Single Page Apps were about to storm out the classical client-server MVC type of web application approach. Cloud transformation of most enterprises was just starting. There wasn’t a better time to experiment with a cloud native app, to find a niche and build a SaaS business around it.

I was trapped in doing CRUD apps in my day job and had a colleague who felt the same way. Both looking for something more challenging and the urge of having fun creating something together. Choosing the idea was an easy one, as my colleague Bartosz had a physiotherapist friend who was in desperate need for an appointment tracking solution in his workplace.

After ~4 months of spare time work, the MVP was ready. The premise of setting dead-simple appointments and sharing it with colleagues working at the same workplace was about to go live. On-boarding was really simple with OAuth providers such as Google & Facebook and had neat features like real-time notifications. We could soft-launch with what we had, gather feedback from our first 2 users and iterate over and over to reach perfection.

We did the soft launch and follow-up iterations part. Since we were in Microsoft’s startup program we could utilize all the benefits of Azure and don’t pay a dime for 3 years! With such infrastructure and our CI/CD pipeline, new releases were fast and hassle-free. We also didn’t have any problem attracting other fellow colleagues to join us. Fight club was growing.

The product was %90 there and first non-paying customer loved it and used it for a very long time. Last %10 was to compose a TOS, privacy policy, thinking about pricing and integrating with a payment provider to collect recurring payments.

The last %10 was never done due to several reasons. I moved to another city. We already got what we wanted from this project and gradually lost our interest on the topic as Google already released Angular 2 without a migration path from AngularJS. It sucked big time when it came to code scalability and if we would want to be serious about this, we would have to re-write the entire app in Angular 2.

We never did that. But we continued to support the app for about 3 years forward just for the sake of not disappointing our first non-paying customer. Finally we decided there is not much point in paying for running costs (3 years later we couldn’t continue to use Azure for free) and the domain names, hipvisit.com & hipvi.com both aren’t active anymore. Another project buried to the side-project graveyard.