RailsOnWave Ruby on Rails web 2.0 Ajax - Got Things Done

The best recipe for creating a profitable web app in a 2.0 era

2008-08-20T14:07:00Z

We, as many other startups, are keep doing ourself the same question: which is the best recipe to create a profitable web app nowadays?

It’s a tough question. I think a good web app, something making money, has many simple characteristics. One of the best and also funny video I found on the Net, talking about this, is the speech that David Heinemeier Hansson gave to the last Start Up School 08 (watch it after having read this article)

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In short, David recipe to create a (Internet) profitable company:

Make a product, price it and sell it!
It has been working in this way from time immemorial, so don’t think that the web is different. It’s not. The best way to see if you really have something groovy to sell, is make it and trying to sell it
Don’t try to set up 1 billion company! The odds are against you.
He’s right, between your current income (typically below 100k a year) and 1 billion dollars, there are a wide range of acceptable revenues. One million company is definitely a good target (isn’t it?), a target you can probably manage without anyone financing you (no VC). BTW… making one million a year is not simple, definitely not easy, but it’s immensely much simpler, than try to making 1 billion a year.
Target: business is better than consumer.
Convincing consumers to spend their money is not so easy, even if your application is useful and well designed. Companies, on the other side, are always looking for tools or services enabling cost cutting or easy management or knowledge management or what so ever. So try with them first.
Keep it simple.
This is a mantra for all of us and Rails helps us a lot following this direction. It’s fundamental that people could understand quickly why they need you.

I’d like to integrate David recipe with some small ingredients of mine:

Your product must have a barrier to the entrance.
I don’t know if this is the right term in English, but I mean you must avoid that someone can copy you in a fraction of a second. The elements part of your barrier can be many: good design, idea, time to market, technology, smartness (why not?), etc. And there’s a postulate to this theorem…
(postulate) Whatever your barrier is, remember that it won’t last forever.
Feed your idea day by day.
The fact that you caught a good product once, it doesn’t mean you are like Mida king.
Every time is a new challenge; no one will buy your product because of your once famous hit.
Making a good product is an art.
It requires time and patience. If you don’t earn 50,000 dollars the first day you’re out, don’t be too angry. Pace yourself and wait. In the meantime think about how to improve it.
Ask yourself: would I spend 50 bucks a month to buy my product?
It’s better to ask you this question before start coding. In any case, it’s important to repeat it every time your expectations are above your results. BTW, if you are not using what you’ve built, then probably it’s not so useful, aren’t you?
Don’t be so sever with you. Even Evan William who built Blogger.com forgot this truth when he founded Odeo. Then he understood and created Twitter

RailsConf 2008 is on air!

2008-05-30T16:12:00Z

The most wonderful conference about Ruby On Rails is starting and GotThingsDone.com is again Gold Sponsor. This year we have big news about our main product: WhoDoes 2.0

Chad Fowler is introducing the whole program right now. Keep following us on this blog or at Wave Factory blog

No useless marketing, improve your product!

2008-05-04T14:25:00Z

I’ve just spent 2 hours reading a good book, I bought it about a year ago in Portland. It’s titled “Founders at work” by Jessica Livingston_. I’ve been very inspired by the interview of Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek, author of Joel on software – a blog I’ve been following since 2001.

He talked about the early days at Fog Creek and Fog Bugz product’s strategy. He said something about not to waste your time into complicated marketing strategies instead of working on your product. In this specific case he was referring to an affiliate program they developed up to Fog Creek:

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on anyone of these crazy things – although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them – was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.

Good tip Joel.

BTW I’ve seen he will be present at RailsConf in Portland this year
I look forward to see you there.

Photos from SMAU 2007

2007-10-18T09:51:00Z

Photos SMAU 2007. Photos from GotThingsDone.com stand at SMAU 2007.

Some photos from GotThingsDone.com stand at SMAU 2007 – 44th International Exhibition of Information & Communications Technology – Milan, Italy.

