VeloViewer PRO – one year in!

Posted on | by Ben Lowe

The 9th November 2015 will mark 1 year since the introduction of VeloViewer PRO and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has upgraded to PRO and helped to support the site over this last year (and prior to that).  It has been an exciting time for me personally as it has allowed me to drop 2 days a week of the day job to focus on supporting and adding features to the site which hopefully you’ve all benefitted from.  I’m really excited about both improving the existing functionality and working on new areas over the next 12 months and fingers crossed the PRO membership numbers will increase and I’ll be able to do a Ray Maker and turn VeloViewer into a full-time job!

Renewals

Lots of people have been asking about how and when they will be able renew their PRO membership – Once the date shown on your Update page is reached then you will be presented with the PayPal link to pay again and will be given 1 week to do so before any data gets truncated down.  That is two weeks from when you first see the message rather than two weeks from the date shown. So, don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to renew.  There is no automatic renewal or taking of money this time but the default option for future payments is by setting up a recurring, subscription payment which can easily be cancelled in PayPal if you’d rather it didn’t renew automatically.

IMPORTANT: PayPal two-factor authentication doesn’t seem to work with subscriptions so if PayPal doesn’t let you pay first try then head back to your Update page and use the fallback “Pay Now” buttons that will appear instead.

Just to make things neater I’m upping the price of PRO by 1p to £10.

PRO✚

Last year lots of people said I wasn’t charging enough (for a point of reference it is $119 a year for Training Peaks) so I’ll be introducing a PRO✚ membership for £20 a year which removes the restrictions on the Update and Rivals page as to how often you can check placings, check for new segments and update your rivals.  You could also go for the PRO✚ option just to show additional support for the site.

The last 12 months

One thing my wife has bugged me about is that I probably don’t do enough publicising of all the work I do on the site, what the new features are or what bugs have been fixed.  I try and put everything of note on the Facebook page but it is a bit of a lottery how many people’s timelines those posts appear on.  So I’ve started a change log in the last couple of weeks and I’ll look to surface that on your Update page and on the blog and will look to be a bit more active on the blog writing up new features.

Most of last winter I spent the majority of my time working on the performance enhancements which have made a massive improvement to the load times of the pages and some aspects of the update process. It was a huge, scary, fundamental, time consuming change to the backend of the site but has made such a great improvement that it was well worth doing.  Since that went live I’ve hopefully been able to roll out enhancements and new features on a fairly regular basis which I’m set to continue doing.

My remarkably low budget marketing strategy took an exciting turn back in March when Eurosport showed my Tweeted 3D profile of the Poggio in the last few kms of Milan-San Remo and since then they have been making a fairly regular appearance. So a big thank you to Eurosport 🙂

It was also great to see Neil Stephens and Mathew Hayman of Orica Green Edge using my profiles to prep for stages in the Vuelta a España on their Back Stage Pass video.  From what I hear they aren’t the only ones!  Thanks to Team Lotto-NL Jumbo for their regular retweeting.

The next 12 months

I get emails every day with suggestions (and bugs) which I try to respond to ASAP and the majority of the suggestions get added to my rather large to-do list. Some of them might be added into the site within a few hours if you get me at the right time and the change is small.  Other suggestions might wait in a holding pile until I get a few more requests for the same thing. I do love hearing your ideas so do keep them coming but I can’t make any promises as to if/when I’ll build them.

I’m looking at grouping changes together so I can concentrate on a single screen for a while and make as many improvements as possible in that one place before moving onto another. Recently I’ve been concentrating on the Summary page but I have growing lists for enhancements to most of the other pages that I’ll move onto soon.

I’ve also got at least 2 major new areas that I’m actively working on that I’m finding rather exciting. I’ll provide more info on those once I’ve got a working beta version ready.

Spread the word

The majority of new VeloViewer users come from hearing other people talking about the site so thank you for doing that and please keep on doing it! The more people that join VeloViewer then the more new, good stuff I’ll be able to create for you all to use.

Cheers, Ben

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