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?
We had this crazy idea, could we create 12 products in 12 months? We've built successful products in less than a month before, so maybe we could do it again... and again... and again. Well after crunching the numbers we realized that we wouldn't have any time to do client work too. So we are going 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. 
Having problems with your product? We can help you out with that, we've been building web products for over ten years. We can help steer your product to a more user centered track, help get your product back on the rails, or build it from scratch.