As we were about to step onto the metro in Washington D.C., Aaron mentioned that he's been thinking about creating a search directory for wikis where users could register and tag a wiki, and others could search for wikis. I immediately loved the idea, as there are thousands and thousands of wikis in existence that no one knows about.
As soon as we got back into the office, we decided to figure out how to get a version 1.0 of a wiki search directory out there. Andy was given the task of working with Aaron to create the back-end (MSSQL and C#) and implement the ASP side as well. Everyone at the office threw out name sugestions (we decided on WikiTag!), and I was charged with designing the logo and doing some basic CSS work.
The first week was full of growing pains, as Andy was relatively inexperienced with C# and ASP, and I was a relative novice with CSS. After a few days, we began to get the bugs worked out and everything began to come together. In just five days we had an internal launch. Four working days later, we're ready to go live with WikiTag!
Sure, WikiTag! is a rough, crude, beta product, but the functionality is there. We'll be adding many features over the next weeks, but WikiTag! is capable and useful right now, and we hope many of you will use it to discover new wikis.
There really isn't a secret recipe to our launching a new product in two weeks with three people. It is really just the product of nice division of labor, hard work, and solid leadership. Nothing mind boggling there. If you have an idea that seems too daunting to even start, then trim down the fat, decide on the essential features, build it, get it out there, and let the people decide.
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1 comment:
Thanks for writing this.
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