So I gave it a try….my verdict? Won’t do it again….

Now this is no criticism of the company that does it, because they are good at what they do and serve a purpose. The only problem is that their purpose is not my purpose Its a good solution if you are not intending to work with the templates they provide, and possibly just use it for a static website.

Problem is that they don’t think of their CSS in a way that is re-usable, they create CSS styles for absolutely everything and don’t think about optimising the CSS for re-use across pages. The end result is that your XHTML is nice and concise, but the CSS is very verbose and long (100’s of lines).

I have ended up using their XHTML and re-creating most of the CSS so that I can re-use it in my application as a template. I am still going through this process and therefore, something that would have taken me a few days to do (create XHTML/CSS from Design), is still taking me a few days to do, but I have the added complexity of working with code that was written by someone else.

Oh well, a lesson learned

ho hum…………………..BORING!!!!

This is one of those urban myths that seems to never go away. People are always trying to stumble on that next killer idea. But the thing is, you and I probably have these great “wouldn’t it be awesome if…..” ideas almost every second day. And so does everyone. Since I am in the business of making ideas come to reality, I get my share of friends (also known as nut cases that think I am waiting for them to bombard me with their next great idea) calling me with their idea and are surprised by the fact that I don’t drop everything to work with them !?!?

So if this is not important, what is?

Your Customer!!! Its that simple…

Its much easier to fill an existing void for your customer than it is to convince your customer that they are in need of this fabulous invention. And timing is key, if you get it out too early, there will be no demand (you are trying to convince them they need it); too late and you have missed the market (someone else has beat you to it and your customers already have the product).

Its also important to extract the idea into reality. How much will it cost to build and distribute. “I can get it into every household in the country over the next 5 years!!!”, but when you do the numbers, the revenue you make never catches up to the cost of marketing and distribution (or maybe in 20 years it does) #FAIL.

You need to get ‘real’ customers in front of your product; get feedback, evolve, refine, more experimentation and testing, and work on filling that need.

Although this was always part of my 2009 plans, they never eventuated Mainly because “paid work comes first”. I think that is a problem we all encounter when we want to work on our own pet projects. We have best intentions, but we get caught up with commercial deadlines from other customer (paying customers) and these take precedent.

And what happens is “another year goes by” and we don’t realise that its another year where we haven’t achieved or even worked on our dreams. Its4aCause is a project that I have now been working on for 18 months. I have gone little further than the initial planning.

So 2010 is the year!!! Time to make a change (sounds like a Michael Jackson song), but I have decided to make sure I prioritise my own projects in the same vein as paid projects – no exceptions!

I have decided that I am going to dedicate one day a week to my project. It may be broken out over several nights/days, but I want to at least dedicate a good 8-12 hours (at least) to my project. You may think that is not enough, and it probably isn’t, but the main thing that I want to ensure is that there is momentum. Bottom line is that 8 hours a week is 416 hours in the year, or equivalent to 10 full working weeks!!!! I didn’t do anything near that last year.

The key here is momentum, losing it means that a week goes by, a month goes by and finally the year goes by and nothing has been achieved. Like a freight train with a full load, it goes slow, but it eventually gets there!

Basically the idea was a bunch of developers, business guys and designers got together and delivered a startup, from start to finish in 24 hours. And I mean START to FINISH! They get together and don’t even have an idea, take it through to the point that on the 24th hour they launch the site live. The launch included a blog, twitter account and facebook page. “I love it when a plan comes together”

Then if that was not enough, they then list the startup on eBay and within 7 days get $5,100 for it. Not bad for a day’s work (sure, a long day and they have to split amongst a dozen of them)!

It reminds me of all the developer camps that go on, but I love the energy of this and how they deliver it.

Its a real inspirational story, and makes me want to lock myself in a room for a weekend to see what I could achieve!!!

Check ou their final product http://www.drhue.com – a shop-by-colour website

After going around in circles within this legal for some time now, I have managed to start getting a positive result. With the help of the Philip Argy (@philipargy) I have now hooked up with the team at Optim Legal. We had our first meeting last Friday, and it was great to chat with like-minded individuals!

They seem to understand what I am trying to do, and how I am trying to do it!

I really am after three things from my engagement with them;

1. Advice whether there are any gaping holes in the Business Model
2. Advice on how the whole thing needs to be structured correctly (legally and from a business perspective)
3. And finally, help with the Terms and Conditions for the site

I anticipate that they will get back to me in the next few days with a plan of attack and I do look forward to working with the team at Optim legal, they really are a breath of fresh air in the legal world!!!

So if you are interested, use the form below to help out on the journey!!!

After reviewing the business model with some of my (trusted) friends, some of the feedback I received was that I had to simplify one aspect of how users are engaged. And I succumbed to the pressure and agreed. I think they are right, I need to make this is as simple as possible for users, and remove any (be they not real) barriers in the process.

In my original business model, I had the concept of a user needing to subscribe (paid) to the Its4aCause.com service. But every time I described this to people, it was the point  where they got stuck. They started having all the ‘why’ questions. And this when the light went off in my head.

If friends that I am sitting with and explaining it to don’t get it, I am going to have problems with people that just happen across the site. So I had to swallow my pride and admit I was wrong. So I removed it!

This actually didn’t actually change my business model, or at least the financial projections too much, but it did change the functionality that needed to be developed. So, I needed to re-plan the functionality to be delivered (actually made it a little easier).

So onward bounds, I take this as a learning and it helps me build a better product! The interesting thing is that I now think that this has become a trigger for some more model changes to come. So listen out for that!

PS: Once again, I have to apologize my vagueness on this, but I hope to be able to tell you soon what this is all about.

Recently I have been toying with a small change to my business model. Although it is a small material change in regards to the technical implementation of one of the features, but there is a significant effect of how potential users would interact with the site. I have thinking about this for the last few weeks and I can’t find a clear benefit (or detriment) to either approach.

So today over lunch with my good buddy my best mate Joe from EmediaCreative (today is my birthday by the way ), he mentioned the idea of a Focus Group. I had thought of this before, but I thought as a one man show, how can I manage (or afford) to do this? But Joe mentioned something quite important “Between us, I am sure we could muster a dozen friends to sit down and do this with”. And he is right!!

But I then thought, why stop there? Why not work the social sphere. Time to mention it to people on twitter, followers to this blog etc etc! These random people are going to be more impartial than my friends that might be afraid to offend me.

So the offer is going out; Want to be part of a focus group for an exciting new start-up? Complete the form below!!!