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- Master Fullstack Development and finally ship a product

3 years ago

Introducing Fungarzione: The app for keeping your users in the loop

#Startups

#Webdev

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@derstudi

I am writing this article because making a landing page in 2020 is still a PITA.
Web Development, yay! 👏️

 

Fungarzione started as a collaborative changelog app, but it quickly evolved in a tool that covers the entire process of an app:

 
  • User Requests
  • Public Roadmap
  • Collaborative Changelogs

It's already in production and we're using it for Sizzy (changelogs, user requests, roadmap)

 

I've been working on it on and off for the last period, and the total amount of work can be summarized into 4-5 workweeks.

 

 

As I was coming up with more ideas about the app, I started getting overwhelmed and I realized that the scope and potential of the app are really big. So I decided to get more serious about it and hire someone to work on it full-time, starting this week. The goal is to open it to beta testers in a month and launch the first version of the platform by the end of the year.

 

I wanted to write a bit more about the motivation behind the project and the progress so far.

 

Big shout-out to Blitz - it's really crazy how much value you can ship to users when there's no API layer to slow you down.

 

What's with the name?

FUNGARZIONE?!?! What the hell does that mean?

 

Fungarzione comes from the word Fungangarzione. And behind the origin of Fungangarzione there is a really long and boring story, so I guess you'll have to hang out in my stream to find out 😜️

 

Also, the classic way of naming apps is getting boring, so I'm glad the app is not called Changeloggy, Bugzy, UserFeedbackzy, PubliczRoadmapper, or even worse, Userizzy. Who keeps naming apps like Sizzy, Twizzy, etc?! Ugh.

 

Why did I make this?

We were using Headway for writing the changelogs for Sizzy for more than a year.

 

Each changelog in Headway is a huge markdown document, so we had to:

 
  • Use 2 different Notion boards to plan and separate the changelog into individual cards
  • Collaborate on the Notion cards with the Sizzy team.
  • Export markdown from all the cards and merge them in a giant markdown document
  • Copy and paste the intro and outro for evert changelog
  • Publish to Headway

In the past few months, I'm working on the changelog alone, so I decided to directly write the giant markdown document in Headway instead of using Notion.

 

Aside from it being an overwhelming experience, I also lost my 3 hours of progress by accidentally closing the tab.

 

So I said: fuck it, I'd rather build a proper app instead of writing this changelog again.

 

sOmEtHinG siMiLaR eXiStS

I know. I've heard about Headway, Canny, Trello, Notion, GitHub, and a billion other tools that do similar things.

 

I was actually using a combination of them to cover all the needs that we have in Sizzy, but I wanted a specialized tool that can do everything and cover the entire user journey.

 

Also, to be honest, some of them charge a lot of money for doing very basic things in a very crappy way.

 

Here's what Fungarzione can do (for now) 👇

 

Projects

You can create multiple projects in Fungarzione, and manage all of them in one place.

 

I wanted to name them "Apps", but I didn't want to limit the use case of Fungarzione to software development. However, if you're developing apps, you will create a project per app.

 

 

You can invite multiple team members to a project, and grant them specific permissions:

 

 

User Requests

Users can submit requests:

 
  • Bug reports
  • Feature suggestions
  • Improvements

 

Project Members can:

 
  • Privately chat on user requests
  • Publicly comment on the request (to discuss it with the user)
  • Lock a request
  • Close a request
  • Merge a request into an already existing Roadmap Card
  • Approve a request (this can trigger a webhook)

 

Public Roadmap

  • Approved user requests automatically go into the Roadmap of the project
  • Project members can customize the columns of the roadmap
  • Users will be notified when progress has been made on their request

 

Project members can combine multiple User Requests into one Roadmap Entry.

 

 

Changelogs

Instead of publishing a giant markdown document, a team of collaborators would start working on individual changelog entries. The editor supports Markdown, but also MDX, with a set of custom components that would make the changelogs way better.

 

Creating a changelog entry is super simple, and it's not as overwhelming as starting a giant markdown document.

 

 

Entries are auto-saved every few seconds, so the progress cannot be accidentally lost.

 

Custom MDX components

Fungarzione comes with a set of custom MDX components like: Highlight, Shortcut, etc.

 

For example: Using <Shortcut mac="cmd,shift,p" other="ctrl,shift,p"/> in the changelog will automatically convert it to Cmd + Shift + P on macOS, Ctrl + Shift + P on Windows/Linux.

 

Dynamic variables in Entries

If you look at the screenshot above you'll notice the usage of $butler$ in the markdown editor. But in the preview, you see something else. That's because butler is a Project variable that will get replaced automatically in all the changelogs.

 

Variables are useful for not repeating things all the time, but the biggest value is using them for content that might change down the road: download links, contact links, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

 

If you use a variable everywhere, you wouldn't have to edit all of your changelogs, you can just change the variable and the content will automatically change.

 

Examples of variables:

 

Publishing and reviewing process

Individual entries can then progress from Draft to Ready For Review to Published. Team collaboration features like assigning people and commenting on the individual entries will be available soon.

 

 

After creating a bunch of entries, a changelog is created by combining individual entries, as well as adding a list of small bug fixes and improvements, which will appear grouped at the end of the document.

 

 

Then, the draft changelog is moved to "Ready for Review" and it cannot be published, unless all of the entries in that changelog are already published.

 

 

Users can leave feedback individually for each changelog, as well as subscribe to get an email when a new changelog is published.

 

 

Project members can get an overview of the feedback or read the details of individual feedback entries:

 

 

That's an actual screenshot of the actual feedback we received for a changelog. Thank you user who commented "aldgkjadlgka", that's really meaningful and I appreciate it!

 

Widgets

Popup widget (You can check it out on the Sizzy landing page)

 

Create request widget (Example: embedded in the settings panel of the desktop Sizzy app)

 

Summary widget (Example: when there is a new update for Sizzy, we show this)

 

That's it! (for now)

 

Want to move your project to Fungarzione?

You can already create an account if you want to follow and participate in existing projects. You will also get notified when the platform is open for creating your own projects.

 

I'm looking for people who'd like to port their changelog/roadmap/board now, so I can get some feedback on the editor experience. You need to have a production app with an established user base, as well as an existing changelog. Just shoot me an email and we can discuss.

 

I'm planning to live-stream my work on the app, so if you have any ideas or suggestions you're more welcome to join my stream! 🙌

 

I want to give another shout-out to all the people on Twitch who helped me while I was building this app (even though they're credited in the footer of the page) and to Praneet for helping with some of the features.

 

There's no way I would've shipped it in such a short time without your help 💜

 

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