How ‘Getting Real’ Is Helping Us Build Haven

Photo by: J Heffner
When you are a small team of developers who is building a web-based application with very limited resources, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the size and effort involved in bringing your idea to life. How in the world can you possibly design and build an application, make it full-featured, and attract customers in a relatively short period of time? We found ourselves asking these questions, and it took us a while but we finally found an answer.

First, how did we find ourselves in this situation? Well, it certainly wasn’t hard. Our idea for Haven (a web-based collaborative development environment you’ll be hearing more about very soon) started small, and over time we designed more and more features that we thought we would solve some of the problems we have with traditional IDEs. It was a natural process, and we are building this application for ourselves so it was really fun to dream. We were excited and got started with development. Little did we know we were creating a huge problem for ourselves by jumping in so quickly. We very quickly got overwhelmed by all that needed to be done.

The kick in the pants we needed was to go back and heed some advice from 37signals’ book, Getting Real. In it, the authors had the answer to our problem:

We’ve read Getting Real and have followed 37signals’ Blog, Signal vs. Noise, for quite some time. If you aren’t following them already I highly recommend you grab their RSS feed. We are familiar with the ideas they used to build their successful business. The idea of doing less was not really that new to us. But, we still resisted the process because we were unwilling to put aside more advanced features that we thought would make us really love using Haven. Still, during a recent planning conversation, at last we really “got real”. We agreed to focus on a short list of three key features. And it’s the best decision we’ve made to date.

We realized that “doing less” means the features we thought were important needed to be put aside (perhaps for a few months, perhaps forever) until we had our key features nailed. It’s a scary proposition to turn your back on what you feel are your unique, customer attracting features. But, the wisdom in doing this is you are going to have the experience and feedback of using the application to draw from as you begin to slowly add additional features.

So, my advice is to sit down early and really focus on what the core functionality is for your application. Then once you’ve done than, it might help even more to do it again for good measure. It will save you time immediately and going forward because you will be adding features out of experience instead of pulling them out of thin air.

I hope you found this information helpful in some way. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: 37Signals, getting real, haven, less