My name is Kevin Basset, and at Progressier, I'm the founder, developer, designer, marketer, salesperson and customer support. 🙃 Thanks for checking Progressier out!
I love being a solopreneur, because it allows me to move fast. It also means that by becoming a customer, you'll know exactly who to blame if something is not to your liking.
Found a bug? That's on me. A missing feature? That's on me as well. An ugly design or a typo? Yup, that's me too.
Portrait of me by my 6-year-old daughter Kyra The Raison d'être of Progressier 💡
Let me throw a little French in here. Because, well, I'm a French citizen (nobody's perfect!). I'm also a proud resident of the city of Taipei, where I've been living for nearly ten years now.
I developed Progressier because I wasn't satisfied with the amount of work required to add the block of features we typically call "PWA" into an app.
Writing code didn't seem like an acceptable solution to me. Most PWA implementations are copies of somebody else's implementation. What really changes is a few variables here and there.
And building a PWA the right way is actually pretty hard: a lot of tedious cross-platform testing, inexplicable browser quirks, opaque service worker code, and an ever-changing set of web APIs.
PWAs are a hassle to develop, a hassle to maintain. There had to be a better solution.
It all started with COVID-19 😷
In January 2020, I gathered a couple of friends and together we built The Coronavirus App link not working?. That PWA, which was originally just meant to be a fun weekend project became an unexpected success: 15+ million users, 3,000+ supporters on Buy Me A Coffee, #1 on Product Hunt, featured on Business Insider, Forbes, and ABC News.
Someone pointed out that we had built a pretty kick-ass PWA implementation. I thought it'd be cool to make it a standalone product, so anyone could add it to their own apps as well.
There's more to come 🔮
Right now, I think Progressier is already pretty awesome. The current product is the result of hundreds of discussions with Progressier customers, and an endless cycle of tests and iterations. Of course I'm biased, so you'll just have to try it for yourself (no credit card required!).
From a feature set perspective, I'm far from done. I have a lot of ideas that go beyond just the scope of what falls under the umbrella term PWA. And I'm shipping new features and improvements practically daily.
Ten years from now, Progressier will be an even bigger and more impactful solution. I'm in it for the long haul — not for a quick exit. And by the way, Progressier is a profitable company, so my only hope is that I can continue running it forever (🤞).
Disrupting the status quo 🦸♂️
Google and Apple have conditioned us to believe that apps must be downloaded from app stores. I say they don't. Not really. Not anymore. With Progressier, that's what I'm trying to prove.
A PWA is as much an app as anything else you find on Google Play or the App Store. In fact, you could even say they're better apps, because they're not limited to a particular operating system.
That being said, I have never liked the term Progressive Web App. It's just too technical. Too abstract. Whoever came up with that name pooped the bed on that one, if you ask me.
Instead, I like the term Universal App. With Progressier, this is precisely what I'm striving to make a reality.
Apps that are free from the constraints of the app stores.
Apps that work everywhere.
Universal apps.
Google and Apple can't make this happen.
But maybe Progressier can. 🔥