Help, otherwise I'll lose my mind soon (real story, real project development)
Greetings, my name is Michael and I will soon go crazy. I really need your expert help.
And now, first things first.
It was a warm summer day, I was lying on the couch and was just thinking about something. Thought after thought, and I accidentally came across a memory of my old work. I became interested in thinking about her, and distinctive short videos from that period of my life began to pop up in my head:
“In the evening, I sit with a friend at the bus stop and drink beer, he talks in colors about his new job, which he got a couple of weeks ago. I remember listening with interest to the idea that I’m not very happy with what I’m doing now. I recall how a desire arises in me to get a job, how I ask him to arrange a meeting with my director. ”
In general, it is possible to describe for a long time what I was still thinking about, but now it is not important. In short, I got a job, spent a couple of interesting years of my life there, made a lot of acquaintances and got a lot of useful experience. The only important thing is that remembering the situation at the bus stop, I could not in my head attach the memory to a specific date. Moreover, I could not even remember the year of events. I don’t know why, but it seriously hurt me. As such, it is an important event in my life, but I cannot remember such a simple detail. This thought haunted me. And then I decided to write on paper all the memories that surfaced in my head when I thought about that period. I needed to find a memory with at least some reference to time in order to make it a starting point.
Here I encountered the first inconvenience. The memories on paper were in the order that they came to mind, and I wanted to arrange them in the correct chronology. To solve this problem, I decided to use a computer. He opened the notebook and line by line began to write down his memories. With the copy-paste function, things went much more fun and easier.
As a result, by simple sorting, I still pulled the right date out of my head.
And then he unexpectedly noted that I really liked the process of extracting memories, it brought a lot of pleasure, because in the process pleasant nostalgic feelings constantly arose, akin to when you see mario or dandy dancing. I decided to continue recording memories from my life.
The next problem was exactly how I wrote down my memories.
Initially, they had this look - "January 1, 2000. It was a sunny day, in the morning I had breakfast with what was left after the New Year’s night, then I decided to meet friends and go to the center, then we decided to go skating . ” The problem was that, firstly, I thought about the memory as a whole for a long time, trying to write a lot of things, and secondly I tried to write beautifully, thinking how it would look. I used this principle for a long time, it was very tiring. Fortunately, natural laziness brought me to the right decision.
I no longer tried to fit into one memory the whole day or week and did not seek to describe it beautifully. As soon as a 2-5 second video clip from my life popped up in my head, I wrote it down with a minimum of tag words: “Evening, embankment, boat, Sergey, talk about school.” According to them, I could instantly restore the situation in my head. This turned out to be the best solution to the problem.
Now, waiting for someone or something, I was wasting my time profitably, extracting the memories and writing them down on what came to hand, simultaneously regretting that I did not have access to the already recorded memories. Such a pastime has turned for me into the assembly of a fascinating puzzle, consisting of the feelings of my own life.
Over time, I received an impressive text file with indexing my memories. Adding new records and looking through old ones, I began to think more and more about my life. About which decisions were correct and which were not. What mistakes I often made. What opportunities did life give me and how often. Why in situations where a breakthrough was required, I showed passivity and laziness? What life situations have caused the current anxiety?
To say that I saw from what I saw was to say nothing; I saw from every interesting conclusion. As a result, I was lucky to disassemble my “I” into small details, clean everything, lubricate, throw out the unnecessary and fine-tune it. Turning myself on again, I realized that I had seriously changed. I understood how I want to live my life and what I need from it. And also I had a goal in life - I decided to tell people about my experience and help everyone who wants it.
In the Internet age, the best solution to achieve this goal was to create a service with convenient functionality that solves the problems that I talked about. I thought a lot then and, in the end, came to the conclusion that such a service could feed me at the very least, and this is a sufficient fee for doing what I love, which brings a lot of pleasure.
From idea to implementation
The next step was the beginning of work. I decided to burn the bridges and drop everything I was doing at that moment in order to concentrate fully on the project. Awareness of subsequent reality was to motivate and not allow to relax. The first thing I did was to prototype a future project. The Keynote program from the Apple iWork 09 office suite helped me a lot in this. I created each service screen as a separate slide, drew graphics using the built-in tools, and the buttons served as links to other slides. So it turned out a good visualization of the desired prototype.
By the way, here are a couple of slides from the first prototype that seem funny to me.
Having a prototype on hand, you can determine how many people will be needed to implement the project and what the deadlines will be. The project was supposed to be ready in 2-3 months. Now it remains to solve one small question - to find money, which at that time I did not have. Sitting at home and thinking about a solution, I accidentally cast a glance at the DSLR camera, my brain intuitively counted it into money, and then my eyes lit up - this was a real solution. In a matter of days, almost everything that was bought over many years went on sale. In fact, I left myself only a laptop and a mobile phone. The money received for the first time was enough.
