Made great progress in the past two weeks in reviving what has been an 8 month hiatus for the development of Runaroo.com
Why the hiatus, and why am I reviving it? First the hiatus..
1. Funding – I’m bootstrapping runaroo.com, and the money I’ve already put into it with my original team was forecasting to be way too much
2. Direction – with the way the site was turning out, I could not get excited about it. The features didn’t flow right and they weren’t addressing what I imagine the user needs would be.
3. Development – the more I learned, the more I realized there were significant web 2.0 developments that I wasn’t utilizing in my site. I saw them as strong differentiators for my site.
Revival….
1. Motivation through planning – i think this is self explanatory.
2. Starting from scratch – with where I last left off, I really didn’t like the site, and instead of looking at it to spark new ideas, I would end up getting frustrated. I decided to start from scratch, and ideate with sketches. I’d have a notebook and pen in hand, and whether it was in front of the television, or at work during downtime, I’d just start sketching wireframes. I used a Ideation workshop I attended through my f/t job to help me brainstorm at a divergent level and then at a convergent level, and it really opened my thoughts. It’s when you see progress that one starts to get excited and motivated, and that for me was taking form by the minute. So after a week, the sketches began to take fruition, and I finally realized them in more detail until they were in a spec and wireframe format.
3. Tapping into people – people at work, friends in the strategy realm.. I was talking to people who had expertise/knowledge that would help propel my momentum. I talked to developers about Ajax frameworks, Ad folks about the concept of Ad sales and revenue, friends in the strategy realm, and scouring message boards related to running.
So it has indeed taken alot of effort, especially since i’ve been going at this alone. Now that planning is intact, and I’ve started to execute on the plan, the momentum is there and it’s so much easier to move faster.