Code, Art & RailsConf moments

2007-10-11T21:33:00Z

The RailsConf Europe is over but we love to remember all the great moments we had there. I loved Dave Thomas’ speech in particular (you can find a brief introduction here and we hope to publish the entire speech soon). He talked about engineering, code and elegance and that reminded me of an event we went to some weeks before the Berlin conference.

We were in Venice – Italy – at the 52° Biennale of Venice to complete art works exposed there with our art: Code… Ruby code.

Code is Art in Berlin

BTW, next week we’ll be present at SMAU in Milan, the largest annual trade show for information and telecommunications technology in Italy. Look for us at the Wave Group stand.

Just one word - RailsConf Europe 2007

2007-10-02T12:34:00Z

We asked the guys at RailsConf Europe to express themselves about Berlin, Rails and the people at the conference. What we wanted to know was only one word for each topic. This video is the result. Enjoy!

How can you express Rails, Berlin and the people @ railsconf europe with just one word for each of these topics ? We’ve challenged the RailsConf Europe 2007 attendees and we’ve condensated their answers in this 5 minutes video.

So, please, enjoy this ‘Just one word’ interviews :)

DHH's keynote in Berlin - A pill

2007-09-22T13:10:00Z

We have been just come back from Berlin where we took part to the RailsConf Europe 2007. It has been an amazing experience so… we couldn’t wait !!!

Here you find a first short video of DHH’s keynote at the RailsConf Europe in Berlin.

We hope to be able to publish the entire keynote in a few hours on this site.

Check again in a few hours!</center>

Want our amazing t-shirt at the RasilConf Europe?

2007-09-17T18:56:00Z

RailsConf Europe 2007 – WhoDoes T-shirt

We are taking part in the RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin once again as Gold Sponsor. Being a sponsor in Portland was so amazing that we couldn’t miss the same event in Europe, but as you know we are a really small company, so we decided not to have an exhibition stand, but we would really like to give a small gift to the people who attend the conference.

So tomorrow we’ll give away our wonderful t-shirt for free at the conference Hotel in Berlin. Of course we don’t have a t-shirt for each participant, so only the the lucky ones will get one.

How will you recognize us?

Where will we distribute our t-shirt?

Look for this AD Poster at the conference site:

The Code is Art

2007-08-27T12:39:00Z

The Code is Art - 52° Biennale of Art, Venice (Italy)

What: The Code of Art
Where: Venice, Italy
When: August 2007 during the 52° Biennale of Art

What is art? To answer the question we decided to go to Venice, the most artistic city in the world, during the 52° Biennale of Art, one of the most important art exhibition in the world.

Our idea is quite simple. Art represented at the 52° Biennale of Venice, is not art at all. All the artists exposed incomplete work (intentionaly or not). We went to Venice to complete their work.

What is missing in our opinion of the exposed work at Biennale? The code (meaning) of universal interpretation: "The Art Code".

So we wrote the code and brought it with us to the Biennale of Venice to show it (like a flag) to the entire world!

"Code".is_a?(String).to_a<<"RT"

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(xy)write it! has been released

2007-08-24T15:24:00Z

Hi everybody,

August is normally a month dedicated to vacation in Italy, however for our team this has been a great time to work. We fixed, extended, created many new things, some of which will be released soon.

It’s almost a year that we’ve been developing web applications professionally using Ruby On Rails and it’s really good to see that big names are investing money and energy on this technology. But even before famous guys like Jeff Bazos and Steve Case joined the Rails brigade, we knew we were onto something really great to know and fun to use. Those of you who were at the RailsConf this year in Portland, can better understand what I’m saying. 1,600 people met in Oregon to share their knowledge on this small but promising technology and to celebrate Ruby as a programming language and Rails as common playground.

Working with Ruby on Rails is so funny that you hardly resist the temptation to code the stuff you need from scratch, instead of using already existing products. That was exactly what happened to me this summer.

