“Ideas are easy, execution is everything”

  • John Doerr

I discovered the above quote while watching Casey Neistat and it has stuck with me. At the time I was trying to think of something I could turn into an app. It brought my perspective in closer to what’s around me. What’s a problem I could fix right now?

Having recently finished secondary school I started to read again with the spare time I had in the transition period. I picked up books I owned and had already read before but it made me realise just how much I missed it. I started to ask my friends for recommendations and was introduced to some excellent books such as Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and King Raven by Stephen R. Lawhead. I loved how easy it was to find good books this way and this is what inspired OpenShelf.

I had the idea. Now to execute. Keeping the scope small makes development time short and maintenance easy. I only wanted to be able to list physical books I own and am willing to share and I wanted to be able to add friends to view their books. That’s it. With this plan in mind I set out to build OpenShelf v1.0. Three weeks later - between hikes, volunteering and work - it was ready.

Oh, but it was dodgy. It did everything I wanted it to but slowly and with a UX close to zero. But I still launched it.

If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release early enough

I can’t say I was embarrassed, it was such a thrill, but it definitely wasn’t polished or something I wanted to keep around for long. The above quote comes from Andy Brice at Successful Software and strikes me as an interesting concept so I decided to try it and I launched OpenShelf. Within the first two days I had fifteen users and within a week I had twenty. My friends who found it through my Facebook post made up most of the users but it was out there. I got such a positive response through Facebook instantly validating my idea but I also got some awesome constructive ideas on how to make it better. Releasing early made me excited and developed a willing audience to my product.

Having a validated idea is awesome, its made me excited for where I can take OpenShelf from here. Right now I’m writing a functional specification to plan more in depth about how to make it more robust, faster and easier to use. Let’s see where this goes!