Ryan Walker on agile business and web software development
For the past year, I have been working on, in the wee hours of the night, a product that I personally wanted to use to help the businesses that I’m involved with focus its energy on creating real competitive advantage.
So in May 2009 I bought SAAS Rails Kit from Ben Curtis, I bought a CSS theme that I thought would help me avoid exercising my web design muscles, and then…
I started building… and changing my mind… and falling out of love with the CSS theme I bought.
A few months ago, I heard a lot of noise “just ship it” “get it out in the wild” so I put together a list of things I felt the app HAD to do before I could share it. And each week I knocked a few items off that list… Until it was empty.
And rather than launch… I refilled the list (sound familiar?)
FINALLY though, I launched the product this week.
I ended up picking 50 people from LinkedIn and sent the link and request for feedback out. Around 20 of them created accounts, and having real conversations with “friendlies” about it is really inspiring me to continue developing the product.
I stumbled across this blog post today from John Nunemaker, +1 on the “Get people in as soon as you can” suggestion.
I have some bugs to fix, some concepts to clarify, but I’m excited to have the app launched and “in the wild” - I’ll post updates as I have them.
