History of GenoPro

Written by Daniel Morin, founder of GenoPro.

Origin of GenoPro

In 1997, as a hobby I started writing code to create a software to draw family trees.  Back then, the software was called Generations and its name was later changed to GenoPro. From now on, I will use the name GenoPro to make this page easier to read for you.

In June 1998, the first version of GenoPro was released to the public.  To my surprise, GenoPro was quite popular and I received a lot of feedback and suggestions from people who downloaded the software and were using it.  I was not interested making money with GenoPro, so I was asking users if they considered GenoPro was worth the price of a post card and a stamp, to send me a post card of their town/city.  I received post cards from all over the world, many of which had invitations to visit them if one day I am traveling to their country.  I filled two shoebox of postcards.

In year 2000, I got kicked out by my ISP for consuming too much bandwidth, exceeding my quota of 1 GB per month.  I tried to negotiate with them offering them extra, such as paying $20 per extra GB, but after a few months, they told me I had to go elsewhere.  Today such a situation is funny because most bandwidth packages start at 1 TB which is 1000 times larger than 1 GB, however back then it was a problem for me.  I spent several weeks looking for different hosting options.  My conclusion was it would cost me several thousand for software licenses, mostly the mail server license which at that time was almost $2,000, and about $500 per month to rent a dedicated server with a 20 GB bandwidth package.  I could no longer keep GenoPro as a hobby and give it away for free because the expenses were too high.  Also, the time I was spending answering emails from users was considerable, and the rest of my time was spent writing C++ code to improve the product and add new features.

I wanted GenoPro to be affordable, I decided to charge $10 per license.  After a few years struggling to pay the bills, a friend of mine told me the price was too low and people may perceive $10 as a poor product, so the price was increased to $24.  This was much better, as it doubled my income, however I was still living on my savings.  While being a student, I got a job as a software engineer at Microsoft and managed to purchase a few Microsoft stock.  This investment turned out great during the dot-com bubble and I sold just at the right time, thus having enough savings to work on GenoPro.  To stretch my savings, I moved to a small apartment about 100 km (65 miles) away from all my family so I can focus on my work.  This apartment was inexpensive and rather small, around 3.6 by 3.6 meters (12 by 12 feet).  My desk was a sheet of plywood: on one end was where I was eating and on the other end of the table was where I was programming.  I was living somewhat like a hermit, sometimes not leaving my apartment for several days.  As long as there was food in the fridge, what was the point of leaving?  I also ended up with a big wild beard for not shaving for a few years.

GenoPro 2007

After many years of intense work on GenoPro Beta, finally came GenoPro 2007.  This product was a success, mostly because uses had been waiting for it for so many years.  During the first months after the launch of GenoPro 2007, the sales were great, averaging between $500 to $1000 per day.  The expenses where also high, as GenoPro was spending about $10,000 per month just on Google Adwords, plus spending an extra $1000 per month on advertising on other networks such as Yahoo and MSN.  I was actively looking for someone who would take care of advertising and marketing so GenoPro could grow, hire employees full time and have an office.  I ended up spending a lot of money paying people to fill in that position, or doing work such as creating press releases which were never sent, and/or tried other strategies which did not worked.

Gradually, the sales of GenoPro started to decline.  In 2008, there was a big drop due to the housing crisis, and the drop continued.  Meanwhile I was doing all the email technical support and answering phone.  Thanks to the online forum, http://support.genopro.com/
http://support.genopro.com/, users would help each other, however my problem was the volume of emails and phone calls was increasing to a point I had no life.  I would typically spend between 4 to 6 hours a day on the phone.  The least gratifying part was most of the calls were from users without computer skills being upset about the software, yet their 'problem' were not related at all to GenoPro.  Common problems were the user could not find his/her family tree located in the folder 'My Documents', unable send an email with an attachment, perform a copy and paste, or turn off the CAPS lock.  I lost count on the number of users who called for emergency technical support to report a bug they just discovered where GenoPro would display EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE.  The majority of the calls were from students who were using GenoPro for free, so I would end up spending a large portion of my time helping users who would probably never purchase GenoPro.  Most calls would last between 20 and 30 minutes, as people calling for support would have many more questions.  I was trying to keep the calls short, but was very hard as it is difficult to hang up on someone.  If I would go to a family event, I would miss most of it as I would spend my time in a corner on the phone trying to help someone calling for support.  I cannot recall how many meals I skipped because everyone else had food and cleaned the table, or meals I had to eat cold.  The worst was people would call at all hours of the day, including in the middle of the night.  If I would forget to turn off my phone, I was unable to sleep.  My favorite were those calls at 11 pm on Sunday night where students would call as an 'emergency' where their genogram assignment is due on Monday at 8 am, and they desperately need help.  Of course, those students never purchased GenoPro and never will, however felt they were entitled help.  Some were very arrogant, telling me it was my responsibility to do their assignment because I built the software.  I wonder how many of those students would call Bill Gates and tell him the same thing because the professor asked the class to submit their essay in Microsoft Word.

Meanwhile the sales were declining every month which was not helping the morale.  The long-term solution was to improve the product to reach a broader customer base.  The number of suggestions from users was awesome, and I had work queued for decades improving GenoPro. One cool idea was to have a Collaboration Module where multiple people would edit the same document simultaneously, similar as Google Docs.

