From idea to product in 24 hours...

Many would think it's not possible but it is once you've got a little practice under your belt.  It's great to continue to hone your skills. When you're a business man or woman you should be out there closing deals. As a technical guru you should be fixing problems and coding away. And when you're a startup guy you should be making things that solve problems or provide people joy. That's what I decided to do this weekend.

While I was getting ready to go to bed around 10:30pm on Saturday evening I came up with the idea. I had a few things I needed to get done on Sunday and I needed a quick way to make sure I got reminded to do simple tasks when I needed to. So I set out to build it myself.

I woke at 10:15am on Sunday morning and I got to coding (eh, it's more hacking than coding when I do it) and within a few hours I had a framework for my product built on a platform called Twilio. Twilio lets you build apps that interact with real telephones (both phone and text) and that's exactly what I needed.

As I walked out the door at 1:30pm to wander around the city with my wife I also set out to figure out a name for the project. I turned to a friend's awesome product, Domainful, that was built to solve a personal need as well. Domainful lets you check on available domain names and then purchase them all through a couple of text messages. It's super simple and in only a few minutes I found one I wanted and bought it - HitYouBack.com.

Once I finished grabbing coffee, wandering around Union Square and checking my mail at the office we headed home. As Magda made dinner I put a few finishing touches on HitYouBack. I added some error checking and helpful messaging and threw up a simple site. It went live at 7:28pm with a tweet.

So in actuality it took me about 21 hours to go from an idea to a simple product. Since I'm building a startup full time right now, GetMinders, I need all the help I can get. And what better way to continue to educate myself than launching new things all the time?

P.S. - If you'd like to give HitYouBack a whirl it's pretty easy to use: Create a new text to 484-819-0577 that begins with the number of hours (from 1-24) until you'd like the reminder to come and the message you'd like to receive. If I wanted to remind myself to go to the post office tomorrow around noon, I'd send "12 Go to the post office" since it's almost midnight here. Enjoy!