Kenny Lövrin, founder of 12khz, wrote in to tell us how Getting Real inspired him to create the 12khz network, which offers musicians an easy way to create a website.
My problem has always been that I sit around, coding away, and never finish anything. After reading Getting Real I somewhat realized that one of my biggest issues is taking the scope down, so that I can grasp what has to be done, and then go and do it.
Before I always got lost in some kind of vision about how things would be in the future of the project, without a clue of what the eventual users would say about it. I can honestly say that Getting Real, combined with your approach to your own products and your thoughts expressed at SvN, gave me that extra kick in the butt. For so long I've been trying to come up with that perfect idea of an webapp to build, but never managed. And after GR, I realized that I'd just do something that I needed myself, which gave me the natural answer.
I've been a hobby musician for years, and it always bothered me that there were no places that I could get a simple website. The choices I had was to go with mySpace and feel a bit sick about it, or roll my own website. Luckily, I am a web developer to the profession, so I could actually code my own site. After I'd been doing that for a while, I realized that there are probably more people who'd like to have a website for their music, but cannot write code. Naturally this led me to converting my site into a platform that could serve several sites.
And with the approaches outlined in GR, I actually managed to get the project out the door in an early version yesterday. I don't know if it is going to work out, but it's ok, because this time I didn't spend loads and loads of time coding things that I was guestimating would work. All I did was code the features that I needed, as I'm eating my own dog food here as they say. Then if it takes off, I'll put the new features in there.
A site created by Sofreq using 12khz.
So, even if I did this myself (I've had help from two friends the last weeks, so now we are actually three people involved), I don't think I'd have realized that it is not a matter of life and death without reading the GR book.
Now I can feel confident to put out an app that doesn't have millions of features, and then update it incrementally.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
