UPDATE: whoops I forgot to set the correct category so this post would be pushed out to the 30 day feed…
I’ve decided that, for once, I would do some market research before jumping into a product idea. I’d rather scrap my 30 day product idea at day 6 than on day 29.
(If you start orders of magnitudes more projects than you complete, then I am like you.)
I’m also posting my idea because I’m not too afraid of someone trying to commercialize this as well. (Who else is obsessed with making these rounded things as me AND obsessed about creating a small company?)
Feedback is great – so of course your business, technical, or whatever feedback is worth a lot to me. Not to mention the massive, iPhone style hype I hope to generate*.
Here’s idea #1:
I’ve done web development for a while now, and some stuff really sucks, like tweaking CSS to work on all browsers and keeping your code clean. And those (warning swear word coming) damn rounded corner things that are almost essential for web 2.0 sites.
So naturally I want to make a better rounded corners generator for web sites.
(and then perhaps move on to an entire toolkit for professional developers, one pain at a time)
Target audience: Professional web designers and developers, and some web hobbyists. Many programmers have piss-poor websites, and by simply adding some rounded corners they could look a lot better for ALMOST NO TIME AT ALL.)
(pause to get a beer. 9 out of 10 bloggers agree that blogging is better with beer.)
I’ve wasted waaaay too much of my life tweaking websites and trying to get paint.net to make a decent rounded corner for me. And the GIMP is fairly intimidating. Yes, I’m too cheap for photoshop.
(pause to reflect on how little writing I have done since college English)
Here’s some of my competition:
Image generators: (They are hard/slow to use and aren’t necessarily fully featured.)
Javascript solutions:
http://www.curvycorners.net/ – this one really slows down one of my websites
Theres also a bunch of articles on the web (google “make rounded divs”).
Main Challenges:
Convincing people to spend their green (or whatever color(s) their currency is) on this product instead of doing it themselves.
Marketing where there are no commercial alternatives that I know of.
Getting it to work on all browsers, etc.
Making web developers, who tend to be more on the anal side, happy.
So how am I doing market research?
See my post on Joels BOS:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.636345.15
And on a web design forum:
http://www.webdesignforums.net/showthread.php?t=29769&goto=newpost
I’ll keep you updated!
* too many people make the mistake of taking me too seriously
