After acquiring Inquisitor in the early summer we pulled together a team of developers who love Inquisitor to extend Inquisitor to Firefox and IE. The Inquisitor team includes folks in HQ Sunnyvale, Bangalore, Orlando, and Vancouver. Each project and team is different – there were three things that we did well that made this product.
Passion for the Product
People who are genuinely interested in the product they are building are 5x better then people who are just as smart and capable who are only mildly interested in the product. We have people like David Watanabe, Paul Alex Broman, Giju Eldhose, and Priya Vadivel who are passionate about Inquisitor and it shows in the effort and the end-product.
Details, Details, Details
The team’s passion to get every detail right no pixel or bug was considered too small - was incredibly satisfying. It is so tempting to add more features, but until you nail every feature in your product which is really hard to do, don’t start implementing new ones. And if you don’t nail that feature or don’t believe you have to then you should strongly consider removing it from the product before it becomes dead weight.
Working with Firefox
Working with the Mozilla team during the development process improved the end-product. Folks like Basil Hashem, Rey Bango and Arch provided excellent suggestions and a thorough review of the product. While people give the Apple AppStore and Firefox grief for their respective App and Extension rigorous approval processes it is actually a super-smart thing to do in the early years of a developer marketplace – Facebook is learning this the hard way. In the early years, I say the more rigorous the better as it will quickly filter out the those developers who are committed to building great products from those simply looking to do something trivial.
So, whether you prefer IE, Firefox, or Safari — Inquisitor is now available on all these. If you are in the market for a faster and smart search experience from your browser check it out.