And So It Begins

Untitled, Haden Nicholl, 2007

Hi All,

Welcome to the DoDont blog.

What’s our thinking behind DoDont? We want to be the place where you alert your friends to useful information and, in turn, where you will be able to find useful information from your friends whenever you need it.

Why Do and Dont? This way all the clutter in between is ignored; you really like something or you really don’t like something. We’ve all had the experience where we just ate at a terrible restaurant or finished a great book, and we immediate want to tell our friends about it. So maybe you go to Facebook and write a status message, but then it’s gone, lost in the avalanche of Facebook noise.  That is the essence of why DoDont is valuable.  DoDont is a site where you and your friends opinions, recommendations, and reviews can be expressed, stored, and easily found whenever you need it.

As described in the About Page, DoDont was the result of a dream I had almost two years ago. But dreams are one thing and reality is another. In order to get from dream to reality there was a lot of education, experimentation, team building and waiting.

I’m going to do a blog post on each of these topics (maybe in order, maybe not), because I feel the process from idea to beta product is important to discuss. You may look at DoDont today and say, why doesn’t it have this and this and this? My short answer is, “It will.” But the longer answer involves the factors above in conjunction with the Lean Startup and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) theories evangelized by Eric Ries and a slew of others. A basic understanding involves  stripping your grand idea down to a MVP, and then iterating to find out what people really want, or more so, what works best. Flickr was initially an online game before it became a photo sharing site and You Tube was a dating site. We’ve released a pared down version of DoDont to find our core components. But releasing such a minimal product is not easy. It is said that  if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve released too late. Our goal is to listen to our customers (here), analyze our metrics, and then improve DoDont accordingly.

Thanks For Reading,

brent