First of all, thank you for all the users that still use followmy.tv up to today! I love how active the users are in our community. Followmy.tv would never existed without our awesome users. And a special thanks to all of the users that donated, without you guys/girls followmy.tv would not be possible to maintain. And I'm grateful for having built a website that is used by 10s of thousands users worldwide daily.
Second, and the most important thing, we as the staff of followmy.tv have to say 3 important words to our users "We are sorry". We are sorry for being inactive this long, we are sorry for features that were promised but never came, we are sorry for not answering support tickets in time.
Now that those are out of the way, lets explain what is going on with followmy.tv, what the future holds and what the reality is.
Followmy.tv was founded 3 years ago as a side project by Jasper and me, we had big dreams, dreams like "We will have 1 million users", "I hope we can work for followmy.tv full time", "I hope followmy.tv becomes profitable enough for us to hire additional staff". None of these dreams came true so far, but I still dream of at least making one of those dreams reality.
Currently the state of followmy.tv is that we are in a hibernation state, the website is working stable, we are still growing daily with an average of 30 signups / day with over 30% active users. We have awesome crew members that moderate and add content daily. But all of this is overshadowed by the fact that our core developers are not developing any new features or are very slow in answering support tickets. Ofcourse this is unacceptable and I hope we can change this in the future.
Of course we do not do this by choice but the sad fact is, we just don't have enough free time to assign to followmy.tv to handle all of the feature requests and/or support tickets. We both have full time day jobs, we both have relationships, we both have a lot of other responsibilities that are more important that followmy.tv. Followmy.tv started as a side project and is still a side project.
The last update to followmy.tv was almost 2 years ago, but we have been doing a lot of development since then. Currently followmy.tv runs on an older version of the CakePHP framework, the moment CakePHP 2.x came out we started re building followmy.tv from the ground up resulting in a much more stable and faster website. This development project has been going on for over a year now and we are close but not close enough to release it to production. This is the reason why there are no features being released to the live website because we would have to build them twice, for the old site and the new site.
One of the biggest requests is the API and the mobile application. I have been working on the API for over a year now and it is complete for about 75%. But due to lacking free time to work on it, it has been delayed immensely. We were also working on a complete new redesign of the website which we scrapped for now because that was going to take too much time to complete now. All in all, the new version of followmy.tv is very close to be finished but not yet. Its the last push and testing phase that is taking a lot of time, and currently we both have almost zero time to commit to followmy.tv.
Financially followmy.tv is costing us a considerate amount monthly to keep it in the air, the combination of ads and donations is just not bringing enough cash in to cover all the costs, let alone hiring software developers to develop for us.
How does the future of followmy.tv look like?
This is unclear, one thing I'm completely 100% sure off though, followmy.tv will keep existing as long as I'm existing. Its my biggest software passion and will always be my biggest passion. Some things have to change though, our crew has to be more active. I personally vouch that once I'm settled in in my new home (I'm in the middle of moving to a different country) I will make more free time to work on followmy.tv.
We will also start looking for extra developers / designer within our community that share our passion and want to help out and want the opportunity to make followmy.tv better.
If you are a software developer with a lot of experience in CakePHP (or PHP in general) or if you are an awesome UI designer, please drop us an email on info@followmy.tv.
I hope you (the awesome user) accept my apology, and I hope you will keep using our website and have the patience. We really appreciate every one of you that use our website daily, weekly or just once.
Cheers,
Jelle