Last Monday we were sitting here at the PocketSmith Offices (read: my sunny lounge) thinking of how we can further pimp PocketSmith. We can’t be buying ad space on sites, we don’t have money for Google Adwords campaigns, nor the time or patience for circa-2001 affiliate marketing programs. Ultimately we decided that rather than pay to feature a large banner ad on a high-traffic site, we could just build the high-traffic site and put our own banner ad on it.
We started on this tangent of creating something that people could contribute to without any commitment at all – it is all too hard creating accounts, validating accounts, remembering passwords ad nauseum. Then we reeled that tangent back to what we are doing with PocketSmith – money and finances.
What if we built something extremely low-commitment, that tapped into people’s and the internet’s voyeuristic nature, which was fun for the user? Building something up that has to be viral in nature – after all, if we can’t spend on marketing PocketSmith, we certainly can’t spend on this little thing. And it must be related to PocketSmith, enabling people who are visiting this theoretical site to be at least primed to be interested in looking at a budgeting and financial management application.
From this spawned the idea for our brand new website – http://www.financialconfessions.com. The idea behind the site is that anyone can jump in and confess their financial sins in seconds – something stupid they spent their money on, something a little dishonest regarding money, or anything at all that they want to get off their chest.
Anyone can also respond to confessions – deeming whether the person needs to be hugged (e.g. getting caught up in an online auction and paying $100 for a small wooden figurine of a pig) or slapped (e.g. regrettably spending rent money on vast quantities of glittery, shiny objects). Then people can anonymously add comments to confessions, sharing their own experiences in a similar vein, or offering commiserations and reprimands.
So extremely simple and straight forward. This is reflected in the time-to-market for Financial Confessions as well – 7 days. Having said that, I bashed out the core functionality of the application in around 10 hours overnight. I love rails. However all the other important things (e.g. design, refining the feature set and functionality, getting the thing working in Internet Explorer) took the rest of the 6 days. And having said that, we also have this other little application and userbase to take care of in PocketSmith, so we weren’t exactly 100% focused on Financial Confessions for that period of time.
It is also worth mentioned here that the app is deployed on Heroku, meaning that deployment took all of… 6 seconds. Seriously. More on this later.
Anyway, this blog post marks the day after the launch of http://www.financialconfessions.com – jump in, check it out, and confess your financial sins.
Ooo, I do love a good agile environment.
Tags: Community, development, financial confessions, Marketing
