For a bootstrapped venture, I’ve definitely gone through one too many changes in direction and strategy. In September, I was gung-ho with developing my own social networking site for runners, complete with what I call collaborative fitness features. I charged forth with building the fitness features, while I painstakingly sought out a solution for the social networking platform I needed. After flirting with building my own social site from the ground up, by November, I gave up on the idea because I realized it was just too ambitious an undertaking, and ridiculous a decision given the number of off the shelf solutions already out there. The only problem was that none of those community solutions were compatible with Google Apps Engine, the infrastructure that my site was being built on. GAE was simply too new, and nobody had yet made compatible any of the community solutions.
In my search, I had come across a reuse initiative called Pinax, led by James Tauber (www.pinaxproject.com), to create the standard social networking features and make it available for reuse. It was the only social platform built with Python and Dango framework that I had come across during my search. Since my site was built on Python/Django, Pinax was the closest solution to letting me realize my product. So in December, I hired Kevin to move the site off GAE, and hired Darrel in February to get Pinax up and running on my server. Darrel has also finished the building of the first release of the running tools, much of which was built by Hugh starting in September. So on the development front, we’ve made significant progress and now have a clear timeline to launch. Pinax is such a feature-ful community solution that I’ve had to turn off more than half the features, to keep our site simple and relevant to our target audience. So I’m really happy with the decision for having moved onto Pinax. I can’t wait to see the continued progress James Tauber and core development team there make over the course of the year.
But its on the business side that I think the latest decisions have been quite exciting. Mario and Christian joined as business partners last month. Mario brings a wealth of business development and finance experience to the table, while Christian’s design and marketing chops will greatly help in the positioning of our product, as well as other design and marketing activities. Mario’s first order of business was figuring out what kind of revenue expectations my idea had, and the forecast was a gloomy one. His proposal was to go b2b, by offering fitness organizations our running tools for some kind of revenue model. I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, but Christian and Mario weren’t completely sold on Runaroo as a stand-alone social network either. It wasn’t until we talked to Sam, the CEO of another internet startup, that we got to some very promising ideas. Eventually, after some due diligence on the product side, we found a middle ground between the two ideas. Without giving away details until we launch, I can at least say that we are going to be a Saas community provider for fitness organizations.
