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.

I’ve been signing up with so many products for research, both billable and personal. And the sheer volume of “Web 2.0” products out there will make your head spin.

It seems as though we gotten to the point where all the low hanging fruit has been eaten, so now we are focusing on making better fruit trees, doing essentially the same thing as the competition only slightly better.

I see no problem in building a better widget, if you have an established market and you think you can do better, then have at it. But it does make me wonder if people are just engaging in a “me-too” philosophy or if they honesty think they are solving the problem better.

One conclusion that I’ve made though, it’s not about building the product, that is the easy part in the grand scheme. It’s all about how and when you launch it and how you will support it that in the long run that matters.

added 3 days ago Permalink

Week Four Report

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.

I’m pretty swamped with billable at the moment, so product progress has been slow, but it is actually intentional. My plan is to front load billable and then by August or September take a break to focus on products full time, or close to it (It may happen sooner, but it all depends).

That being said over the last two weeks there have been very interesting events that could really change the direction of this experiment.

Plus I’ve had five new product ideas in the last two weeks! I think I have close to ten new product ideas in the last month, in addition to the original six. So I’ve decided that I will be using this site as more of a general product idea blog, keeping tabs of the products I am building as well as the ideas that I’m not pursing, well at least not yet.

I’ve learned that as I share product ideas publicly that feedback that it is changing my plan, for the better. Therefore I’m planning to take the wraps off of all six products here very soon (say in the next week or two) in order to start getting feedback from the public. Combined with sharing the ideas that I’m not planning to pursue, I figure that it is best to go with what people want, not just what I want to build.

added 2 weeks ago Permalink

Week One Report

Well Week One of my Six Sites effort hasn’t been very riveting. In the last week I have:

  • had to tend to a lot of email regarding the Fling Media launch.
  • tend to bunch of new project requests.
  • deal with our car getting smashed
  • jump on a few calls, but not too many.
  • tend to a pretty full week of billable work.
  • spent far too much time dealing with CSS for Google Reader.
  • write down notes and deal with the six new product ideas I’ve had.

I’ve been plagued with at least one new project idea per day. Each idea I write down and talk it over with Cyndi, debating if it would be worthy to pursue. Add to that trying to figure out the priorities of the original six. Each morning I say to Cyndi something like, “Oh, we have to get started on Yellville soon.” or “I did some thinking about Willacoochee, and I think I should start on that next.”

The real problem is really priorities. Something I’ve witnessed countless times while at startups or for clients, but now struggle with myself. Obviously each product has a particular business goal attached to it. Being a small business, the needs of the business and the opportunities that arise change almost daily, gently brushing up against one of your product ideas.

Like a reflex, you immediately think about how the added benefit of one product would help in todays situation. How it would solve a problem for you, and therefore others. Trying to not become too overwhelmed by the reflex is the challenge. How do you avoid becoming distracted by ideas and innovation?

Well, surprise surprise, I have an idea for that too. But the idea still needs a little more reflection on the details.

The good news is that this week I did a lot of thinking on the first site, Sandwich. I have a pretty good plan of attack and have started on the initial project planning. It still might be another week or two until I start talking about it publicly, but at least I feel like I made some headway.

So while I haven’t made a ton of progress this past week, I didn’t exactly have high hopes. The big question moving into week two, will be how much will I be able to do with upcoming travel and billable work?

added 4 weeks ago Permalink

A New Newsreader Update

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.

I’ve reached out to Shaun to see if there are similarities in what he is working on and what I’m thinking. The more I’ve been pondering this idea, the more I think there is a need to completely reinvent the paradigms in which we digest feeds, using a less is more principle.

We’ll see how similar Shaun’s work is to my thinking and I’ll make the decision shortly of whether I should bump one of the original six site ideas for a newsreader or dump the idea entirely in favor of Fever.

added 1 month ago Permalink

Is there a need for New Newsreader?

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.

But one issue seems to be holding me back: All the online newsreaders are so UGLY!

If I’m going to be spending the majority of my face time with my news feeds online, then I want my experience to at least be a pleasurable one. Not only should online newsreaders support strong interaction for reading the news, but it should be also be a delight to look at.

And by being online, it should be able to support multiple contexts. So if I’m away from my desk I should be able to read my favorite feeds on my mobile device, my Kindle eBook reader, or even a nicely printed paper.

So in an effort to try do something about the general state of ugliness in the online newsreader space I started a very ill advised attempt this weekend to extend the excellent work of Jon Hicks’ gReader to work in Fluid. It seemed like a good idea, but it is a lot of work to reverse engineer such complex code, forget about the time it would take to maintain it.

At some point I realized that I realized it would be easier (I’m sure a gross understatement) to just build an online newsreader from scratch. One that works great AND looks great.

When Garrett and I had the idea for Leaflets last year, the technology started as a simple newsreader. Using Magpie, Garrett was able to quickly put together a simple, scalable newsreader engine quickly. We were able to reuse the underlying code numerous times to create a variety of “leaflets” in mere weeks.

So in thinking about my dream newsreader I came up with the following lists of things it should do:

1. It should look f*ing great.

It should be rivaling the user experience of desktop apps, not be some poor substitute. Design is a crucial part of the experience. I want to be able to enjoy reading my news, not feel like I’m reading my email, which seems to be the most commonly adopted user interface convention.

2. It should work great.

After all it is a newsreader. You should be able to read your news easily and never feel hindered by the fact that it is a web app. This means all the interactions should be nicely designed, but it should also load quickly, with next to no lag (or at least have some user feedback while content is loading).

