Before the release notes, I would like to share with our fellow readers (that’s you) the story behind this project. As you may know, VentureGeeks is a very small team, and even though we’ve started with some funds we are constantly searching for new ways to bootstrap our business.

So we had a few ideas, but not enough time to develop them, and even though we were looking into the lean startup methodology we couldn’t find a solution. The “eureka moment” came when I saw this post from Noah Kagan, which was a great inspiration and even though we haven’t entered the contest we learned a lot.

So what’s Instabuck about?

The outcome of all this research is Instabuck, our first real attempt to a lean startup. The purpose of this service is actually simple to understand: we want to enable anyone with a downloadable product to sell it instantly.

This is something we are doing for years (selling information products) and even though we’ve started a business like that many times, we still need a lot of time to launch a new product. Well not any more

Features

So our first attempt to create a lean startup, is actually a service that you can use to launch lean startups (interesting huh?)

Here are some key features:

• It takes just a few minutes to launch a product
• Instant payments in your PayPal, AlertPay or Clickbank account
• Download protection (only buyers are able to download your products)
• Real time sales analytics with graphs
• Google analytics integration

But we are going to add more soon, like A/B split testing for your landing pages, iPhone app with push notifications for sales, more payment processors like LibertyReserve, 2checkout and more. Some of these features are already under development so expect an update very soon.

We hope you will find this service as useful as we do. Now please go on and test it with your own products, after all it’s free for a few days, and let us know how do you like it. Any feedback is as always deeply appreciated.

The bad side of this process is that you have to start from a common place. Why is that a problem? Let me explain by an example.

Brainstorming as a job (ok a cool job…)

In the past weeks we have actually burnt our brains in order to find out what’s the next step for Social Whale (more on that in a later post) which actually means that we have used all our time for about two weeks in brainstorming sessions.

The need for another way

Aristotle once said “Από ορισμού άρξαστε” which in a free translation means something like “You have to question everything”. So we need fresh innovative ideas or if you prefer a breakthrough idea that can change the world in our eyes.

In open brainstorming sessions, people will try to add pieces to an idea which typically comes from the most experienced person in the field. Which can’t help because there’s already a starting point. What we were looking for was not a starting point though.

So how can I have a fresh idea?

In a nutshell, let the less experienced do the talk. How do you do that? Here is an easy process we found:

1. Everyone writes down (in an email) a possible solution for the problem.
2. Using a countdown app (in our case we’ve used Timer for Mac) we keep this for 15 minutes.
3. Everyone sends the mail to the company’s mail.
4. We are pitching our idea to the others as we would if we haven’t listened the other pitches.
5. Start the conversation and find out what works.

This will ensure that we have original ideas from everyone, and this is mandatory. In most cases when someone starts with an idea people tend to use this idea instead of making their owns. And when you need something really new and innovative this should not happen.

The time factor is also very important as we don’t need people to invent something in this process. We just need a simple idea that will lead to the invention and this should be quick.

When we have less experienced or even completely unexperienced people in a brainstorming session like the one I’ve described before, the results are great because their approach is often the way to the solution. This is because completely unexperienced people take the non technical way and focus on the why(s) and the how(s).

Anyway that’s all with the “speedstorming” technique, hope you will like it

If you are interested please send us an email with some details about you including a few examples of your work. Our email address is info@venturegeeks.com.

Aside VentureGeeks, there are more good news to share. Today our main property Social Whale is announced as one of the 8 finalists for the Vodafone Appstar competition. This competition is about mobile widgets for the JIL platform and for us it is a great way to expose the quality of our team.

In this final phase of the competition people from all around the world can vote for their favorite apps, so feel free to vote for us here. Bellow you can see the video presentation of our widget in case that you can’t use it in your phone: