Man, I really let this slide, eh? Well, hopefully I can be more consistent in the future, but I wouldn’t count on it. Here’s what’s been going on…
Idea #1 is in a holding pattern. The original product idea I had only did meekly in some testing situations and some prelim market research. It’s still a viable idea, just needs more time, money and refinement. I don’t have two of those three, so I’m moving onto something more “in my wheelhouse”.
Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve been building a website. This website will service entrepreneurs in a really cool way, and I think will provide some awesome opportunities for others like me who are trying to get a business of some sort off the ground. Everything, as usual, is under wraps right now, but I hope to be in a beta stage by June, so everything will come out then and I’ll let on to the exact nature of what this is.
In the meantime, I’ve been teaching myself PHP and MySQL from scratch to try and build this site. I’m a web developer by day job anyway, so doing this type of thing is a slightly better fit at the moment. I’ve worked through almost 1000 pages of two books on PHP/MySQL and I’m happy to say that I’ve learned enough to be dangerous and actually build a functioning, and somewhat complex website.
At the moment, I’ve built out about 50% of the functionality (maybe closer to 60%) and I’m starting to work in on beefing up some securuty holes and fine tuning a few processes. It’s nice to have the framework built and be able to move into actually fine tuning. Definitely a big step.
For those who want to follow along as I randomly post updates of progress here, here’s the timeline I’m working with:
- March 08 – Function build. Get all functionality built for the site with no visual element. Skeleton site, but fully working.
- April 08 – Visual Design. Design visual for site, and apply to functionality. Work out bugs in getting functionality to play nice with the looks.
- May 08 – Personal testing. This will be a month of me putting the site to the real test. Here, I’ll be going thru the site myself, trying to think thru every possible problem, hiccup or overload scenario.
- June 08 – Beta 1. I’ll assemble a small group of real testers to start using the site behind a password protected front end. I’ll continually interview and monitor their experience.
- July 08 – Beta 2. Same thing as Beta 1, but I’ll be working hard to fix any usability issues, implement new desired functionality that folks want from Beta 1. I’ll be out of town for 10 days during this time (and no, I won’t be working then), so I’ll have a short month.
- Aug 1, 2008 – Launch.
So, follow along at home and hope that I meet all my deadlines. Doing well so far.
Again, I’ll try to be more consistent in the future. Look for a post coming up that explains a bit about a revelation I’ve had about my purpose and calling, and why I figure my appropriate title to be something along the lines of “serial entrepreneur”.
