Bryan Franklin

Hello, World (no really…)

11 years ago

“Hello World” is the cliche sample display text used the world over by programers when learning a new function or language. Since I have not identified as a developer, programer, engineer, etc. before, I thought it was fitting to re-anounce myself in this customary fashion.

January 16th, 2013 :: Day One :: Inception

This diary is meant to record my ideas, feelings, decisions, and actions during the creation of a company. I hope it will be a contribution to anyone who has the entrepreneurial yearning to create, and anyone who follows it. Its a completely different type of blog than I’ve created in the past on BryanFranklin.com. This one is practical and direct.

Tributr.com is the social network for entrepreneurs, founded by Jennifer Russell and me. We are trying out our relationship with Tibi to see if we work well together, with the intention of adding him as an early partner.

After months of just talk, today is the birthday of tributr.com – the transition from gestation to manifestation. The difference is pretty subtle for anyone other than Jennifer, me, and Tibi, our Bulgarian cohort. For me, the first ‘clock’ has started. Zuck’ created Facebook in 45 days. Tick Tick Tick.

Setting Up I.T. (or Setting IT up)

We’ll use our existing virtual dedicated server as the live and development servers. We’ll use Tibi’s set up in Bulgaria as the test server.

Tibi recommends that the test and live server not be on the same machine, though there’s no difficulty with dev and live being together

At a later point, we’ll need three different servers of the exact same spec. That point will be determined by the findings of Tibi’s performance testing.

Choosing Platforms

We’ll use Office Auto Pilot for the customer database and WordPress to create static pages for now.

One consideration with OAP is that we cannot email to our users with another user listed as the ‘from’ or ‘reply-to’, as LinkedIn does. All of our notifications will come from circletribe.com, including when one user sends a message to another

One benefit is that users will be forced back to the site to read and respond to that message. More viral traffic and less development complexity won over more user freedom and flexibility.

It is understood that we will outgrow both of these systems eventually and build everything from scratch as the number of users grow.

Project Management and Bug Tracking Software

We’ll use asana.com for project management / bug tracking and bitbucket for the code repository

The First Final First Feature List

These Things change constantly – but this is where we stand today. We settled on the ‘first seven’ features (after brainstorming literally hundreds of awesome ideas)

1. Facebook / Linkedin Login
2. Be able to enter your industry, revenue, team size, and customer list.
3. Be able to enter what you want to accomplish next
a. We want users to generate a finite list of topics, but we also want them to have the flexibility to say what ever is true for them
b. Users in general are bad at goal creation. How can we guide them to a useful granularity… not to general and not too short-sighted?
4. Be able to see a list of people and what they want help with
a. We’ll start with chron-order. Creating a more useful order using a Relevance score will come later.
5. Be able to select a user from the list and offer help
6. Be able to say “thank you” and award contribution points
7. Display contribution score based on contribution points

Web Design – Doing It Oneself

We’re not going to hire a designer – which means the design work will fall to me. We’re going with speed and economics over that last Nth of elegance. This, oddly enough, was the scariest decision of the day for me. Time for me to become a UX expert. When you want to learn something new – go to Quora. This is an excellent article on books for UX design: http://www.quora.com/User-Experience/What-are-best-10-books-about-user-experience-design.

comments, ideas, suggestions, and questions welcome. Lets start a dialog. Subscribe (orange box above) to get frequent updates as we birth our most significant idea into existence!

 

Image: 1

No Comments »

Reply