Some months ago we needed a tool to help us to collaborate writing a document. We used Writeboard by 37signals for few months and it showed us how Textile can be powerful and simple at the same time. Textile is a simple but powerful markup-language used by many Internet applications; it is a web text markup-language that “balances the strength of HTML with speed and ease of editing”. It allows you to concentrate on the only important thing when you write a document: the content, what you need to communicate. I mean, no huge formatting, no font selection, only text… and a few tags to give a bit of structure.

Using Writeboard we realized that if we would have made a tool like that, we probably would have introduced some changes. Some small differences like moving comments on the right side of the page – instead of having them on the bottom of the document – or some extensions like a smart phone interface – a mark-up language like Textile is the perfect choice to write a document using small devices such as (smart)phones.

We soon understood that a product like Writeboard can be really useful as plug-ins to many others applications that you are planning to develop.

So after a few days of full time coding, a new product is ready to be delivered. Amazing!

Change the Word… (xy)write it!

(xy)write is (re)born.

Why did we name it this way? For the “seniors” in our team, having a simple but powerful word processor of the good old days means only one thing: XyWrite (remember… no… maybe too young). You can have a deep understanding of what I say reading some stuff on Wikipedia for example.

XyWrite has been a pillar in the word processing market, so we decided to tell it softly and put the brakets in the name. In alt.folklore.computers it was addressed as “the GOD of word processors”. Well, for sure it was pretty popular during the 80s and many people had the pleasure to use it for a while. That piece of software was a dream running on DOS and a nightmare when it got a GUI. Now with the web, the spirit of XyWrite can be re-established.

Oh, by the way, (xy)write, our new product, is FREE. Anyway, let me introduce you to this wonderful tool pointing out its main features.

What it does

Collaborating

(xy)write makes easy writing, sharing and collaborating on a document. It helps your team agree about what to do, wherever they are. It helps you to share a meeting report or a contract with a customer. And it makes sure that if someone changes the document, you’ll be notified via email by the system. You can invite people to collaborate with you in seconds simply having their email addresses.

Version tracking

(xy)write manages version tracking allowing you to retrieve a previous version if something goes wrong. Then you can complete it and save it with a new version number.

Commenting

Writing a document often requires exchanging information with the other people. (xy)write allows you to share comments while you and your collaborators complete the document.

Export in PDF or RTF format

In any moment you can export a document in PDF or RTF format to elaborate it offline. That’s a very normal thing for a word processor, but Writeboard doesn’t have it. Yet another reason to code our own product.

An egalitarian word processor: re-use your old PC

I’m so upset when I find a good product on the Internet, but I can’t make it work with older OSs. (xy)write has been written to be usable with old OSs like Mac OS 9.2 and browsers like Netscape 7.1. We chose Netscape bacause it’s available on many old machines. We are very proud of this feature, so if you have an old PC with Netscape 7.1 or greater on it and somethings doesn’t work well with (xy)write, contact us to get it fixed immediately. You don’t need a new PC to use a smart word processor.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

A tribute to RailsConf & Portland

2007-06-28T09:41:00Z

This year – as many of you probably already know – we took part in the RailsConf in Portland. We met great people and learned a lot of stuff. The city was wonderful! The Light Rails took us wherever we needed to go and amazing bookshops drowned us. Coming back to Italy we discovered we got a lot of stuff – pictures and videos – that could be used to create something to celebrate this event.

Joe – our creative mind – worked a few days to review all the material we gathered and elaborated this homage to the wonderful town and the amazing people we met during those days.

Watch it

Hope you love it as much as we do.

Massimo

WhoDoes: our new product soon online

2007-05-03T20:02:00Z

Driving a project to succeed is always been a tough job. We have been involved in project delivery for a long time – and we actually are right now – and we know how difficult it can be to identify the best trade off amongst time, cost and customer satisfaction.

In this time we have understood that the major hit in this process is making your team aware of what they have to do every morning, when they start their work day. Planning project activities and taking care of every expected and unexpected task is a major challenge that your team is going to face everyday. The secret weapon to survive the mess is, don’t panic and slice your project tasks into little chores: simply, understandable and quickly to complete.

