Today I am pleased to present my very first guest blog and blogger! A.J. Juliani, Co-Founder of Colllabo.com and colleague, has written the following post. Check it out, and be sure to check out Colllabo.com!
It is a wave of emotion putting your product or web app out there to real users for the first time, and we did just that at Colllabo this week. We know we are a bootstrapped company right now, and getting real user feedback is going to be huge for our development. Right now we have 51 users, perfect for our Alpha stage, and although people I respect (such as 37signals team) don’t recommend having these types of phases…we are forced to for a number of reasons.
1. This is our first go around. As far as experience goes, our developer has done this before, I’ve started a non-profit, but none of us have put something together on this scale. This is both exciting and intimidating. One of the best realities of an Alpha phase is the ability to experiment in real time with real users. Get their feedback and tweak.
2. We have other jobs. If the only thing we were doing all day long was Colllabo there would be no “downtime” and we could put it out there more. Right now we are constrained by our circumstances (while these circumstances are also jobs we each love). Our goal is to make collaboration in education simple. We are test users ourselves because we are educators. This is a web app that will only make our lives easier, and allow us to do our jobs more efficiently.
3. We have a lot of ideas. To be completely honest, it is a hard line to hold between keeping it simple, and adding all the features we would like. So this time is for our community to figure out what works best, and doesn’t complicate the experience.
4. Colllabo is a completely new platform. There is nothing out there in education like Colllabo. It was created from scratch based on educational needs. If Twitter is a way for educators to expand their PLN (professional learning network) then Colllabo is a way to work with your PLN (more on that in a later post).
So this is where we stand, and we are ready to move forward into this new platform for collaboration. Stay tuned!