I decided not to bother with renting an office, buying equipment and cleaning staff with office managers. Now is the time that it is generally not clear why to throw money out for this. Why should people spend 2-3 hours traveling a day? This is almost 750 hours of pure time per year, 47 days of a full life that you can use wisely. And how much money is spent on travel, gasoline? And how many brain cells die during communication with other such "going to work"? I definitely decided for myself that I don’t want to scoff at myself and the people with whom I will work.
As a result, the work began to boil remotely; for development and testing, a self-assembled server was installed on the coclocking. Trac was raised on it. For communication, Google services (mail, docs) and Skype were chosen.
After a month and a half, the first prototype appeared, its screenshots were not preserved, but it is not very different from what is shown in the slide below. Testing of the prototype showed the complete failure of one of the key ideas - one window in which all notes about the memories were placed. When there were a lot of them, moving the memory from beginning to end turned into sophisticated torture. The solution to the problem was the creation of two windows - a draft and a clean one. All created notes fell into the draft, and also he served as the buffer of the clean-up. Chistovik became the keeper of notes in the correct chronology.
Now about the placement of windows relative to each other. One window over another simplified the task, but still did not become an ideal solution. But the placement of windows on the sides seemed the best option. This solution allowed you to quickly manipulate notes.
Work on the prototype seriously dragged on, the money ran out and I had to urgently look for someone to borrow it from. Fortunately, this problem was resolved.
Then came the understanding that the existing design needs to be changed. Creating a new design, working out small things and fixing errors that pop up due to poor browser compatibility has increased the time by three times.
How to repay debts and start making money
Now I’ll talk about monetization. The initial thoughts on this subject were different: either sell the number of available memories for money or sell monthly subscriptions. But definitely somehow it was necessary to earn. The first thing I did was connect the Ukrainian LiqPay payment system, then I went through all the checks in two more Moneybookers and PayPal systems, but my hands haven’t reached their integration into the project yet.
The complexity of the choice and the assertion of many experts that “if the product is good, then users themselves will pay for it” - did not let me sleep. And then the moment came when I nevertheless decided to make it free, developing only on donations. Then, by the way, another thought came to me - not to disturb the user with unnecessary registrations. There was a “try” mode, which allows you to evaluate all the functionality of the service. If you don’t like the service, you can just leave and all the user-entered memories will disappear, but if you like it, then they will be saved during registration.
The more time it took to develop, the more worried was the idea that debts would soon have to be paid. And yet, you need a lot of money in order to not only finish the project, but also to launch it, and in the future to develop it. I decided to sell my sports car. Work continued again.
The Last Judgment
And then came the moment when, from a functional point of view, the service was completed. It remains only to write a text that can explain everything to users. This task became my Achilles heel ...
After some time, I wrote the text and, placing it on the site, began to invite my friends and acquaintances. The first stream of users poured, and with it the first reviews of the service: someone liked it, someone did not understand how to use it, and someone - why would he even remember his life. Having collected most of the opinions, I came to the conclusion that the service is incomprehensible. Having really appreciated my strength, I realized that most likely I won’t be able to write a description accessible to users, so I decided to order it from a famous copywriter. The text I received was definitely better than mine, and I resent the invitations. This gave a positive effect, but the result was still far from desired. So the service lived for some time, there was an increase in users, but it did not pull on records.
After some time, I stopped by to visit one of my friends, who before that gave a link to the service. We talked for a long time, and now the conversation about the project started. I asked how he told him, he said that he tried to use it, but did not get much pleasure. I was very surprised, downloaded the service on his computer and asked me to show how he used it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he, trying to extract and record a memory, was making my initial mistakes. It turned out that the new text is also not effective. As a result, I myself decided to explain everything to him. He talked about the meaning that I put in the concept of “memory”, talked about how to properly extract and record them. I took the keyboard and asked him to recall an event in life, based on my rules. I wrote down everything he said. And oh miracle
I decided to conduct an experiment, drove that day to my two other friends. And bingo! The same trouble, they also did not understand how to use the service. After a master class, I went home to think what to do with all this. The next day, I was very happy when all three friends called back and began to share their impressions of the service and where the process of memories took them.
Definitely all the descriptions needed to be changed again, this time I posted a semblance of a mini-tender on the freelance.ru website. I tried to give people the opportunity to understand the service, and from their point of view correctly describe it. I chose the two best test items, and we began to write texts again. Guess what problem I had again?
