We just opened the Goplan Forums in an effort to give you guys (the users) a better way to get in touch both with us as well as other members of the community.

Use the forums to talk about feature requests, discuss best practices, report bugs, and generally discuss the application. The whole team here is going to be around the forums answering questions, so rest assured they won’t go unanswered.

The forums also include a section for those of you who have coding chops and want to build applications on top of the Goplan functionality - so make sure you hop on.

Click here to visit the forums. Have fun!

It’s now been one month since we officially launched Goplan (our collaboration product) built by ourselves, for ourselves (and now for you guys) - we’ve built others in the past since our business is to help companies launch web-apps, but this one’s our own baby. So it makes sense to look at how last month was, and how it’s going to influence our future.

The comparison with Basecamp

The first thing that happened - and we were expecting it to a certain extent -, was that Goplan was compared to Basecamp by 37Signals. It is a valid comparison given how the two solutions serve a similar purpose. However, our goal is not to eat away at 37Signals’s audience and here’s why:

We built our product because existing solutions (Basecamp included) did not fit our needs. Basecamp lacks a few features we need (issue tracking being the obvious one), and somehow their navigation never “clicked” for us. There’s people who share these problems - and thats the kind of people we want to help.

Ultimately web-based collaboration is about using tools that become second nature to you - that help your team’s process (even if the team’s only you). If Goplan’s not the tool for you, find the right one and kick ass with it. But tell us why you didn’t like our product and we’ll make it better with your input.

The reactions and requests

There’s been hundreds of posts on the blogosphere about the product - we’re really happy about that. And there’s been some amazing feedback, both positive and negative. A lot of people sent in feature requests for things they’d love to have, and with quite a few issues we overlooked (it happens, even with 6 months of testing) were found and fixed.

We’ve always had an open attitude when it comes to talking about the things we want to build into the product, and those we don’t. We openly published known issue lists in the past, and the things we were working on. We’ll continue building on top of Goplan in the exact same way - we’ll let you know and listen to you first, and then push it out.

The future

We’re now actively prioritizing the things we’ll add to the application and we’ll publish a list of updates very soon - within a few days at the most -, so keep an eye out for that. We’ve listened to your feedback and things like personalization, global calendaring and better experience are right at the top.

So now, the question: how has your experience been this far, and what could we do better? As always, feel free to send us an email or leave a comment right here. Thanks!