Adiakritos Journal

dchuk said:
What's the project? Demo link?
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We literally were just syncing up our development environments a day ago so we've yet to actually build anything. We were tossing ideas back and forth on a project for students. I'll link you when we've got something cool working.

Or just shoot me a message on skype and we'll bounce stuff of each other.

Gone are the days I program all by me lonesome :)
 


I also stumbled on a cool idea.

I have a friend who is a professional web designer. I decided to let one of my clients know that I have this friend, and that I can ask him for design advice for an hourly rate since design isn't my strong point.

That way I can 1. learn from a professional web designer 2. provide professional quality work and 3. benefit a friend.

It's a win-win-win! :D
 
My first application is ready for testing. It's not that beautiful but it does what it needs to to be useful. I'm currently trying to get it launched with Amazon Web Services.
 
Elastic Beanstalk is fucking gay. I'm gonna just learn to launch with EC2, Capistrano, and Unicorn.

Sure it might be a headache but I'll be a learned champ afterward and have more control over my app.
 
Deploying manually is a pretty torturous but thankfully a friend of mine helped me through 95% of it. I'm so close to deploying now!

On top of it, my friend makes like $5k/DAY on one of his apps with hardly any volume. That shit is so motivating and inspiring it's absurd.
 
LAUNCHED!

I'm so blessed to know my friend who helped me get it launched.

Now I have to:
1 Work out the obvious errors
2 Get a nicer design on instead of plain vanilla twitter bootstrap
3 Get real users testing
4 Setup tracking and tweak with user feedback
5 Setup ads
6 Keep tweaking and listening to my users

Hopefully I can setup a store and sell stuff from the app. I think I'll definitely get way more users by keeping the app free.

I can't believe I've made it this far in developing this app. It doesn't mean anything until it makes me some money, but still, I'm fucking proud of myself.

I'm excited for the day I finally report on this thread that I'm making serious cashflow. I'm gonna post pictures of my Lamborghini Aventador and everything :D Just because I know some people on here have grown tired of this thread dragging on forever without monetary results to show for all my efforts.. and then all of a sudden BLAM! Fuckin' Lambo.
 
Good Luck!

Being persistent is everything! only if you invest and keep on moving you can go on. don't forget that until most businesses start making money even in the real world is a year or 2+ (break point). and also that you learn in everything you do - you learn how to market, SEO, manage campaigns on PPC and "fish out" the 80/20.

GL
 
djorz said:
Good Luck!

Being persistent is everything! only if you invest and keep on moving you can go on. don't forget that until most businesses start making money even in the real world is a year or 2+ (break point). and also that you learn in everything you do - you learn how to market, SEO, manage campaigns on PPC and "fish out" the 80/20.

GL
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Thanks for wise words!
 
It's inspiring you you're still trying to make it man.. but 3 years and you know whats going wrong? You switch focus so often. You've done so much but so little at the same time. But you have persistence. Man keep it up.

Subbing to this.

Best of luck, yo!

Walt :)
 
Hey thanks guys!

I'm never gonna quit. It's do or die!

- Walt, your exactly right. Thankfully I realized this a while back and it's what's kept me on this particular project for as long as I've been on it. Almost there! Developing an app isn't a joke. I thought I'd be able to do it much faster but, holy shit, has it been a major learning curve.

- phoenixrising. I'll send a link when strangers who visit the site can understand what it is when they visit. Right now it's not obvious and it's buggy. I know it wrote that it was ready for testers, although, that was before I launched it, and launching proved to change a few things.

I've been pretty quite on here because I've been busy getting this bad boy built.

I'm currently writing a scraper to basically grab all the public data from a - sort of - competitors database.

One thing is for sure, developing this app would have been 1000 times harder if it weren't for the help and crazy generosity of this guy Travis. I'm gonna surprise him with one of those water jet packs when I strike riches.
 
Alright so I've got a month to dedicate nearly entirely to my site before school starts up again.

I've decided that I want to work in a team. I was a little disenchanted with the previous guy I was working with so now I want to see if there are any RoR devs out there who believe this will take off with proper attention to jump on board.

Every single person I talk to about it is like "damn dude that's a sick idea. I'd pay for that for sure!"

I want to just spell out the idea here but the last thing I want is more experienced devs racing to bring it to market. I mean, the best part about it is that since I'm my own customer I have that extra intuition to make it that much better.

I think a team of like 2-3 devs would be ideal from what I've read.
 
My friend told me that no one's going to want to be a part of a project that isn't already gaining ground... that pretty much there are tons of people out there with an idea asking experienced devs to jump on board with them lol fak.
 
So, I'm dealing with a client/business partner (since I'm getting equity) right now who's pretty demanding. He's been frustrated because I didn't do first things first. Which I realize how important they are to being effective and moving things forward. It's purely a matter of integrity and workability.

So, in working with him I noticed that there are certain things that MUST be first in order to make sure everyone is on the same page.

This is the order building the business should go, in my view, after seeing what's happened this past week...

1. Get clear about who the target market is
2. Get clear about what the product is
3. Decide on how to reach that target market best
4. Decide on the site map/sales funnel
5. Formulate a time table
6. Execute

This would have made expectations clearer and defined what both of our work is from the start.

heh.. project management 101. it's a different beast entirely when I'm not just the worker taking orders from others.

Some other keys I'm seeing the value in to avoid overwhelm:

1. Starting with the end in mind
2. Seeking first to understand, then to be understood.
3. Communicating breakdowns or screw ups ASAP

Also -

I realized this over time:

In order for me to be effective and take massive action I have to:

1. Have a clear game plan I believe in

or

2. Have a clear and cut task I can execute
 
So I was listening to Eban Pagan's stuff earlier today and I thought to myself... holy shit...

In Get Altitude he talks about creating a customer avatar to write copy for. The point of that is to direct all your copy and advertising to your market in a way that they recieve the communication in such a way that it occurs that it's especially and exactly for them. It feels more like a one-to-one communication.

In Get Altitude he talks about using a more advanced version of empathy to acheive this level of insight into your market. Well I thought that was sort of limited. Why not just find a handful of individuals who are EXACTLY your target market, and interview them one-to-one? Or even speak to them until you know exactly what their desires or needs and perceptions are, instead of guessing, so that you can then write you copy and marketing materials as though your just writing to the person you just spoke to....

It achieves pretty much the same concept except its based on a real person rather than an imagined one.

In regard to my app, I need to go out and speak to my exact target audience and sell them on the idea before it's even created.. as thought it were created. And see what gets their fires burning and ready to take action. Then I'll be better equipped to design the app AND write ads and what not. But not only that, I've got to get them testing this thing. I've been currently redesigning it whenever I have free time.

Sometimes I lose sight of my goal to get the site built and going for a more shortsighted goal of making more money as a web developer.. like NAO. I've gotta stay focused....
 
My friend has been helping me a LOT with the app. He's convinced me to just re-write the entire thing and do it correctly from the start. My intial app was a horrendous mess, as anyone's first solo app would be.

Anyway,

Never knew how liberating it is to design a site from the bottom up, beginning with the interface, before touching any logic. It's fantastic, and I think this step will REALLY make the final product way better. I can already see how awesome it's going to be for me and others to use. Super excited! It's all I think about lol
 
adiakritos said:
Every single person I talk to about it is like "damn dude that's a sick idea. I'd pay for that for sure!"
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Not to discourage you, but when someone says something like this make sure to follow up with "Great cause I'm already live, why don't I sign you up right now? Got a credit card?"

You'd be surprised how many people say "I'd pay for that" but rarely follow through.
 
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