Hours 20-24: The Frantic Rush
Posted on | November 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
OK, so it’s now Monday, and after sleeping for most of the weekend I now finally have the strength to write about the last few hours of our 24hour-startup.com adventure.
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The frantic rush to get a working Beta up
Wow. I think I can honestly say that none of us have ever worked on anything that has come together quite so well at the last minute. And I mean literally the last minute. At 11.59am, the first ever live test of a colour based search on DrHue.com, examining the colours from real pictures of real products pulled into the system, and matching them to the colour selected by the user, then returning that list to the user, was done… and it worked!
We actually cheered! The 4 hours leading up to that moment had been very much “will it, won’t it”. Despite everyone working at 500 miles/hour, we had contingency plans in place for if the image analysis stuff didn’t work (the site still has this functionality – its the “match by description” tab).
Inevitably some stuff didn’t make it. We were agonisingly close to adding a bit of functionality that allows the user to upload their own photo (say, of their living room) for the system to analyse and match products to. (Naturally, the code for that will go to the eventual winner of the eBay auction.)
In the meantime, the design guys had to produce variants of the pages, dependent on what functionality we would actually have in.
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The frantic rush to bring Dr Hue to market
We hadn’t predicted the twitter hype we’d get, so the marketing team were being kept very busy keeping up with everyone’s tweets (we thought the winning bidder would appreciate the effort!). However, there was time to put together a “sweet” little blogger outreach campaign on Dr Hue’s new blog! And, the icing on the cake was the @Dr_Hue twitter account… THE place for advice on products that match the colours in your Twitter profile pic! (Try following @DrHue…)
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The frantic rush to write a business plan
Eagle-eyed blog readers will have noticed the appearance of the “business plan” category on this blog. The intention was to write a set of posts designed to show ebay bidders that DrHue.com is a great product and can make them money.
In the end, we got a good few posts up on this, talking about our thinking behind the product, the brand etc. These still need some work, and we’re going to re-evaluate them this week. So, if you have any questions about the business of Dr Hue, ask away, and we’ll try to address them in updates to these posts.
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The announcement (and the pub).
Here’s a hastily cut video of us talking to the webcam when we were done. It’s mainly Dave explaining how the site works, but we’d like to reiterate here our MASSIVE thanks to the UK Twitterait, who kept us going right through the night with 140 character motivational blurts!
After this, we headed straight to the pub, where a few random fans we’d acquired dropped in. (Hi Chris Titley!!) We all let our hair down, especially @willsavage … if anyone’s found a pair of Prada glasses that fell of his face at some point on his accidental and very sleepy journey to Heathrow and back on the Piccadilly line, please let us know!!!
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December 1st, 2009 @ 11:46 am
This really was a great achievement, have to confess to watching the stream of the last hour or so and it was clear what an achievement it was!
Made me interested in what you guys actually do on a normal day..