One of my challenge was handling the technical support as it was consuming most of my time.  I would start writing code and the phone would ring, interrupting my flow.  Some days, I would spend so much time on the phone and answering emails I had not time to write a single line of code. This was very frustrating because I knew I needed to write code in order to improve GenoPro.

I was working with my brother Jean-Claude to build GenoPro Gamma which was never released due to technical difficulties.  GenoPro was using XML as its native file format, so my idea was when the user would save his family tree, GenoPro would compute the differences since the last save and send he modifications to the server.  The server would merge the modifications with the master copy, and then broadcast the modifications to the other users.  A user could be offline for days, and then merge all his/her changes on the server, however there could be many issues regarding resolving merge conflicts, and handling the case of updating an object (individual, family, picture) which was deleted by another user.  In retrospect, the technology I was using was inadequate for collaboration.

The report generator also needed serious maintenance.  When I started the report generator, IE 4 was the dominant browser and the most popular language was VBScript.  JavaScript was unstable, and the name JSON did not existed.  The long term solution was to rewrite the report generator from scratch and have better support for multiple languages.  Localization (translation) was also an issue, as most of the text was localizable, however about 5% of the text in GenoPro could not be localized and would require massive work.  Worst, GenoPro was built using the MFC framework for Windows 95, so in some places, the localized text would show as question marks ????.  Another frequent request was a Mac version of GenoPro, however I estimated porting the GenoPro code to produce a Mac version would require at least 2 years of work (porting 350,000 lines of C++ code takes time, as it represents about 7,000 pages if printed on paper).  Since I am not a Mac developer, there was many technical details I would have to learn such as printing a family tree on a Mac, multi-threading & thread pooling, network sockets, and some of the features probably would not work at all, such as the report generator. Also, having two GenoPro products, Windows and Mac, increases the complexity of data compatibility and testing matrix by four (4). Also, every exciting feature would require a serious architectural upgrade which would require massive development work.

Really get rid of the MFC framework and compile to Unicode, but how?  Also use UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 as natively. Filenames non-Unicode.

The estimated amount of work was just too much for me alone to handle.  Having built GenoPro 2007 alone was a big accomplishment, however building and maintaining two products and taking care of the business was just too much.  I wanted to have a life.

As a result, I started other smaller projects which required less work than rewriting GenoPro from scratch.  I also met a girl, got married and permanently moved in Central America where the cost of living is a fraction of what it would cost in Canada. Moving to Central America was my second best decision of my life, after marrying my wife. For instance, during my first 18 months I has a Samsung phone I paid $12 and was spending a few dollars per month for service.  The same phone and service in Canada would cost me at least 10 times.  Likewise, medical services here are cheaper and much better than anything my wife and I could find in Canada.  If you are reading this and feel it is difficult to make ends meet (pay the bills) in your country, perhaps you may consider moving in Central America.  I have contacts would be happy helping you to relocating. 

While working on a communication software I learned to develop software with the Qt framework.  The Qt framework is far from perfect, however enables the same C++ code to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Tablets and Smartphones.  After spending two years developing a network application with the Qt framework I feel confident I can rewrite GenoPro from scratch within one year.  I also met a great businessman, Roberto Montano, who came with several ideas for making GenoPro a financially sustainable business.  What it means to you is you will get continuous upgrades and a better and easier to use software, and you will not run the risk of using a software which may be abandoned and have to restart from scratch using another genealogy/genogram software.  Also, by having a financially sustainable business you will get technical support when you need help.  Roberto came with brilliant ideas how to handle technical support, so it is effective and fair to our users.  By making GenoPro a business, we will be able to hire professionals to provide support, make video tutorials, maintain the website, hire more developers.

From now on, Roberto is the CEO of GenoPro.  Myself, I am spending all my time writing code. I am not alone, as we have another full time C++ developer, Arthur, who already included voice chat in GenoPro 2017 and working on a feature to share screens.  We will use Arthur's code to provide better technical support.  Reward those who answer other's questions.

GenoPro 2016

We are releasing GenoPro 2016 to raise funds to develop GenoPro 2017.  New features of GenoPro 2016 include a picture mode which turns a family tree into a picture tree and a problem spotter. The Problem Spotter analyses your family tree searching for 26 types of potential errors, such as an individual who died before he/she was born, or someone who married he/she died, etc.  If you have an existing family tree or a Gedcom file, try it with GenoPro 2016.  The Picture Mode turns a family tree into a picture tree.

GenoPro 2017

As a software product, GenoPro is a success and has thousands of visitors per week, however as a business, GenoPro had difficulty to pay  so we can also pay people for the work they did.  Many people have contributed for GenoPro and never received any compensation, or very very little.

We already a prototype

offline

JSON, websockets, Javascript

thumbnail management, caching, sharing, updating

Voice support

Share screens

video tutorials

Picture management, Pack & Go

Real-time collaboration

it is not fair for those who purchased GenoPro to be denied support while those using for free get free support

So after years of doing the support, I decided I had enough.

The Vision

peer to group

Real business, so we can also pay people for the work they did.  Many people have contributed for GenoPro and never received any compensation, or very very little.

As a product, GenoPro is a success.

I totall understand why people don't want to buy an abandoned product.

 while I was while The project GenoPro started in 1997 while I was a student, and it grew

If you already purchased GenoPro 2011 and do not wish to upgrade to GenoPro 2016, feel free to download https://www.genopro.com/download/InstallGenoPro2011.exe.  This version will also work with any site license you purchased.