the Body of Christ. It was the perfect deadline for Method Apps, far enough away that we could reasonably finish, but close enough that it would be a lot of pressure.

So earlier this year, we set our sights on Echo Conference as a launch point for Method, and we made it. As the conference neared, we knew we were close enough that we could confidently show off what I hope will become a revolutionary product for churches and businesses. I was able to make some good connections with other businesses that I hope to partner with to bring even more value to each of our respective products, and ultimately to you. And I had a great time too, it was so much fun meeting so many people doing so many things in so many different parts of the country. Conferences like Echo are a great way to get new ideas for your church, but also, they’re a great way for you to share your ideas with us, which is exactly what happened. Because of the feedback we received, we’ll be bringing even more value to Method very soon, but first we’re going to get it out the door. You can always sign up for our mailing list to stay up to date.

We’re looking forward to opening up the Method Apps platform to you, and then starting in on the next iteration which will inevitably start the cycle over again where we’ll keep making it better and better, while trying to find that ever elusive stopping point. It’s always looming.