… I'm desperate! I am starting to feel like the inventor of sticks with sugar, which committed suicide due to the fact that the world did not understand his invention and used it incorrectly. I do not know how to describe the service so that it becomes clear to everyone.
And I really want a Success Story, because there are still a lot of plans for development:
I really want you to try using the service. I am interested to hear your opinion about him, and how it can be correctly described or improved.
Thank you in advance for your help.
The address of the service is vspominator.com
Update:
After reading all the comments, my eyes twitched, I'm getting closer and closer to the inventor of sticks. The service again did not give in to understanding, so I will try to explain everything again:
1. We take any event from our life that can cause you feelings. To speed up this process, I’ll attach a few photos.
I don’t know if I coped with the task, but these photos personally catch me, looking at them I remember different situations from my childhood. Not the whole childhood, but 2-5 second situations out of it - how I sat down for the first time to play on a computer, when I saw a friend Sega, how I walked after school.
2. Now we’ll try to digitally register the tags for these memories in my head - “Chip and Dale”, “Guest from the Future”, “First Class”, “Lessons, school are over, we play ball, school bags on the ground”, “Kindergarten, swimming pool, children, angry teacher ”,“ Dandy prefix, tanchiki, ducks ”,“ Sega prefix, sonic ”,“ Computer search, livingstone games, paratrooper, goodie ”
3. Digital memory tag viewing should instantly start playing back the memory in the head .
4. Due to the nature of the memory, the reproduced memory launches other videos in the head. They urgently need to catch and prescribe tags to them.
5. A large number of notes with tags about your memories, allows you to relive the feelings that were associated with them. And also return to them at any time.
6. For magic to appear, write tags for 20-30 memories in this way.
This is the essence of the service. This is not a blog, this is not a photo album, this is not a diary, this is not a social environment at all. This is a personal tool that, with your help, assumes the role of an indexer of your memories, the product of which is the ability to navigate your memories at high speed. Which in turn improves memory, gives pleasant feelings and helps in introspection.
And yes, the most important difference between the service and others is that it allows you to drag and rearrange notes in the order you need, and it does not matter what date you set it. Try posting these manipulations on your blog or twitter. The idea about the video is very correct, I’ve already sat down to think about it.
And now, first things first.
It was a warm summer day, I was lying on the couch and was just thinking about something. Thought after thought, and I accidentally came across a memory of my old work. I became interested in thinking about her, and distinctive short videos from that period of my life began to pop up in my head:
“In the evening, I sit with a friend at the bus stop and drink beer, he talks in colors about his new job, which he got a couple of weeks ago. I remember listening with interest to the idea that I’m not very happy with what I’m doing now. I recall how a desire arises in me to get a job, how I ask him to arrange a meeting with my director. ”
In general, it is possible to describe for a long time what I was still thinking about, but now it is not important. In short, I got a job, spent a couple of interesting years of my life there, made a lot of acquaintances and got a lot of useful experience. The only important thing is that remembering the situation at the bus stop, I could not in my head attach the memory to a specific date. Moreover, I could not even remember the year of events. I don’t know why, but it seriously hurt me. As such, it is an important event in my life, but I cannot remember such a simple detail. This thought haunted me. And then I decided to write on paper all the memories that surfaced in my head when I thought about that period. I needed to find a memory with at least some reference to time in order to make it a starting point.
Here I encountered the first inconvenience. The memories on paper were in the order that they came to mind, and I wanted to arrange them in the correct chronology. To solve this problem, I decided to use a computer. He opened the notebook and line by line began to write down his memories. With the copy-paste function, things went much more fun and easier.
As a result, by simple sorting, I still pulled the right date out of my head.
And then he unexpectedly noted that I really liked the process of extracting memories, it brought a lot of pleasure, because in the process pleasant nostalgic feelings constantly arose, akin to when you see mario or dandy dancing. I decided to continue recording memories from my life.
The next problem was exactly how I wrote down my memories.
Initially, they had this look - "January 1, 2000. It was a sunny day, in the morning I had breakfast with what was left after the New Year’s night, then I decided to meet friends and go to the center, then we decided to go skating . ” The problem was that, firstly, I thought about the memory as a whole for a long time, trying to write a lot of things, and secondly I tried to write beautifully, thinking how it would look. I used this principle for a long time, it was very tiring. Fortunately, natural laziness brought me to the right decision.
I no longer tried to fit into one memory the whole day or week and did not seek to describe it beautifully. As soon as a 2-5 second video clip from my life popped up in my head, I wrote it down with a minimum of tag words: “Evening, embankment, boat, Sergey, talk about school.” According to them, I could instantly restore the situation in my head. This turned out to be the best solution to the problem.
Now, waiting for someone or something, I was wasting my time profitably, extracting the memories and writing them down on what came to hand, simultaneously regretting that I did not have access to the already recorded memories. Such a pastime has turned for me into the assembly of a fascinating puzzle, consisting of the feelings of my own life.
Over time, I received an impressive text file with indexing my memories. Adding new records and looking through old ones, I began to think more and more about my life. About which decisions were correct and which were not. What mistakes I often made. What opportunities did life give me and how often. Why in situations where a breakthrough was required, I showed passivity and laziness? What life situations have caused the current anxiety?
To say that I saw from what I saw was to say nothing; I saw from every interesting conclusion. As a result, I was lucky to disassemble my “I” into small details, clean everything, lubricate, throw out the unnecessary and fine-tune it. Turning myself on again, I realized that I had seriously changed. I understood how I want to live my life and what I need from it. And also I had a goal in life - I decided to tell people about my experience and help everyone who wants it.
In the Internet age, the best solution to achieve this goal was to create a service with convenient functionality that solves the problems that I talked about. I thought a lot then and, in the end, came to the conclusion that such a service could feed me at the very least, and this is a sufficient fee for doing what I love, which brings a lot of pleasure.
From idea to implementation
The next step was the beginning of work. I decided to burn the bridges and drop everything I was doing at that moment in order to concentrate fully on the project. Awareness of subsequent reality was to motivate and not allow to relax. The first thing I did was to prototype a future project. The Keynote program from the Apple iWork 09 office suite helped me a lot in this. I created each service screen as a separate slide, drew graphics using the built-in tools, and the buttons served as links to other slides. So it turned out a good visualization of the desired prototype.
By the way, here are a couple of slides from the first prototype that seem funny to me.
Having a prototype on hand, you can determine how many people will be needed to implement the project and what the deadlines will be. The project was supposed to be ready in 2-3 months. Now it remains to solve one small question - to find money, which at that time I did not have. Sitting at home and thinking about a solution, I accidentally cast a glance at the DSLR camera, my brain intuitively counted it into money, and then my eyes lit up - this was a real solution. In a matter of days, almost everything that was bought over many years went on sale. In fact, I left myself only a laptop and a mobile phone. The money received for the first time was enough.
I decided not to bother with renting an office, buying equipment and cleaning staff with office managers. Now is the time that it is generally not clear why to throw money out for this. Why should people spend 2-3 hours traveling a day? This is almost 750 hours of pure time per year, 47 days of a full life that you can use wisely. And how much money is spent on travel, gasoline? And how many brain cells die during communication with other such "going to work"? I definitely decided for myself that I don’t want to scoff at myself and the people with whom I will work.
As a result, the work began to boil remotely; for development and testing, a self-assembled server was installed on the coclocking. Trac was raised on it. For communication, Google services (mail, docs) and Skype were chosen.
After a month and a half, the first prototype appeared, its screenshots were not preserved, but it is not very different from what is shown in the slide below. Testing of the prototype showed the complete failure of one of the key ideas - one window in which all notes about the memories were placed. When there were a lot of them, moving the memory from beginning to end turned into sophisticated torture. The solution to the problem was the creation of two windows - a draft and a clean one. All created notes fell into the draft, and also he served as the buffer of the clean-up. Chistovik became the keeper of notes in the correct chronology.
Now about the placement of windows relative to each other. One window over another simplified the task, but still did not become an ideal solution. But the placement of windows on the sides seemed the best option. This solution allowed you to quickly manipulate notes.
Work on the prototype seriously dragged on, the money ran out and I had to urgently look for someone to borrow it from. Fortunately, this problem was resolved.
Then came the understanding that the existing design needs to be changed. Creating a new design, working out small things and fixing errors that pop up due to poor browser compatibility has increased the time by three times.
How to repay debts and start making money
Now I’ll talk about monetization. The initial thoughts on this subject were different: either sell the number of available memories for money or sell monthly subscriptions. But definitely somehow it was necessary to earn. The first thing I did was connect the Ukrainian LiqPay payment system, then I went through all the checks in two more Moneybookers and PayPal systems, but my hands haven’t reached their integration into the project yet.
The complexity of the choice and the assertion of many experts that “if the product is good, then users themselves will pay for it” - did not let me sleep. And then the moment came when I nevertheless decided to make it free, developing only on donations. Then, by the way, another thought came to me - not to disturb the user with unnecessary registrations. There was a “try” mode, which allows you to evaluate all the functionality of the service. If you don’t like the service, you can just leave and all the user-entered memories will disappear, but if you like it, then they will be saved during registration.
