Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Free software project update


Update 12/27/11: here's what I ended up building

I received over 20 ideas for my free software hackathon project, and also a lot of encouragement. Here's a quick note to update everyone who has expressed interested in the project.

About half of those ideas were from people who want to start businesses. I'd love to help them out but I can't go into business with someone I've never met, especially if they don't live in Baltimore. If you are in that situation I recommend you hire someone to build a prototype as that vastly increases your credibility. Better yet, you should try teaching yourself how to code so you can build it yourself.

About two-thirds of the ideas were far too ambitious for me to tackle in one week. I'm exploring those for future endeavors, though.

About three or four of them look specific enough for me to create a basic solution in a week and I'm investigating each right now. The ones I ultimately pick will be based on how responsive the original customer is and what I think my chances will be to deliver the product within one week.

People are definitely fed up with crappy software. Many of my correspondents talked about existing solutions that are too expensive, buggy, or simply too bloated. They end up hacking things together with Excel or a web calendar. Based on this simple market research I definitely can confirm the "many competitors, little competition" thesis and it's something I hope to attack with this project.

No comments: