"more than 20 engineers" on a to-do list app? Isn't that quite an overhead? I mean 37signals have 9 developers and they successfully run several products (even with their easy-going lifestyle).
3 iOS Developers
3 Android Developers
2 Mac Developers
2 Windows Developers
5 Web Developers (they not only build the web app)
5 Backend Developers
1 Sysadmin
Isn't Wunderlist/Wunderkit essentially a free todo-list app? How are you planning to monetize into a sustainable business?
Fred Wilson wrote about user metrics, he called it the 30/10/10 rule (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/07/301010.html) - 30% monthly active users, 10% daily active users and 10% new users each month. We can apply this rule to Wunderlist, but as we're in the 'task' market, we generally have more monthly users than daily users - because the product is more optimized for weekly use.
With 30ish people, let's say you burn $2 million a year. You'd need to get 30,000 people to each pay ~$70 a year for your app. My numbers might be wrong, but I'm just curious how you'd get people to spend that when it's so easy to switch to another task app.
Joel on Software: Things You Should Never Do http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
In addition, contrary to Spolsky's claim, unmaintained code does rust, or "rot". Libraries you were using might go unmaintained in newer versions of a framework that fixes critical vulnerabilities. Code that held up well to thousands of users doesn't necessarily when you're talking about millions of users. Fighting code/app entropy is a real thing.
But we're taking steps to make sure this backend neither suffers from the "second system effect" (we got that out of the way with Wunderkit ;-)), nor simply needs to be rewritten again in a year or so. Spolsky is correct that in general, code is harder to read than write - which is why we're writing Wunderlist 2's backend to be easier to read at the cost of extra work up front. Strict conventions, enforcing documentation, challenging any code that isn't the clearest way to express the problem it's solving - well, we'll have an engineering blog post to discuss our "Pull Request Parties" and other related process improvements in depth at a later point in time/
The short version, though is that the WL2 backend is probably the most beautiful, readable codebase I've ever had the privilege of working with. Of course I'm more than a little biased, but hopefully the proof will be in the pudding when we launch it out into the world.
> So we decided to rebuild Wunderlist for all major platforms (Web, iOS, Android Mac & Windows).
> So we decided to rebuild Wunderlist for all major platforms (Web, iOS, Android Mac & Windows)
The android client hasn't been a wrapper for a long time, and the new iOS version we don't know, since it's not yet released.