What a year!
There is a saying that sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn, and this year, we learned a lot. Not everything we had planned for this year happened as we had imagined. True to our mission, we will make things right. So let’s dive into a few of our key 2022 events and tell you how we are prepping ourselves for 2023.
Our launch
While we worked hard and were excited to launch our new product just before the 2022 bee season started, it turned out that our app wasn’t ready for prime time. As many of you will remember, we had some serious technical difficulties that prevented users from using our app and enjoying the features we had designed and tested with so many of you.
So what did we do this fall? We went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. Well, it’s not really from scratch, as our email inboxes were filled with suggestions, feedback, thoughts, and ideas from over 70 countries. While typing this, we are working hard to turn all these ideas into a new app: version 2.0. We will share more about the process soon and hope to make up for the expectations we couldn’t meet this year.
For one, we received a lot of feedback that we should provide a free trial for the app that requires no credit card information upfront. We have taken your feedback to heart and will offer a proper 30-day free trial, so you can try out the whole app experience and decide for yourself if you want to give our app a try for your 2023 season.
Apimondia
After a longer you-know-why (COVID) break, the international beekeeper community regrouped in Istanbul, Turkey, in August. It was a thrilling experience to wander through the conference center, catching snippets of conversations in every international language you can imagine. Also, we met with many of our project partners who had come to Istanbul from Lebanon and Ethiopia. After years of Zoom calls, meeting our colleagues in person was refreshing.
HiveTracks overseas
2022 was the second year of our projects in Lebanon, Uzbekistan, and Ethiopia, where we worked with women beekeepers to localize our app and test new features during many workshops. The highlight was our visit to Ethiopia and Uzbekistan for workshops with stakeholders from local and international governments, researchers, and beekeeping experts. We tested our new symptom checker, which will be part of the upcoming app release. Before returning home, we also made a short trip to Tajikistan to lay the groundwork for future collaborations.
What else is happening?
COP 15 (the United Nations Biodiversity Conference) took place in Montreal, Canada, earlier this month. The UN Conference gathered countries from around the world to discuss the importance of biodiversity and protecting it. Beekeepers and beekeeping are essential to any country’s strategy of protecting environments and ensuring healthy hives to pollinate food systems and ecosystems. You will soon hear more about how biodiversity and beekeeping are interlinked and how our beekeeper community contributes to making our planet more livable! Have you ever thought about what would happen if we could incentivize pollination services outside of agriculture? In your backyard? Worldwide? Stay tuned.
What’s next?
We are as busy as bees during a honey flow working on our new app. Hundreds of hours of testing, designing, tinkering, and iterating are shaping the 2.0 version of the software, and our excitement is growing. After a well-deserved holiday break starting this week, we will be back in full swing once the new year has begun. We are excited about entering one of the most promising years of our company history, and we can’t wait to take you on the 2023 beekeeping journey.
Have a great, restive, festive holiday season and an excellent start to the new year. We’ll be back.
Max
Comments