Quebec Valley

So after explaining my idea to my friend, we decided to start working on it. And we worked hard everyday and during the weekends. We worked on a very detailed business plan and we thought we could get financing. We worked on a killer Excel sheet which calculated everything auto-magically. Of course when we started, we had grandiose plans. A large server farm, lots of storage and so on. We also wanted a large dev team and an office. Boy we were so wrong, but very excited and motivated :)

We then presented our business plan to a local CDEC (that’s a local business support group for you non-Quebecois). To be honest, I knew I would have a hard time selling my idea, but after 2 hours (yes I was lucky to even have 2 hours) they barely had a clue about what my friend and I were trying to “build”. We did get very valuable tips on hold to build the business plan but once it was done, we were pretty much on our own. Well that’s something I kind of expected as well, but when you’re hyped like I was, I was kind of expecting a little bit more. This “incident” made us realised that finding money wasn’t going to be easy at all and that perhaps we should rethink our grandiose plans and start right away with a much smaller plan.

So we started to work on the software architecture. We wrote roughly 300 pages of detailed information about what we wanted to do including functions, screens and so on. We were exhausted even though we never wrote a single line of code. All this took roughly 4-6 months considering that I couldn’t always work during the weekends. I had my 9 to 5 job and then my 5 to 12 job.

What we did is we took a look at each and every site that we considered to be a competitor, whether they were a close competitor or not. We registered and used their product. We wrote down what was great and what was bad. We took all the best features and worked around that to improve our own ideas. During this process, we actually did a lot of research and we did find closer competitors. We did find many semi-competitors but they were not very mature or simply strange/silly. At first, we were a bit “down” but then we quickly realised that they had perhaps 50% of what we wanted to offer. We were still optimistic about our idea and continued to work on the plan. We had a vision that no one had. Even today, no site offers what we wanted to offer.

So what killed the idea? I’m still not sure and I don’t want to admit that the idea is dead yet, just dormant… I guess seeing new features pop here and there (on sites we kept a close eye on) didn’t really help. It’s like those sites can read our mind and release features we thought of a year ago. I guess we also realised that there would be a lot of work to be done in this field in order to get some attention and that the current players could easily copy our idea overnight with their army of coders and designers. Perhaps if we had started coding instead of planning we would be a very popular site? Who knows…

So what’s next? I don’t know. I have other plans but I refuse to kill this idea until I see an exact copy somewhere else. I thought of “open sourcing” my idea and let people work on it. I would lose control and the end result would definitively be different. Perhaps not like what I wanted. Would this be bad? I’m not sure. That’s what happened to Linux when Linus let it go. He created a monster but couldn’t control it anymore. But I bet he’s proud of what he’s done…