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Build a Real .com in 24 days: codename Respondz.com

Posted by Andy Singleton on Wed, Mar 12, 2008 @ 01:46 PM
The popular blog post "Build a dotcom in 24 hours" took readers through the steps of building and deploying a simple Web application.  I know it was popular because when it made the Digg front page, about 1000 people clicked through to Assembla and signed up, even though Assembla was a minor link way down in the article.   So, there is a real hunger for this type of tutorial.  I work with people that need to solve a different and more complicated problem - how to build a real product, company, team, and user ecostem.  I'm going to give this bigger problem the same treatment, going through all of the steps in 24 working days, and documenting what we did and what we learned about each step.  As an added bonus, we're going to build an interesting product that I have been thinking about for some time.Thursday, February 28, was our first day. In the  time-bound spirit of the exercise, I executed step one of the project in the airport waiting for my morning flight to Miami.  Step 1 is "register a silly name that nobody else wanted", so I got online and registered "respondz.com".  The app listens to what you want, and responds.  The registrar site was slow and I barely made the plane.  Then, I wrote a slide presentation on the airplane, and presented it to a roomfull of Barcamp geeks I had never met, with the tagline "You will help.  We will start today."  We're not going to run the days consecutively (the original 24 hours wasn't consecutive either), because we all have intense day jobs, but we will report our results within 24 working days.You can see the presentation here.Three people signed up out of the audience.  Ken Scott said he could help with system administration, and he set up a Web server on the spot. Bob Baldwin volunteered to do some development. And, I can draw on my team for both development and management talent. We're still lacking an expert in online advertising and affiliate marketing.  We need to fill the role soon, so contact me if you can help.Here's the Idea:  We show a form that asks the user some questions about what he or she wants, and then we present information and offers that match.Duh!  We ask the user what he/she wants, and then we give it to him or her.  That's the most simplistic advertising idea, and possibly the most stupid, since asking people to pay for search placement.  It's going in the opposite direction from complex techniques like behavioral targeting.If we drill down, we can we can see that the actual implementation of this idea supports more subtlety and sophistication.  For example, we can offer the user a chance to answer a few more questions, and get better targeted content and offers.  We can optionally save user attributes (by default usage is completely anonymous) this so the user doesn't have to answer the same questions in the next search.  We can provide freelance editors with ways to maintain questions and matching content, and get a percentage of the proceeds in their subject area.  We can provide sponors with ways to "bid" for a match.  We can get smarter and smarter about matching.

I've posted a picture of what this might look like below, as done on the plane between peanuts.  This example is from the subject area of health and wellness, and it uses an idea that I have seen in the wild working for diet sites - a banner ad that contains inside it a little 2 question form, a micro-assessment.

You could apply this to a wide range of subject areas, like travel, or books.  I originally proposed this idea as a way to match travel offers with itineraries.  Then, a few years ago, a client wanted to build a health and wellness site, and he had licensed a "Self assessment" from a medical school that included about 100 questions on every aspect of your health and habits.  My reaction was that nobody would sit through 100 questions on the Web, but we might be able to suck them in if we only asked for 2 at a time.  I was also in favor of community content, with sponsors being engaged to match their own offers.  Nobody went forward with the suggestion, so it's come down to us.This idea has advantages that make it appropriate for our 24 day startup launch.
  • It's simple.  We can get it up and try it out.
  • It's easy to explain.  That saves a huge amount of time out of the 24 working days, during which we will explain what we are doing to dozens or possibly hundreds of people.
  • It uses existing revenue streams from online advertising and affiliate commissions.  We aren't going to wander in the wilderness for 40 days looking for a way to "monetize".
  • It's specializeable. You can pick a narrow subject area.  That's important because when we start, we are a tiny company, and we need to go after a market that fits our resources.  This is important for most startups.
  • It's optimizable.  We can always make this product a bit smarter and a bit better.  That's how we sneak up on the competition.
 
There is one big disadvantage.  There isn't any obvious way to defend this service from competition.  If it turns out to be a good idea, and Google or Microsoft or two guys reading this blog want to take a swing at it, they can.  We just have to specialize, optimize, and get good at our specialty. Another disadvantage is that we need some innovation in the techniques for matching content to answers.  The ideal business applies a known technique to an underserved market.  Innovation slows you down.  That's why VC's don't want to get involved until your innovating days are over.  But, all in all, this is a pretty limited area to innovate in, we can start stupid and optimize, and I have some ideas.

The Deliverables

We have a bunch of things to deliver in the next 23 working days:Assemble the team - In addition to an operating team, including a marketing, development, and a CEO (could do double duty at this early stage), we will need a board of directors that will figure out how to go forward with this fabulous product at the end of our 24 day time and money budget.Create a company structure - To build a team, we need to be able to give out equity in a real company.  And, we need to take care of the messy details like budgeting and accounting.Targeting - We need to identify a subject with a lot of user and sponsor interest, and sign up at least one editor.
Build the product -  We're going to showcase the Assembla tools and process.  We'll run daily builds starting from day 2, and we'll show our work in a public space.Blog it - document what we did and what we learnedWe start now.  You will help.  Contact me if you want to participate in some way.

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Author Andy Singleton writes about accelerating software development, distributed agile teams, and Assembla.com services.

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