

How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000 - adityakothadiya
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/how-to-build-a-web-app-in-four-days-for-10000-say-hello-to-matt/

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bscofield
This just reinforces my impression that Carsonified is more of a marketing
shop than a web development shop - they had as many PR people on the project
as they did designers and developers combined??

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ajkirwin
Two bloggers, a copywriter and three PR people?

Imagine how much could've been done if those six had been replaced with
programmers and/or designers!

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petercooper
Sure, but then we wouldn't have known about it. PR and marketing are way more
important than building a good product nowadays, alas.

It's like how implementation trumps ideas. You can have great ideas, but with
no implementation, nothing happens. Ditto for building a good product. You can
build the world's best product, but if no-one knows about it, it's not getting
used.

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Zev
On the flip side, with all PR and no product, you dont have much either. Like
you said, an idea only goes so far. You have to have the actual
implementation.

Just look at Qtrax. They had pretty good PR, but no product to sell. So they
blew their big launch and then blew their relaunch as well later on because
their product didn't perform as well as PR said it would.

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breck
"The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter
accounts."

So, the real title of this article should have been "How to waste $10,000 on a
pointless web app."

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jrockway
Yeah, I agree. I could hack this together in 15 minutes with Net::Twitter and
Continuity, with maybe 30 minutes more to make the CSS look nice.

Total cost? $250.

(Oh, and $400/month hosting for an app nobody uses? I would just use my
$20/month Slicehost until that stopped being possible.)

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mcxx
The difference between you and them - you _say_ "I could" but they actually
_did_ it.

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jamongkad
On this note I don't have any doubt in my mind that Mr. Rockway could do it.

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wumi
A few are focusing on the literal aspect of building a web app -- why there
are so many PR people, why did it cost so much -- while this seems to be an
exercise of what a few people can accomplish in a short amount of time, a la
Startup Weekend.

He even admits as much _"I would say you only need three people if you want to
strip it back to the bare minimum..."_

The focus seems to be more on how teams can iteratively build new features, a
quick app as proof of concept, or take time away from normal business to
inject some excitement into the team.

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dawie
I think they did little with a lot of people. Sorry Carson, I like your stuff,
but this is a bit weak in my mind.

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tonystubblebine
They did a great job with this, but it's also a good exercise that other
people should try. These days, a lot of development styles ask you to be able
to scope your work to the available time (agile, getting real, any crunch time
situation).

I did a couple two day solo versions of this and it's paid off repeatedly. My
goal was to create and launch a website in two days. Usually I went in with an
idea, but all the work needed to fit into two business days. The best thing I
created was probably IHeartQuotes, a web front-end for Unix fortune files.

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Tichy
I imagine they spent 2 hours coding and and the rest of the time for marketing
(like producing the video)?

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jrockway
Hopefully.

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dmix
In the last few years, developing the product has usually been the easy part.

Now building a useful product, identifying a market need, and finding
users/customers is the hard part. Lets see them do that next time because they
missed the ball this time around.

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redorb
I'm waiting for one of the hackers here to make 'how to build a web app in
four days for $500' ... This project wasn't ran "skinny" or even like a
startup - but still nice, I enjoy the time lapse desktop video.

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notauser
One of the guys in the Techcruch thread pulled together a functional clone in
a day on his own.

So the other three days and eight people must have been for the drawings and
the publicity :)

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petercooper
Oh, is that like all those armchair quarterbacks who came up with complete
"solutions" for Twitter's problems?

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notauser
No - this guy actually put together some code.

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henning
Apparently we're hearing about this because of those three PR people, not
because of the obvious large-scale payola going on between Carsonified and
TechCrunch - it is purely because of the amazing viral marketing talents of
those non-coding, non-designing, non-art-directing, non-blogging PR people!

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ideamonk
i agree its more about PR. thats why we are discussing it here, What good is a
startup which no one knows about?

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goodgoblin
What happens when they realize they built the wrong product or need to tweak
it or pivot 180 degrees to follow a good opportunity? Helps to have
programmers in house - or be a programmer.

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mtw
we did the same thing earlier this year but with 11 different teams, who were
challenged to make a working product in 48 hours.

great experience.

of course, we don't have a real company at the end of the event, but the goal
is more about getting together, maybe find co-founders -- and well just hack
things

