So far, I have done everything myself. The graphic design, the web design, the interface design, the application programming, the system administration, the support, the marketting, the DSP scripting, the database administration, the product management, the creative directing, the bla bla bla.
That’s my style, I’m a bit of a jack of all trades… and I’ve always asked myself “why get someone else to do it when I could probably do it myself?”. But is this a good strategy?
I’m starting to realise now this strategy results in a large drop in productivity, and a subsequent significant slowing of the development of the site.
I’ve always though that I dont want financial investment / venture capital… because I dont need it (I can do everything off my own back). But I’m starting to realise that attempting to do everything is only slowing down the development of the site.
It is so clear to me right now what are the next steps in developing the site… but it is going to take me 6-10 months to do it myself. If I had an extra 50-100K to play with, I could probably get all that stuff done within a couple of months _and_ have 6 months left over to push the site even further.
The question is, will the value of the site be more than the finances spent in 6 months… compared to what it would be worth without the financing? I dont think that question can be answered without a business model to define ‘real-world’ figures
Categories: Strategic mistakes · product management
I’ve made a few mistakes that I’m realising now. Here they are:
- Announcing the conversion to DTS was ‘coming soon’ but without stating when. This means that people would come back to the site often in the days after discovering the new anticipated feature… then after a week or so of coming back without the feature being there, they would get frustrated and not bother coming back… until maybe a couple of months away. I wonder if there is a maximum time for announcing a ‘coming soon’ feature?If the users can subscribe to an email that tell them when the feature has arrived, that’s probably good. Otherwise, I suspect that 1 or 2 weeks is the maximum (I’ve been going for over a month).An other possibility would be to announce a specific date at which a feature is deployed. This might be risky seeing that timing in software development is so ethereal.
- Deploying a WIKI and a FORUM without coding up a single-sign-on feature. I bet people register an account on the front page and then attempt to post on the forum only to find out that a) they have to log in again and worse b) they have to create yet an other account.
- Broken search functionality. I didn’t think that anyone used this search functionality, until I had a look at the site statistics and saw that quite a lot of people use it. Why do I have a broken feature on there anyway? Would it be better for me to remove it until it is fixed? (I’d say so).
DTS is coming very soon now … but I wont let the cat out of the bag until it is completely there.
Then, I have to work out how I am going to manage the Binaural deploy. I have a ‘coming later’ sticker on there, but I suspect that I will need to be more specific than that.
Categories: Strategic mistakes
