Archive for January, 2011
|Made by One
January 12th, 2011
I’ve been hanging out on the Hacker news site from YCombinator. It is a great source of information and inspiration for anyone starting their own business.
The folks from YCombinator, who have funded some awesome startups, put a strong emphasis on funding teams of founders, rather than solo creators. Now I’ve been solo creating for a number of years, along with a few team projects, but the recent launch of Facto.me, I even blogged about it, got me thinking on the subject of solo versus team.
If you have all the necessary skills, being a solo creator cannot be beaten for time to market for your MVP release. Larger projects can benefit from a division of labor, but most MVP releases are small enough that this isn’t the case. Having co-founders can be useful to bounce ideas off, but I’ve found my network of friends is good for that, even if they’re not working on the project.
In the ended I decided solo creators should be celebrated! They shoulder all the risk for creating something where nothing existed, with nobody else to blame if things go wrong. Even if they do fail, they are a great way to learn for your next project solo or not.
Rather than just posting a blog entry listing a few solo creators with links to their works, I decide instead to build my first interview based site. Made by One is a series of interviews with solo creators about the creator and projects they have created.
I posted about the site to Hacker news, and was pleasantly surprised with the response. I wasn’t sure how many solo creators I would be able to interview, but now have a enough leads for about a years worth of weekly interviews.
Visit the site, follow us on Twitter feed, or subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll never miss our great interviews.
Posted in My-Launches
From concept to launch in 24 hours
January 2nd, 2011
I thought I was pretty quick about getting sites built and launched, but I must bow to the master.
Yesterday Kyle Bragger (who also built Forrst), took a concept and launched a site in just 24 hours. He posted this blog post about Facto today.
Facto is a fun way for you to share facts about yourself with friends or anyone on the internet. It is a simple idea beautifully executed.
It sounds like Kyle had a great time building Facto, and thinks you should build one of your ideas too. As Kyle says:
There’s nothing more fulfilling than creating something out of nothing, and in my opinion there is no better time to transform yourself into someone who can produce something from a mere idea. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even refined. The ability to create a working prototype of an idea is invaluable. It’s not a mockup, it’s not a powerpoint deck, it’s a real, living, breathing thing that real users can interact with now. If you’re a developer or designer but lacking in the opposite discipline, what are you waiting for? You could be hacking on a cool idea as we speak. If you’re a business guy/woman, or “ideas person”, why spend any more time relying on other people** to build your ideas?
Now back to my ideas, not sure I can do any of them in just 24 hours, so I might have to come up with something else!
Posted in Entrepreneur
Goals for 2011
January 2nd, 2011
Following on my post reviewing of 2010 I thought it would be a good idea to set some goals for 2011.
I’m very excited for 2011 to hit. It will be a big year. The day job has some promising projects on the horizon, and the for the garage job, I’m hoping to get some awesome project moving.
Rather than being specific about launching particular apps, I’m going to set broader goals to allow myself to adjust to the year as things develop.
Mobile
I want to release at least 1 free, and one paid native iOS and Android app. This means getting to grips with Objective C, and the Android Java SDK.
I would like to add WebOS to the list, but unless HP does something amazing with its new range of Tablets, the market is going to be pretty small.
Dog fooding
Some of my most successful projects, have been applications/websites that I’ve needed myself. Episode List was born from the frustration of not knowing if tonights episode was a repeat or not. Most Inspired has saved me countless hours of surfing design galleries looking for that key bit of inspiration. This year I aim to return to building tools that I would use very day.
This year this will start with Mubdo. Frustrated with the many todo and time tracking tools out there (and yes I’ve used most) I decided to build my own. The aim to is be quick and simple, yes I know most tools like this aim for that, but very few actually stay that way.
There is enough functionality built to launch Mubdo, but I’m going to be running it for a long time in private beta. This is primarily a tool for myself, and I don’t want to get bogged down with people requesting too many features/changes.
Rebirth
I’ve left a few of my previous projects alone for too long. A lot has changed in the last couple of years, and fresh look at some old problems I was trying to solve is in order.
My first order of business will be turn Uberlook into more of a Reddit/Hacker News, style community site. I’ll be able to leverage a lot of that functionality into other sites.
Social
Not living in a big city makes it hard to connect with other lean startup folks, but I vow to try harder. I’ve been part of some local developer groups, but nothing aimed at people starting their own business. This may involve a little more travelling this year, but should be well worth it.
Health
Time to get my bum out of my chair. I used to be a lot more active, and therefore a lot thinner! I’m aiming to lose about 50lbs this year. This is going to involve a combination of more exercise, and watching what I eat. I don’t think I’ll be using Lose it or Lose it, but if things don’t go well in the beginning part of the year, it might come to that!
Money
Makes the world go round, right? I’m hoping by the end of the year, that my garage projects, can bring in as much income as my day job, yes I’m a long way from that right now, but it good to set targets 
There you have them, my goals, for the 2011. I won’t be waiting til 2012 to post a review, I am to do one every month.
Posted in Sitenews