That's an excellent question. We invested a lot of time into Scout, and so we certainly wanted to have some confidence that it would be useful to other people.

In Scout's case, we learned what users wanted in two main ways - firstly, by being those users ourselves. We are an advocacy group that follows all kinds of legislation and regulation in federal and state government, and so we very much wanted something that would scratch our own itches.

The other way is by observing the success and use of the app I mentioned in a previous comment, Congress for Android. It began as an experiment of mine that I did on a whim, without expectations of much success - but it turned out to be a great success, and has almost half a million downloads to date. More importantly, our users were clearly comprised of both ordinary citizens and professionals who carried it with them on the Hill. It was gratifying that something could be attractive to both ends of the spectrum of expertise.

Finally, it turned out that push notifications were a very popular feature, and so we learned that people of all sorts want to keep their finger on the pulse of what their government is doing.