Reading smart ideas is not just enough

Take an minimal essential features, put them into the pot, boil it, stir occasionally ... Finally serve to the customer in the nice form. I'm not talking about cooking as you can think. It's one from many advice I've captured from my "start-up" books regarding. This advice is obvious but not as simple to stick with as it could looks.

We've broken this rule many times in the past couple months and realized this fact later on. I'm talking about our new web project called Monitems.

Main idea behind is to monitor items (Monitems is just abbreviation of those two words) for individuals and companies. This service is mostly called as asset tracking.

Our problems starts due to our thinking which tends to create highly abstract model for the particular problem. In general you can create highly universal piece of software and cover many possible scenarios. This solution is good for developers but users suffer a lot. Users cannot see their solution, cannot see how to use the software and get lost in this type of scenario.

Hope we have learned our lesson and steped back to simplify our output. I still think Monitems could find users but this seems to be step TWO - now we work on step ONE. And this step seems to be much more easy to reach due to low complexity and its easiness.

Let me finish this post with another smart thought I've got from my recent reading. Make your first version of your web app quickly and easy so you don't waste time in case your idea doesn't catch users. We lost some time but we took it as a learning process hoping we could proceed gained knowledge in the next project.