When I started working on revamping SIx Sites last week, my only goal was to move from Tumblr to Chyrp. But during the process I discovered that using a micro-blog tool can actually make for a powerful collaboration tool as well. It is a bit early to make any firm decisions, but the more I think about it, the more I can see using sixsites.com as the central hub as the primary collaboration point.
About a year ago, while at Blue Flavor, Garrett and I started to try and solve a very old problem: Request for Proposals otherwise known as RFPs. The RFP is a blight on professional services, it is a poor investment, taking far too much time to create just to get your foot in the door for a meeting, which is where any real decisions will be made any way. And even though most corporation don’t know it, RFPs are a terrible and costly process that only pronounces their ignorance and/or cheapness and invites vendors to gauge them for any services rendered.
Which is why we made a little product we call Estimatr.
I’ve tried to get mobiledesign.org off the ground as a community news and information site numerous times. It has never worked. Getting people within the mobile industry to contribute time to the community is like pulling teeth: it needs to be done, it’s painful and but no one wants to do it.
Its hard to believe it has been eight months since I left Blue Flavor, the company I co-founded, to reboot my own company Fling Media with my wife Cyndi. In that time I have done next to nothing with Leaflets, the product Garrett and I created while at Blue Flavor and we now own.
I’m finally updating Six Sites! (as you can see by the lack of stylesheet on the Tumblr site)
It has been a long couple of months, but I’m finally pulling away from client work and focusing on products.
I am in the process of moving from Tumblr to Chyrp, which will add a host of new features, like commenting and member accounts. My plan is to use the site for both public posting on development status, as well as private posting to the team working on the products.
I hope to have the new site up soon. I have a much longer post at the ready explaining some of the challenges I’ve faced so far getting this project up and running as well as trying to make the switch to products.
Stay tuned.
-Brian
Earlier this summer, Garrett and I had this idea to create a game for mobile devices that would be truly unique (and maybe a bit revolutionary). We’ve looked and there is nothing else like it. It is based on classic game theory, but designed for the mobile context.
We have a lot of the app already wireframed and planned out. We are waiting to see what happens in the App Store and get some work done on other products before we move forward.
Signal is an app that Garrett and I are currently working on. While there will be a lot more said about it in the future, what we will tell you now is that it is a web and mobile app designed to organize and make sense of all your information. I know a lofty and bold idea, which is why we are making it now instead of launching Estimatr. Signal is something that both Garrett and I desperately need and we hope other people will want.
Over the past two weeks I’ve been overwhelmed with web products. I’ve probably signed up for a dozen free accounts with a dozen web products solving about three problems.
Week Five is almost here and I figured I should probably do a quick update summarizing the activity of both Week Three and Week Four, which has basically been mostly filled with client work.
Well Week One of my Six Sites effort hasn’t been very riveting. In the last week I have:
While the votes so far overwhelming point to building a newsreader, several people have mentioned that Shaun Inman is currently working on a newsreader himself, already in beta.
After I launched Six Sites last week, David emailed me to let me know that his site every5weeks.com has beat me to the idea. They have a much more aggressive endeavor to create 10 functional sites in 50 weeks.
I think this is awesome. I love hearing people willing to both make products in the open in additional to using an agile development model to rapidly get products to market.
I’ve been thinking a lot about RSS Readers lately. I’ve always been partial to desktop newsreaders like Newsfire, but the allure of the multi-context flexibility of online readers like Google Reader has found me thinking about switching camps.
Argh! I just had two more great ideas this morning. Both would only take a couple weeks each to do, but the revenue potential on either wouldn’t be as high initially as the original six ideas.
I had this crazy idea, could I create 12 products in 12 months? I’ve been able to build a successful product in less than a month before, so I thought maybe I could do it again. After crunching the numbers I realized that I wouldn’t have any time to do client work too. Plus I feared that I would be so consumed with the insane pace that quality of each product might suffer.
So I scaled back the idea by half and set the goal to try and build six products over the next year, no investment, no big teams, just a handful of good guys with a half a dozen good ideas.
I have no idea if I can pull it off or not, but I figure it will be fun to at least try. And while I’m going through the trials I figure I might as well blog about it as well. That is where sixsites.com comes in.
So today officially marks Day 1 of the challenge!