The image on the homepage makes me think this family is running for their lives from a horde of zombies, but seem fairly happy about it. Gotta love stock photography.
http://www.pigeonpic.com/
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Idea to App in 2 weeks
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#42I'd like to offer an observation about the copy at http://www.pigeonpic.com . The larger slogan, "Never lose touch with friends and family", is vague. The smaller one, "Send photographs through the mail with just a text message", is specific. It makes clear what you offer and also that there is a concrete service here instead of just another smarmy social site. If I were you, I'd drop the first one and put the second…
>The larger slogan, "Never lose touch with friends and family", is vague. The smaller one, "Send photographs through the mail with just a text message", is specific. It makes clear what you offer and also that there is a concrete service here instead of just another smarmy social site.
This is an excellent point. However, I don't agree with your second bit of advice to drop the first line and just use the "clear" copy. Instead, I suggest coming up with a better tag line that maybe even ties in nicely with the name Pigeon (love that name, btw). Maybe something like, "Send photographs to anyone on the wings of a text." OK, that's probably lame, but I think you get my point.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#43I think this is how it should be done. Get something super rough and functional to market as soon as possible. I've been taking the same approach to micro-portal sites I've been building and launching the last month. In my first month from 2 sites I made $125 from Google Ad revenue. Essentially I build aggregation sites that rewrite the content based on multiple sources, sometimes even improving the original source by using multiple angels for the same content. The result is 2 highly ranking Wordpress sites that get first page priority for some big keywords.
It might not be the most logical for an app you have to build, but I think getting something out super unpolished that works is a great way to get to market early. People think you need massive teams, business plans and a strategy, but all you need to do is release something. I made the same mistake on a project I've been building for 7 years and counting, I'm not sure I'll even ever release it.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#44I think this is how it should be done. Get something super rough and functional to market as soon as possible. I've been taking the same approach to micro-portal sites I've been building and launching the last month. In my first month from 2 sites I made $125 from Google Ad revenue. Essentially I build aggregation sites that rewrite the content based on multiple sources, sometimes even improving the original source b…
I think there's a huge difference between creating a content farm and a real product.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#45I think this is how it should be done. Get something super rough and functional to market as soon as possible. I've been taking the same approach to micro-portal sites I've been building and launching the last month. In my first month from 2 sites I made $125 from Google Ad revenue. Essentially I build aggregation sites that rewrite the content based on multiple sources, sometimes even improving the original source b…
I think there's a huge difference between creating a content farm and a real product.
Maybe so, but the result is the same. What I launched went beyond a standard content farm though. I didn't use free or purchased themes, I used a self-created Wordpress theme framework I created a little while ago as the base of the sites but each design was built from scratch in Photoshop. The content aggregation and rewriting plugin that I wrote isn't something you can find anywhere, especially not to the point articles are rewritten from multiple sources in a way that works.
I was merely trying to make a point of developers needing to get stuff out as quick as possible. Maybe what I did was different to an app (and rightly so) but the fact I executed on an idea from start to finish and didn't get caught up on the little things or having a perfect end result is something I think every developer can take from and apply to anything they do.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#466 weeks: http://multiplayerchess.com built it 3 years ago after I had quit my job and came to SF
Cool stuff
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#47> So after I launched this product I had more orders in the first 24 hours than I did in total with my startup that took over a year to develop. Can you please elaborate on what you did to get orders? I would think it would be many times harder to get a first order from someone you don't know, than writing the app.
I would imagine that a good deal of the orders are from the friends that were mentioned.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#48Nice app. However, slow development time is not necessarily a bad thing. If you can develop an app in 2 weeks, it most likely means someone else can easily clone the same app. Whereas if you need 1+ years to develop it, it's likely not as likely to be duplicated (ie. there are actual technical barriers)
If others are interested though, that validates the idea, which is immensely more useful than the alternative.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#49The image on the homepage makes me think this family is running for their lives from a horde of zombies, but seem fairly happy about it. Gotta love stock photography.
Haha, spot on.
Re: Idea to App in 2 weeks
#50This is a pretty cool idea and I applaud the rapid execution.
That being said, you could have tested this idea out without building any tech at all by using your own phone number for texts and manually printing and shipping photos.
Then if the idea took off and you could no longer manually keep up with the orders you'd know you have a winner.