The Road Ahead

Many, if not most, Support Seekers are seeking support on behalf of someone they care for rather than themselves. The current profile system is not well set up for this reality.

In order to get to launch I kept it as simple as possible, but improving this, and enabling Support Seekers to more easily separate themselves from the one who actually needs the support will improve searchability.

This is a significant upgrade that will need to be justified by community adoption and growth. I’ve invested my time heavily into getting this far but need your support in order to justify an upgrade like this.

Please continue to refer your mates to get the community growth necessary to make this a worthwhile upgrade.

Given the nature of the market that I am looking to serve, I take the accessibility requirements of Drop Bear Care seriously.

But building this has been a challenge that has stretched me in many different directions and I am well aware that I may have missed things that aren't obvious to someone like me who is fortunate enough to not depend on accessibility features in order to access the world.

If you find something that needs improvement from an accessibility point of view, please, PLEASE, let me know!

We’re currently a tiny community and your search results are going to be very short lists.

But as the community grows, that will change and you’ll be wanting to filter results to be more specific about who you are looking for.

I’m well aware of this future need and hope to build it before the need becomes real.

What isn’t super clear to me is exactly which filters you would like to have available. So let me know which filters you would like me to add. Help shape the future of Drop Bear Care!

Drop Bear Care is not the prettiest app going around. My focus has very much been on getting something to work. Fiddle-farting around trying to improve the appearance was a major time sink that could easily have sunk the entire project.

Now that the basic functionality is in place, it's time to cycle back and clean up the UI.

Once we have an income and resources to reinvest, I’ll look at bringing a graphic designer on board. Quite proud of how far I came on my own but have to recognise that graphic design just isn’t my forte.

I don’t like doing invoices. It’s a tedious necessity. This is one of the few things that the incumbent meeting place platforms do that makes life easier. But at their commission rates, I’d rather do it myself. Tedious or not.

I’m guessing most Support Providers would agree. I’d like to build in an invoicing layer that takes some of the tedium out of the process and also enables quarterly summaries for BAS reporting purposes.

This one does raise significantly the consequences that come with making a mistake at scale, so it is going to need very careful planning and discussions with my lawyer.

Please let me know if this is a feature that you would like to see.

I’d love to upgrade the identity verification process to include reading the chips on the passport.

ID verification is a once-off process that doesn’t meaningfully alter your experience of using Drop Bear Care. However, reading the passport chip directly has a number of benefits:

Unfortunately, it may also prove to be quite a fiddly and unfriendly experience for users. So implementing this will be a bit of an experiment to see how bad the user experience actually is and assess whether the benefits justify it.

This is definitely going to be the least popular of the upgrades. Sorry about that!

But I do want to be completely transparent about where we are headed.

I firmly believe that Drop Bear Care is a fantastic addition to the Australian support community for both providers and those who need their support. And I am proud to have made it happen.

But it has to work for all of us – me included.

My guarantee to you is that my prices will ALWAYS be a negligible fraction of what the incumbents are charging in commissions at the time of Drop Bear Care’s launch.