Last night we had our first development team meeting…I feel it went really well, and I’m even more excited about the team, the talent, the passion and the enthusiasm embedded within the team. We will unveil the members of the team once we release the new blog and we are more deeply into the development phase(s).
Not to contradict my other post Who is Your Front Man…but the backbone of every Web 2.0 company is a strong, knowledgeable and experienced development team. No development team…no concept, and no job for the front man.
Initially, the development work for Why Go Solo was going to be outsourced, but we ran into all sorts of problems, road blocks, issues, and frankly, a lack of money. Due to the level of work required, the immense potential of Why Go Solo and a need to ensure top level quality control, very timely response time, and performance assurance, having our own team makes a lot more sense and makes us much stronger as a whole.
We might have to plug a few holes here and there with additional programmers, developers and leaders in certain respective areas, but as it turns out, the team has the connections to those people and the abilities to do whatever is needed. Have I mentioned how nice and good that feels!?!?
Development is set to begin on September 7, 2007 (my birthday present) with a private beta release scheduled at the beginning of November. A more solid timeline and updates will be released as we make progress and move ahead.
This is that moment where the scale is about to turn…I smell it in the air and I feel it in my bones. Not saying the fight is over…but when you have a team behind you, when people are brought together, when passion is ignited in highly motivated, ambitious and intelligent people…that creates some serious synergy and momentum.
I’m smiling, I’m happy and I feel good…and that is priceless after 8 months of working at making this happen. No stopping a massive avalanche of progress and good things from happening!!
2 comments:
I suspect that you're about 4-6 weeks from the hardest part by far. It's after the initial enthusiasm has started to wear off... some of the more fun bits are done... and its the subtle complex errors that will cause you the most problems and sleepless nights. I know they do for me.
Regardless, doing a v1 with an outsourced team where there are huge timezone, language, and cultural differences is always the worst. You don't have any common context, you don't know the players, and many teams change regularly. I had a customer that in one year their entire team changed 1.5 times....
That said, v2 is fundamentally different. You already have the baseline, architecture, and more of the Vision exists. You just have less variables in general.
My 0.02.
I'm really happy for you and this project. I'll be watching the development of it and hope to be one of my favorites.
Good Luck, Jason Nulph
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