The more time it took to develop, the more worried was the idea that debts would soon have to be paid. And yet, you need a lot of money in order to not only finish the project, but also to launch it, and in the future to develop it. I decided to sell my sports car. Work continued again.
The Last Judgment
And then came the moment when, from a functional point of view, the service was completed. It remains only to write a text that can explain everything to users. This task became my Achilles heel ...
After some time, I wrote the text and, placing it on the site, began to invite my friends and acquaintances. The first stream of users poured, and with it the first reviews of the service: someone liked it, someone did not understand how to use it, and someone - why would he even remember his life. Having collected most of the opinions, I came to the conclusion that the service is incomprehensible. Having really appreciated my strength, I realized that most likely I won’t be able to write a description accessible to users, so I decided to order it from a famous copywriter. The text I received was definitely better than mine, and I resent the invitations. This gave a positive effect, but the result was still far from desired. So the service lived for some time, there was an increase in users, but it did not pull on records.
After some time, I stopped by to visit one of my friends, who before that gave a link to the service. We talked for a long time, and now the conversation about the project started. I asked how he told him, he said that he tried to use it, but did not get much pleasure. I was very surprised, downloaded the service on his computer and asked me to show how he used it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he, trying to extract and record a memory, was making my initial mistakes. It turned out that the new text is also not effective. As a result, I myself decided to explain everything to him. He talked about the meaning that I put in the concept of “memory”, talked about how to properly extract and record them. I took the keyboard and asked him to recall an event in life, based on my rules. I wrote down everything he said. And oh miracle
I decided to conduct an experiment, drove that day to my two other friends. And bingo! The same trouble, they also did not understand how to use the service. After a master class, I went home to think what to do with all this. The next day, I was very happy when all three friends called back and began to share their impressions of the service and where the process of memories took them.
Definitely all the descriptions needed to be changed again, this time I posted a semblance of a mini-tender on the freelance.ru website. I tried to give people the opportunity to understand the service, and from their point of view correctly describe it. I chose the two best test items, and we began to write texts again. Guess what problem I had again?
… I'm desperate! I am starting to feel like the inventor of sticks with sugar, which committed suicide due to the fact that the world did not understand his invention and used it incorrectly. I do not know how to describe the service so that it becomes clear to everyone.
And I really want a Success Story, because there are still a lot of plans for development:
- Finally, normal texts and lessons on the service
- Translations of the service into other languages (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese)
- New illustrations for other languages
- Grouping memories by topic
- Ability to upload pictures
- Launching a radio with inspiring music
- Social Media Integration
- Service version for iPhone and iPad
I really want you to try using the service. I am interested to hear your opinion about him, and how it can be correctly described or improved.
Thank you in advance for your help.
The address of the service is vspominator.com
Update:
After reading all the comments, my eyes twitched, I'm getting closer and closer to the inventor of sticks. The service again did not give in to understanding, so I will try to explain everything again:
1. We take any event from our life that can cause you feelings. To speed up this process, I’ll attach a few photos.
I don’t know if I coped with the task, but these photos personally catch me, looking at them I remember different situations from my childhood. Not the whole childhood, but 2-5 second situations out of it - how I sat down for the first time to play on a computer, when I saw a friend Sega, how I walked after school.
2. Now we’ll try to digitally register the tags for these memories in my head - “Chip and Dale”, “Guest from the Future”, “First Class”, “Lessons, school are over, we play ball, school bags on the ground”, “Kindergarten, swimming pool, children, angry teacher ”,“ Dandy prefix, tanchiki, ducks ”,“ Sega prefix, sonic ”,“ Computer search, livingstone games, paratrooper, goodie ”
3. Digital memory tag viewing should instantly start playing back the memory in the head .
4. Due to the nature of the memory, the reproduced memory launches other videos in the head. They urgently need to catch and prescribe tags to them.
5. A large number of notes with tags about your memories, allows you to relive the feelings that were associated with them. And also return to them at any time.
6. For magic to appear, write tags for 20-30 memories in this way.
This is the essence of the service. This is not a blog, this is not a photo album, this is not a diary, this is not a social environment at all. This is a personal tool that, with your help, assumes the role of an indexer of your memories, the product of which is the ability to navigate your memories at high speed. Which in turn improves memory, gives pleasant feelings and helps in introspection.
And yes, the most important difference between the service and others is that it allows you to drag and rearrange notes in the order you need, and it does not matter what date you set it. Try posting these manipulations on your blog or twitter. The idea about the video is very correct, I’ve already sat down to think about it.