3. There has to be a mobile version

By being online you can keep your news syncing across multiple devices. Having a mobile access to your news is crucial and you don’t want to have to mark old news as read once you get back to your desk.

4. It should support multiple view types

I can think of several ways I might want to view my news. For example you would have a headline view, and a “River of News” view, but there are other views that might be helpful, like a Coverflow like view, or a Newspaper layout. The point is that it’s my news. I might feel like a functional view one day, and an experiential view the next.

5. It should be taggable.

Folders for organizing news might be helpful for some groups of feeds, but it largely seems to add volume and make reading your news more tedious. So each feed should be taggable, both by me and by others. So if someone tags Daring Fireball with “Apple” or “Mac” I shouldn’t have to. By adding tags, things can start getting interesting with creating Smart Feeds, being able to add logic to filter feeds on the fly.

6. It should be shareable.

I know a lot of people don’t like the sharing features of Google Reader, but I think it is an important element. We amass a lot of information through feeds these days and the ability to get it out of our newsreader and into the heads of others is an important part of the experience. I want to be able to add notes to feed items and generate my own RSS feed that I’m able to import into other web apps, widgets, mobile apps, etc. That is when really interesting things start to happen.

7. It should be skinnable.

So I might create a design I really like, but maybe someone else doesn’t like it. I might want something that looks more native to my Mac, but someone else wants it to look like Vista. The user should be able to select from multiple themes and if they don’t like what they see, they should be able to customize to suit.

8. You should be able to send to your Kindle (or other eBook Reader)

I love my Kindle, so why can’t I send a version of today’s news to my Kindle in a nicely formatted PDF? So if I’m going on a train or a long flight I can take it with me and not have to worry about data access? I think portability of news is crucial, and while I don’t rank this high now, it is growing in importance as new devices come out.

9. You should be able to print your news.

Adding to notion of portability, I should be able to print out my news in a nicely formatted, newsy format. Again, if I’m traveling and want something to read, I can quickly print out my news and read it on the morning commute.

10. It should play nicely with Site Specific Browsers (SSB’s)

Last but certainly not least, I should be able to create my own desktop apps using tools like Fluid, Prism or even Adobe AIR. So if I prefer to have a dedicated app for my news that it just works.

11. It should be free.

That all of the above should be free to the masses. There are more creative ways of making money these days then charging for features they can get free elsewhere. I have some ideas of how to make the necessary cash to keep a product like this alive, but I certainly don’t think you would need to rely on subscription fees.

So this all begs the question, should I do something about it? Should I try and build an online newsreader service? While not part of my original Six Site ideas, it is definitely worthy of being one.

I know it can be done, but this idea would require a lot more functionality. I think it needs to be something more than just another newsreader. It would probably take me more time to create it than the other six ideas, but it might be worth it.

I want to hear from you. Let me know what you think. Vote in our poll, or contact us directly.

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added 1 month ago Permalink

Every 5 Weeks

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.

Read

added 1 month ago Permalink

Two more ideas today...

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.

Since both of these ideas would make for perfect open source projects, I wish I could just spend a few days on designs and jot down notes on the features and publish them. Maybe try to attract a handful of people looking to collaborate.

The problem is that I think taking a project public too early, with not a lot of meat on the bones yet is a bad idea. It can come off too much like vapor. I obviously believe there is value in talking about the process early on, but when is the right time to say what you intend to do?

That is a question I’m going to be asking myself a lot over the next few weeks.

added 1 month ago Permalink

Announcing Six Sites: Six Products in One Year

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!

What is a Product?

As I’ve been thinking about this idea, trying to figure out which of my long list of product ideas are worthy of the challenge, the question of what is and is not a “product” comes up.

By product I mean to say a site designed to be its own self sufficient brand meant to provide a specific audience or group of users a service or personal value. Each site will have a specific business goal designed to make money, some directly and some indirectly, some short term and some long term.

So by products I really mean websites.

Why Six Sites?

You may be asking, “Why Six Sites?” (not the name, but the quantity)

Three reasons really: The first is that I tend to have a sundry of ideas and interests as diverse. I’d like to explore them and do what I enjoy. Each product idea is something I am passionate about would love to do full time.

The second is simple startup investment logic. If 1 out of 10 startups will be successful, then why not try and increase the odds yourself? Why not create a number of products that each have potential, and see if they are able to reach an audience. If so, invest more, if not, shelve it, open source it… who knows.

The third reason is simply to see if it can be done. Can an agile design and development model work on multiple products in such a short period of time?

I don’t know but I think it is worth trying.

Why not just create one “good” product?

Why spread myself so thin trying to do so many products? Why not just focus on one “good” product? Good question.

I want each product to be released with the same pride and quality that one might put into a product they’ve spent on. I just believe it doesn’t have to take a year. If I focus on the problems I’m solving and nothing else, if I keep decisions, features, designs and code all streamlined to serving its basic purpose, I think I can pull it off without making sacrifices.

I believe that if I stay lean and mean I can create six great products in a short period of time.

Is it Doable?

I’ve estimated hundreds of client projects. I’m gotten pretty good at being able to assess scope and complexity of an idea. You can never be 100%, but my instincts tell me that I can complete each product, each with varying complexity within a year and still be able to do client work, which will be paying the bills.

Some products will be simple and can done over a weekend and some will be complex and take a few months. But is it doable? I have no idea, that’s the fun part.

What’s Next?

I plan to provide more details of Product #1, codenamed “Sandwich” named after a town in Massachusetts, in the next few weeks. In the coming weeks and months I will provide updates and clarify the business goals of each product, though some details are very likely to change.

Stay tuned on this site and my company site. There is a lot more to come.

-Brian

added 1 month ago Permalink

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