The story of Morningscore version 3

Morningscore version 3 is a big deal for us. Not just because of a complete redesign. But because it’s a whole new engine. Actually it’s like a restart of everything we do in the company. So yeah, a big deal 😊

And before i forget: The pricing plans have changed. This has already been covered in detail here.

In the questions below I try to answer what is up and down with version 3 and give you some personal insights.

Why did we change so much with version 3?

The original idea with version 3 was to build a little dashboard. But at that time I started talking more with customers about the design of our tool and what problems they saw. After talking to more than 30 customers, I realized that I had to stop building new features like crazy and start listening to what deeper problems people saw in the user experience.

This was a bit painful since I have designed all parts of the tool. I had to swallow my pride. At the same time everyone told me they loved many of the things Morningscore could do and the idea behind it. So the solution wasn’t just to fire myself 😉

The result of a lot of team and customer talks was that we needed a restart of the design. My graphics designer was of course very happy. My investors maybe less so. And I understand. It’s very expensive to start all over. But nevertheless we did.

What I didn’t know right away was that our developers were secretly craving for a new engine to build upon. We were still running on a lot of the same technology as in our 2017 prototype.

When they heard about the design talk they used that chance to recommend a new engine. And even though it is invisible to you it is by far the biggest achievement in version 3.

Let me put it like this this: The code has been fully cleaned.

What can this new engine do?

On paper it might sound super boring. First of all we went from using React (coding framework) to using… React!

Yes, impressive right? 😉

But it’s how we use React that has completely changed. We are on the cutting edge now. We code the smart way.

The simple way to understand the difference is that before we could reuse maybe 20 % of the code. In our new engine we reuse maybe 60 %.

In theory that speeds up our development 3 times.

In practice it is like a 1-2 times increase. So you will see us deliver new exciting features and bug fixes noticeably faster from now on.

This is a big deal for you 😊

Why did it take 1 year?

Version 3 was supposed to be a 6 months project. It turned into a 12 months thing instead. The biggest reasons are:

1) As we got deep into our code we could see that things would start breaking once we hit +1000 customers (currently just below 700).

2) Automating a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff took a while as well. The result is a development team which can now focus more on building things than just maintaining and keeping servers alive.

3) The major part: Rebuilding our entire frontend was a much bigger task than the development team had anticipated.

The truth is that this delay hurt us quite some. Not releasing new features for a year is something our customers had never seen from us before.

We are so thrilled to get back into releasing new exciting things on a monthly basis on top of our shiny and fast new engine.

When and what is the next release?

You can see the roadmap of planned features here.

Version 3.1 has actually already started with promising early signs. We are so excited to take our data quality to the next level.

In our measurements we already land in the top 10 of SEO tools (there are +200 SEO tools globally) in terms of data quality. We aim to be in the top 3 next to Ahrefs, SEMrush and Moz within the near future. This release is part of that plan.

We will also release more detailed link data for our super-users.

So that’s 3.1 😊

The remaining roadmap might change soon because of you and other customers.

We want to do a vote on all of our plans (plus your ideas on top) and let our customers decide when we prioritize what.

This will happen in our customer club on Facebook within a few months.

Why is version 3 a big restart of things?

This could be a long answer. So I will leave you with bullet points:

• 🏠 New office: We are moving to a bigger office in Odense, Denmark and open up shop in Amsterdam in January.
• 💶 Funding: We are ready for the next big round of funding in 2022.
• 👩‍🚀 Partnerships: Big new partnerships around v3 already signed.
• 🎮 Gamification: Everything that can be gamified will be gamified.
• 💜 How we look. Purple has been our thing for a while. Now it’s official.
• 🔨 How we build new features. We design first. Then ask customers. Then code.
• 💳 We switched our payment system to Stripe.
• 🌍 Website: Completely rebuilt as well. We are proud of it.

Do you have feedback for version 3 or Morningscore in general? I love to receive it, even if it’s critical. reach me at [email protected].