The New Product Idea

NOTE: This post first appeared on my "ataraxissoftware.com/blog". It has been re-created here because that blog is going through a transition and the archive may be lost. This post will have a permanent home here. (The post has been back-dated to the original post date.)

For the past year and a half I was planning on creating a web-based Project Management application. I was blogging about the development of it on my previous blog. Long story short, the project was just too large for 1 person (me) to develop. To get the full story, you can read my blog post (from the old blog), Getting Second Thoughts / Time.

After I published the, “Second Thoughts”, post I made the decision that I really wanted some help with this whole, “I’m going to build a software product”, thing. Enter Mr. Marder.

Jeff (Mr. Marder to you ;) ) and I used to work together at my current employer. (Damn, I think we’ve know each other for almost 4 years. But I digress…) Jeff and I hit it off pretty well when we worked together. We made fun of the same things at work, share a love for stupid-cool cars, and we’re both into technology. Ever since he left my current employer we’ve kept in touch.

I’ve got a bunch of ideas for products that I want to build (some more original than others) , so I pitched one of them to Jeff. He was totally stoked. We felt that the size of the idea was small enough to implement in a few months (at least have something working). I spent the next couple of weeks working on a prototype, but about a week ago OUT OF THE BLUE another product idea smacked me in the brain. (It’s more of a service/product, really.)

I shot off an email to Jeff describing what it is, and again, he was stoked.

This “out of the blue” idea is even smaller in scale than the previous one, thus increasing our likelyhood of actually finishing it.

So here is the idea.

Well, here is the back story first. ;)

At my current day job I am a Project “Coordinator”. (I’m a Project Manager, but they call us “Coordinators” so they can pay us less.) One of my roles is to meet with people from the various internal business units when they request a new web site or web application. I talk with them about what their needs are, gather their requirements, and manage the technical staff through out the project’s implementation.

About a year ago I had a request from the Creative Design department of our company. The request was to build a system that would accept requests from other departments for print work, and facilitate the electronic review and acceptance of their work by their internal clients. Long story short, this system never made it past the initial discovery phase because they needed a “system” and they are only a department with a handful of people. (IMO a very talented and important handful, but apparently not yet worthy of the resources to build out this “system”.)

The entire time I was talking to the Creative Design department I kept thinking to myself, I could turn this into a commercial product/service. There’s got to be more companies that have this problem.

Now, for the first release of our yet-to-be-named product/service I’m not going to implement the entire “system” concept. Jeff and I are going to build one piece of that “system”, and we’re starting with the electronic review and approval piece.

I’m not giving up the feature list details quite yet! But 1.0 is going to be small and lean. I’m itching to actually complete something!