30 Days to Launch

I'm shipping a brand new consumer web service in 30 days. I better get started.

Flashback

A little over a month ago, I started building Puzzazz, a new puzzle site that I launched last Monday. For those who haven't been reading, I built it from start to finish, in my spare time, in less than a month -- using a language, a framework, and a platform that I'd never used before. It was fun and challenging. During my extra spare time, I started thinking about taking on a much bigger challenge, and I'm starting that challenge today, full time, with a plan to ship in 30 days.
 
Today, you can find "software as a service" -- applications supplied as services on the internet -- all over the place, from Google to Microsoft to thousands of small companies. But I'm not new to building consumer software as a service. I built my first consumer web service using AJAX in 1997, before most of the world had heard of software services and before the name AJAX was even coined. Sadly, that product was way before its time in many ways and the company didn't make it. One of the things I worked on at Microsoft was the bCentral Communications Center service. And, my last two companies, DreamBox Learning and Sampa, are also consumer web service companies, for educational software and family web sites, respectively.

Fast Forward

This time, I'm going to build a consumer web service that I've wanted to build for a long time. I'll be giving more details soon, but, for now, I'll just say that it's a new take on a simple idea. Like almost every other idea you can come up with, you could say it's been done before. But I have some new ideas. What I hope to do is combine the right set of features and usability so that I end up with, as Goldilocks would say, something that's just right.

30 days is either an eternity or no time at all, depending on how you look at it. I have enough time to build something that's pretty useful. And I have little enough time that I won't be able to throw in the kitchen sink.

Starting today, I'm going to try to blog about what's going on every day.

And Then What?

Well, I'll ship it. And I'll see what happens. I hope you find it useful.

After that, I'll be available for consulting gigs or maybe even the right "real job".