So, a successful project driver must first of all answer the following question:

What do I have to do today?

Your people need to know what they have to accomplish every day in order to succeed in projects. They don’t need to know the whole complex picture and be worried about every single aspect of the contract – client expectations, timing and cost constraints, status reports and so on.

You need them to be focused on one task at a time and possibly the right one. The one which is due for the next deadline, satisfying the client and keeping your boss relaxed.

Often the major problem is driving team effort in the right direction, producing visible and valuable results on time. People working hard on the wrong task get frustrated quickly when not achieving results and often decide to leave your company.

So, the main issue you have to address is to have tools and methods which answer to this simple question:

What do I have to do today?

You can be a great planner and a wonderful communicator, but if you don’t answer the simple question you get quickly burnt out as well as the project. It’s really simple: your people need to know what to do and they need it every day. We studied this simple problem very carefully until we understood, us – and probably you – need some tools to support our operations.

We are currently on the way to release a brand new product called WhoDoes.

Keep reading our blog and we’ll give you some news soon.

WhatALi.st – Little restyling

2007-03-29T12:15:00Z

We recently did a little restyling of WhatALi.st layout in order to give more space to the contents and to increase the usability.

We enlarge the layout width till the limit supported by the 1024×768 resolution, bringing it to 960 pixel.

We did also some little changes to the Tag Cloud increasing the distance and the line-height between tags.

This is the power of CSS: you can change an entire web site layout modifying only few lines of code.

Here you can see two screen shots… before and after “the cure”.

Which one do you prefer?

WhatAList is online!

2007-02-22T18:48:00Z

We finally did it. WhatAlist is available online! Follow me…

WhatAList: designed for simplicity

2007-02-11T18:38:00Z

In my last article I shared some lessons learned during WhatAList set up phase. This time I’d like to spend few words about some design decisions we made during the project. After having closed the beta version of our application, we found the design guideline – the user interface we chose – was not completely appropriate.

Do you remember what Getting Real states about decisions?

Don’t take action on an idea for a week and see if it still seems like a great idea after the initial buzz wears off. The extra marinading time will often help your brain come up with an easier solution.

Well, it refers to code decisions, but the same philosophy can be applied seamless to the user interface we created. What seems to be a cool design can suddenly become a nightmare during implementation.

Let’s move to demonstrate what I’m saying. Our initial GUI design was something like the following:

We loved the overall look and feel. It was very attractive. It was one page site: you were never forced to leave this page to use lists, reorder items. You’d got nice DHTML tool tips following the cursor while moving through list items. You’d got fancy basket to drag’n’drop lists to your bookmarks. So, you can say, what’s the problem?

It was damn complicated. Synchronizing tons of Ajax, making it cross browser compatible, showing baskets always on the bottom while you were browsing lists, ... Too much time spent on the GUI and too few on the features. It was wonderful to watch for the first time. The second one it was great too… The third time you got annoyed. Moreover, after having worked very hard on this application, we understood we missed something: features! Adding missing features could be quite complicated because of our design decisions.

So, one night we said ”Stop!”.

In a few hours we fixed a new design guideline:

White color never fed you up
Don’t be managed by Ajax. You decide. Use it to simplify.
If you have time to spend, use it to code essential features
Pace yourself. Print the layout. Hang it on a wall and watch it every morning. After 2 weeks decide if it’s the one.

Than, we went through a new lighter version of WhaAList, rethinking some features to make it more useful. We got this:

Even if some details are going to be finalized during these days, it’s pretty clear the radical change in the approach we adopted. Light, simple and polite. Closer to cross browser compatibility. In this change we understood why Ruby on Rails can be so powerful, actually. It costs us very little to apply the new way of thinking WhatAList.

Even if the application isn’t perfect yet, I prefer to exit as soon as possible in order to begin collecting feedbacks through our blog. At the moment we are only waiting for whatalist domain registration to go public.