11pm Thursday the 31st of July 2008… Only 1 hour before the big day! As I am not involved into the technical development of the application, I am taking some of my time to give you an update at where we are at.
* Jason has been coding hard to include awesome features in this first version of PocketSmith. We have been discussing which features to include in the alpha release quite a bit in the last few weeks. We agreed on limiting the number of features available as we would rather release a simple and stable solution rather than a buggy feature rich app too soon. Jas has been impressive, picking up the language very quickly in this short amount of time. He is definitely our hard coder guru 
* James has been very busy with loads of homework. Spending 70% of his time coding and the rest dealing with marketing / PocketSmith blog / research / general strategy of the startup. We bounced some ideas around revenue models and let me tell you its not as easy as in academic books. Exploring various possibilities, we once again decided to leave this question very open and wait to see the results of the alpha test. James is a giant sponge. Like Spongebob except he’s 6.4ft, he wears piercings and listens to alot of drum ‘n bass. Honestly, you need a sponge in your team cause this man makes the link between the development part and the business aspect of the project. That reminds me about the Getting Real series by 37signals in which they state the best startup is composed of 1 developer, 1 designer and 1 “chameleon” who can jump from one function to the other easily. PocketSmith management style is slightly different. At this stage of our development, Jas have been more committed to develop and design the app. James has been focusing his efforts in finding new code fixes / plugins, concentrating on the user interface and getting the marketing materials done for the alpha. I am more focused on the business part of PocketSmith, getting my head around startup finance, operations management for startups and marketing researches.We hope this innovative business structure will stay successful in the long run!
* I have been busy both with my thesis for my school in France and my workload for PocketSmith. I take this opportunity to confess I haven’t been studying as much as I should but once you try it is hard to go back to doing assignments. After spending some time to do the business setup work, I have been recording the financial transactions of the startup. Then James and I get the marketing materials done just in time for the release. Our marketing research skills will (hopefully) help us to be as efficient and effective as possible. My current mission is to test the application and find out what have to be clean or tweak. Problem: I am not a developer. Consequence: I try to have an objective opinion while looking at PocketSmith and consequently come back to Jas and James with loads of stuff to change without having a good estimation about the workload behind the idea. Hope: I will understand the strange words they pronounce!
It’s funny how you experience this at school and you read about it in the paper but at the end of the day you always end up finishing the work at the last minute. But you know what? I like this feeling of doing something great with good people!
