Writing the application – part of the creative process. My StopGoStopGo experience.
So I spent this weekend seeing how hard it is today to pump out an application. Particularly a mobile one such as the ones you see in the Apple App Store.
The actual activity was Start-up Weekend Boston held at Microsoft’s NERD offices in Cambridge.
The basic game is anyone can pitch an idea, then everyone votes, and then the top ideas are supposed to assemble teams. I will discuss this process and the implications in another post, but the process of selection is much closer to the process that people use when they decide whether to make something “go viral” eg recommend it to their friends, than any VC pitching competition.
I decided that I wanted to see what development on steriods was like, so I picked a team (StopGoStopGo.com) that was simply focused on writing a simple Windows Phone 7 application to show Boston MBTA train delays, but with the analysis performed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
To my surprise we had a working application by Sunday night. What was also surprising is that in the process of building the application we had check that it was working correctly. What stunned us was that our little model (with no historic data) was already predicting the actual delays way ahead of the MBTA’s alert system. Suddenly we had a competitive advantage over the other mobile applications in this space.
The process of writing the application was far more akin to using a combination of Photoshop and a very benovelent word processor.
I am sure that there we lots of things that we should have worried about – but all the old pain around memory management and garbage collection (Tuesday’s mornings at my house) has gone with Microsoft’s c# language.
And the business model?
Well we found that after we had built the v1.0 product.
Now Microsoft is promoting us on their Bizspark site – and we have more coverage less than a week than I have ever managed with a “real” startup in a year.
What do I conclude?
Well if you are a software Entrepreneur then you need to be able to code – just like you need to be able to create a Powerpoint presentation. Don’t say “I’ll outsource that to India” or “I’ll find someone to do that” because coding is becoming part of the creative process in the same way that you crystallize your ideas when you are creating that PPT file!
