By live I mean I invited a couple of close friends to sign-up and create their own profile page. The site itself had been "live" since November but in a basic "read-only" fashion. Yesterday was the culmination of 3 months work to get it to a state where users could sign-up and start generating their own site content.
I didn't think I would be quite so nervous. But having sent the invite emails I found I had to leave the house and take a drive up into the mountains as a distraction from waiting for the what I was sure would be the inevitable "it didn't work for me" replies.
Today I caught up with one of those users. He reported that in under two minutes he had successfully created his own profile page and was very impressed. I let out a big sigh of relief and briefly, just briefly, started to feel smug.
I had done it. I had taken an idea, distilled it's essence to a core goal and delivered on it. I had done this in under 3 months and I now had a executable product I could start promoting. It doesn't sound like much, but having started numerous "startup projects" over the years and, prior to yesterday, only having delivered on one of them it was a significant milestone.
Ideas are the easy bit. Everybody is an entrepreneur these days - every city is awash with "Entrepreneur Clubs" and "Startup Schools". The hard bit is actually going live with an executed version of your idea.
My idea for GetConnected was not even the idea I thought I would be implementing. Last year I engineered a 3 month "sabbatical" gap between jobs that I was going to put to use to execute on a startup idea I had around collecting online news & editorial.
As I was going through the process of leaving my old job I was struck with the though of how many communication mediums I had for my colleagues and friends I had made at this job to "stay connected with me". There was LinkedIn, there was this blog, there was Twitter, email, Facebook, Skype etc. etc. Each serving a different purpose but each a social connection medium I utilised. Additionally there would be other social networks I would inevitably use in the future. How would people know where and how connect with me then (for instance I've since jumped into Foursquare)? Rather than give out a laundry list of connections that could quickly become out of date, I wanted to give out a simple single URL that centralised all this.
I jumped onto GoDaddy and quickly found myself some useful domain names that scratched this itch I had found. "getconnectedto.me" was my favourite and the one I used to create my profile page to give out to people as I left my job. Instead of the above laundry list, I simply gave out:
This scratched my itch, but I soon found a lot of others in my network that had the same itch and soon started asking for their own profile pages. All of a sudden I had a simple product idea with appeal that I could execute on. All I needed to do was write a way for people to edit their own profile and I was off and running. Rather than work on my news and editorial collation/crawler project I would first get this idea executed and live. Surely it couldn't take that long - functionally it was so simple after all.
What initially seemed like it would be at most a 3 week project took me close on 3 months duration. Admittedly it wasn't 100% time spent on this project - I had another boss, my Wife and our landscaping projects to answer too, but it did give me an appreciation of how even very simple ideas take a huge amount of effort to properly execute and "go live" with.
To mark this milestone of having executed my idea I decided to reread 37 Signal's "Getting Real" (http://gettingreal.37signals.com). When I first read this manual about quick (I refuse to use the now overloaded term "Agile" - more on this later), "going live" focused software development philosophy, it struck me as a manual of "things I already intuitively knew and did anyway", but I was also aware there was probably a healthy dose of Confirmation Bias at work here. It's easy to "talk the talk" but could I "walk the walk"? How "real" was my very own "Getting Real" experience?
Over the next week I'll be blogging about my honest warts-n-all experiences at building getconnectedto.me in relation to the Getting Real book - what worked for me, what didn't and where I could have improved.
Tomorrow - my experiences in relation to Getting Real, Chapter 2 - "The Starting Line".
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