One year ago today, we launched AgileZen to the public. It had been a long road to get to launch. Niki and I had been building the product during nights and weekends for a long time, while I was still working a full time job, and she was still working full-time on her Ph.D.

When we finally launched, I had put in about 500 hours of solid development over the previous six weeks. I was crawling across the finish line. Niki and I were confident that we had a great product, but we weren’t sure if anyone would care enough to buy it, or even if anyone would even pay attention at all.

In the first week after launch, we had over a thousand signups, and we sold enough accounts to easily cover our hosting costs in the first 24 hours. To see that sort of reaction, it made all of the hard work we’d put in worthwhile. We knew we were on to something good.

It’s funny to say that it’s only been a year since we launched, because so much has happened in the meantime. The product has changed dramatically, and sometimes I forget that features we use all the time weren’t included at launch. Not only that, but Niki and I have sold the company, and moved from Akron to Raleigh to work for Rally Software. All great things — but our lives are very different than they were a year ago.

The other day, I stumbled across the very first mockup of the AgileZen interface, and on the product’s birthday, we thought it’d be fitting to share it with everyone.

It sounds silly when I think about it now, but originally I wanted the interface to be all grayscale, so it would blend into the background and let users focus on their work. I’m glad we didn’t go quite that far, but you can see shades of the approach in today’s version of AgileZen, and I’d venture to say we’ve succeeded so far in our goal of staying out of our users way.

Now that we’ve joined Rally, we’ve got all kinds of crazy ideas about things we can add to AgileZen. Some of these you’ll start seeing soon — very soon, actually — and some others we’re still debating about whether they belong in the product in the first place. After all, we’re still dedicated to keeping AgileZen simple and easy to use above all else. Now that Brec’s joined the team, we’ve got the capacity to implement some great stuff that we’ve always wanted but kept pushing off because of lack of time.

Not only that, but we can start taking shots at some of the harder problems people have in managing their work — problems that we’ve always felt AgileZen was uniquely positioned to solve.

Both us and the product have come a long way over the past year, but we have a long way to go and a lot of work still to do. Thanks to everyone for helping us along the way, and be sure to stay tuned over the next few months, because there’s some fantastic stuff coming.