Hi there! I'm John Orman, head of growth at Devolens.

I wanted to write some quick notes regarding our roadmap for 2026 in a more personal format.

We will go through some of the work we did in 2025 for context, what our priorities will be in 2026, and I will share some more personal learnings and comments as well.

Let's get started!

A Quick Look Back

Let's first take a quick look back at 2025 to put everything into perspective.

From my view, we had two major goals for 2025:

‍

1. To change our name from Cryptolens to Devolens to avoid confusion with cryptocurrencies.
   ‍
2. To talk more with customers and truly understand what makes our platform special, and what could use some improvement.
   ‍

The Cryptocurrency Curse

When I joined the technical team at Cryptolens, there was already talks of possibly changing the name away from Cryptolens.

While the name makes a lot of technical sense (referring to cryptography, which is of course used in our licensing system), the cryptocurrency trend certainly made most people immediately associate us with cryptocurrencies and not cryptography.

Here are some reasons this was, by us, seen as suboptimal:

‍

• We have no connection to cryptocurrencies at all.
  ‍
• We wanted to avoid being linked to an (at times) scam-associated industry.
  ‍
• We saw an opportunity to get closer to our dev audience with Dev-o-lens as the brand name.
  
  

In this transition, we saw an opportunity to launch a new website (the one you're on right now!), which is still being improved and optimized to this date.

The focus was clear - to better signal to companies the capabilities and features we provide, and the ease of which you can implement them.

As a result of this, we launched an initiative to talk more with customers to better understand what points to bring up.

‍

What Customers Said

We spent a lot of time talking to valued customers to gather their feedback, and in all honesty, I was very positively surprised.

Most customers had only good things to say about Devolens:

‍

• "It's easy to get started with!"
  ‍
• "It helped me clear up time for an R&D developer"
  ‍
• "We are confident Devolens will scale together with us"
  ‍

However, there was also one aspect that people mentioned in a less positive way:

‍

The design and layout of the application is confusing and outdated.

‍

→ Read more about what customers said and our learnings here

‍

Why This Matters A Lot (Especially To Us)

So, while we had primarily focused on improving the website, we realized that the next priority should be the application itself.

It became clear that, while the functions and features are well-loved, the design and layout could use an upgrade.

The reason this matters so much to us is because of the synergies between the site and app.

We believe the first impressions matter a lot, especially when evaluating such a mission-critical part of your business as the licensing system.

While we had improved the first impressions on the website, we had not made the same first impression improvements on the application.

In my mind, the true uplift of these improvements only happen when both are in place. Otherwise, people may think:

‍

• Okay, so the name is "Devolens", it seems like this this company is for me (a developer)!
  ‍
• The website talks to me specifically and brings up points I care about, great!
  ‍
• But wait, the app is not as user-friendly as I expected... Maybe this is not for me.

What We Will Do About It In 2026

Our main focus for 2026 will then be to improve the application and give it the proper love and attention it deserves!

We are fortunate to have so many valued long-term customers that love our product, and we will be working closely with them to ensure nothing is lost.

Our priorities will be:

‍

• A more insightful and actionable analytics experience that showcases the value our platform silently brings every single day.
  ‍
• An overhaul of the design and layout of the app in general, including a more useful front page.
  ‍
• More features and integrations that actually matter to you as user.
  ‍

With these improvements, we hope to make our app simpler, clearer, and more enjoyable to use.

Thank you for reading, I am looking forward to sharing more updates about our progress in the near future!

John Orman | Head of Growth at Devolens