The story of the first six months building my first startup

Around six months ago, I resolved to bootstrap my own Internet business. As I wrote at the time, my goal was to create a self-sustaining and personally meaningful business without seeking funding. I had no ambitions of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, I wanted to do honest work building a product which would prove useful to a niche audience.

Six months on, I have come a long way: I got possessed by a personally meaningful idea, experimented with Lean Startup methods for validating it, and then learnt Rails and iOS development to actually build it. And as of this week, my product, RecordBox, is open for business!

I have been documenting this journey on this blog all along. In this post, I am going to stitch my previous posts into a narrative which touches on how I began, what I did, what I learnt, and what lies ahead.

So get that cuppa brewing.. Ready? Let's go!

How I plan to market RecordBox

I am strongly considering starting a blog for RecordBox as a major part of my online marketing strategy. In fact, I put up a version over the thanksgiving weekend which is ready to go if I choose to pull the trigger.

In this post I want to talk about why I am thinking of using a blog as my primary online marketing vehicle, and how I plan to do it. In a follow up post I will share my lingering reservations about this effort.

Just to clarify, my online marketing strategy is in addition to direct marketing through my contacts. This latter marketing can help me get started, but ultimately it is NOT a scalable way of building a viable customer base when each customer contributes $10 a month.

Into Marketing Mode

I have realized that I desperately need to pay attention to marketing. As it stands, RecordBox gets no organic search traffic. And the referral traffic is mainly through this blog. This is quite a sad state of affairs no matter how you look at it.

In this post I will talk about why I think it is high time to start marketing RecordBox. I will also touch on my immediate marketing strategy.

Co-opting users to help with product design

RecordBox reached an important milestone this week: our iPhone app was released. Finally people could enjoy the end-to-end RecordBox experience.

The feedback so far has been pretty positive. The engagement with the website and the product shot up as it became easier to create and upload recordings.

Another thing has happened: feature requests and suggestions are pouring in thanks to the real world use the product is getting. This is a bit overwhelming, and requires me to prioritize my focus because one man can only do so much.

I have reached a few decisions about how I am going to go about this prioritization process and what the next steps for RecordBox are. In this post I will share these decisions and the rationale behind them.

Getting started with IOS development

I have been working on the iPhone app for RecordBox for the past few weeks. It is coming along well and I have the skeleton of an app which can record audio and upload it to a RecordBox account.

I had no experience with IOS development before this app, and did not know anything about the Objective-C language either. (Objective-C is the de-facto programming language for iPhone apps). Given that I started a little over a month ago, I think the progress has been rather brisk: I hope to have a first version of the app out in a week from now.

I am going to share how I got started developing an IOS app to interface with my Rails web-application. I think everyone charts their own course through this maze, and if sharing mine helps fellow programmers down the line, it will be very satisfying. So here goes!