December 2024 Update

December 2024 Update

What a last month of November it's been. Where have we been and where are we going?? Let's jump right in!

Update FROM November:

As I read back through our hopeful opportunities from November on the last blog post, I want to give you some updates as we see things come to fruition. The first thing I said we'll do in November is CLEAN UP. With any new platform, you're bound to have bugs. And with Accountable Driving, that was no different (unfortunately). What it allowed us to do was take a quick step back and really focus on a few things. We had issues with people signing up, issues with board creation, issues with adding drivers, the whole 9. Instead of being down casted, I look to this being encouraging as users were WILLING to let us know and excited to quickly see fixes to things that (we can test it all day long but most things break when they get out into the wild) and sure enough, some did. But we got about 80% fixed and we're still trucking along to get some smaller things addressed.

We did allow for the ability to join multiple family boards. Currently right now, I'm a part of 3 boards. We're currently working through the process of owning multiple family boards which will be done through a brand new subscription on Accountable at $44.99/mo. for owning up to 5 family boards. This will likely be out within 1-2 weeks.

One thing we learned from our data is when people create a family board, they are immediately wanting to add drivers. We give them the option to skip this but from data, they're not wanting to do so. So we're going to adjust our design to make that even easier for the newly board owner.

I'm proud of our team for focusing heavily on reducing battery usage when not connected to your bluetooth beacon. A big opportunity for us is to allow the driver every time when they get in the car to automatically pair with their device. This is only possible if the app is running in the background of the phone (the driver has not swiped up and out). Most users want to reduce battery life by swiping up and out of the app (Apple has already debunked that this doesn't actually save battery life - read more here).

Current Stats FROM November:

Family Boards: 11
Drivers on Family Boards: 35
Drivers on App: 59
Friend Relationships: 62
Orders: 70
Devices Ordered: 178

Update FOR December:

As we move forward into December, we have a few BIG things as well as plenty of small things and clean up. 

Friends is up first. Now you might have seen above that there are already 62 "friend relationships" without having friends??? Anytime you join a family board, you automatically are friends with everyone in that board. What we're releasing coming out soon are stand alone friends. You will not have to be a part of a family board to view people's driving data. It's a friend request just like on Instagram or Facebook. You request to be friends and then you can see their profile and driving data to hold them accountable. We're introducing this because we're finding a lot of people are interested in trying out Accountable with just 2 people. 

Allowing users to own multiple family boards is big and I believe that that will really help us moving forward. 

We have a "Remind" Notification coming out. This will force send a notification to driver when a friend of theirs notices that the app is not open in the background of the phone. This will encourage that driver to at minimum open the app so the next time the driver goes to drive, it will track.

Search is coming out allowing you to search family boards and drivers. All family boards will be private with that being their only settings. Drivers will have the ability to have their profile private or public.

We've got a brand new support feature coming to the settings to allow users to connect with me so I can help them navigate the app if they have any questions.

And to close, a lot of small updates to our algorithm on how we're tracking driving. 

In Conclusion:

We're just getting started but I believe the best is yet to come for this little idea of turning safe driving social. Thanks so much for reading and joining the journey. All bluetooth devices are completely free through the end of December so don't wait to grab as many as you need for you and your family!

See you in the new year!
Zander Huff
Founder of Accountable Driving

Back to News