Today I spent a good portion of my day migrating the TextFugu “bounty program” over to a brand new system that should make things oh so much easier to keep track of (the other half of the day was spent going through all the bounties – lots of catch up to be done after getting back from my funeral leave). Before, I would get your e-mail, and then put it on a spreadsheet, and things would get all jumbley. Now, I’m using an actual ticket capturing system which will allow myself (and others) to coordinate bounty checking without stepping on each other’s toes. I’m so happy for the new system, which should solve a ton of problems that existed before.

Migration

Migrating bounties over to the new system wasn’t that bad, though we’ll see how things go once pay-time rolls around. To be totally honest, organization of the old system was terrible (all that is fixed now). Rest assured, if anything, I’ll be overpaying due to my organizational snafus, not underpaying.

Here’s how it works now – sounds (and is) kind of clunky in some ways, but with more than one person checking bounties I’m loving the new process:

1. You fill out the bounty form, which is a form I built using Wufoo (I didn’t expect their service to be so useful and maleable, but now I can’t live without it).
2. After you fill out the information and hit submit, the data gets sent to bounties@textfugu.com, which automatically forwards to hello@textfugu.com (the general customer support e-mail). From there we will respond to your e-mail and say “thank you” (because you’re awesome), and then forward bounties we want to take action on to Lighthouse, which is a great web app for tracking bugs, assigning jobs, etc.
3. Within Lighthouse, we can assign the task to the right person (usually me, for now anyways), mark it as resolved (or invalid, if we decide it’s not something we want to do), and then from there we have a shared Google Spreadsheet to mark down bounties that have to be paid that month.

So, there are four web apps being used to make the Bounty system work, and make it work smoothly. Seems like a lot (and has more steps than the previous version), but now everything is kept track of, and it’ll be easier to get through the bounties on a more regular basis.

Note on Previous Bounties: All of the bounties from the last two weeks have been processed, but I didn’t send e-mails out with them. Due to the migration, it made it pretty hard to get e-mails out to everyone, but all actioned bounties have been associated with your usernames even if you didn’t get an e-mail. Jdkce, you did pretty well :)

I’m also spending the next 9 days going through Season 1 and Season 2 to make them better, streamline some things more effectively, and overall just make the experience better for all of you learning Japanese. Thanks to all the response I’ve gotten so far from you guys, I think I’ve also figured out my key demographic: Self-learners of Japanese. This is a really tough group, but nobody else really caters to them, I think. I’ve already done a lot of things with TextFugu to help keep self-learners motivated, but now I’ll be able to focus on that much more to make the experience for self-learners of Japanese so much better (and non self-learners won’t have any problems either, if you’re out there!).

I’ve also gotten a little bit of help on the customer service side, so if you send us a message, hopefully you can expect to get a quicker (and more pleasant than me) response. Of course, you can still always e-mail me directly.

Coming up:

• Going through chapters one-by-one and making content / usability adjustments. You’ll start to see sub-chapters pop up one at a time on various chapters to make your life easier (especially when going back and re-reading something specific).
• New worksheets: I’ll be re-doing all old worksheets to streamline them with a new “style” – content won’t really change in these, so don’t worry, just want to go back and pretty up old worksheets and make them easier to use.
• Talking with users. I won’t be doing this right away, but starting in February I’d love to talk to some of you and learn more about how you use TextFugu and what you like / don’t like about it. This will help me make a better product, and market it more effectively!

Of course, there’s a lot more than that going on, but those are the main things I’m focusing on this week. Cheers and thank you to all of the support so far!