The entire of the 24hour-startup team, plus a good 50 or so auction followers were glued to the eBay auction, and over-using the “Refresh” button as the auction counted down. Personally, I was on a 3-way iPhone con call with Dave and Nick (that’s just how I roll!!)

The excitement was incredible, because in the last hour – as the bid history shows – the price more than tripled from $1500 to a final amount of $5,100!

Perhaps this had something to do with the boys at The Telegraph writing up the story. Not only did we make their website, but also got onto page 2 of the Business section of The Sunday Telegraph.

(Note to our Mums… you can download a PDF of that article here!) Apart from me looking like a psycho killer, and Robbie giving his cheesiest smile, we think the photo isn’t bad. At least it makes Dr Hue look like the main man, which of course, for those of you who want to Shop By Colur (TM!), he is!

There’s a couple of inaccuracies in The Telegraph’s report – to be expected when conducting a rushed telephone interview, I guess. The two we’d most like to address are:

• As well as Nonsense and White October, the guys at Hutchhouse deserve a mention for their beautiful web design work. (Which, by the way, was all managed through their awesome new bit of software AllWorkedUp – kind of like version control / project management software but specifically for designers – check it out.)
• We’re quoted at saying we wanted £20,000 for DrHue.com! This was taken a bit out of context. That was our estimate of the hours – at rate card price – that had been put into the project. Not that we’d have complained (after all, I’ve got to fund my very important purchases somehow). This was about having an awesome experience together, and an experimenet in how fast a startup can be made (they’re a bit slow sometimes, we thought!).

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We have had contact with the buyers. Apparently they’re a few city types from the same football team who have clubbed together to take on Dr Hue as a little side project. Looking forward to meeting them on Weds evening!

(I think we’ll probably document all that stuff on Dr Hue’s blog.)

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Also, Will made a nice little animated banner / TV ad for DrHue!!!

Nice, eh?

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• Bidding has topped $1,000!
• There are now over 9,500 products on DrHue.com including a LOAD from Tesco.
  + we have been approved by more TradeDoubler feeds, means DrHue could have practically instant access to a catalogue of LOADS of products.
• @Dr_Hue now has over 700 followers – cheers everyone!
• There’s still a day left for you to enter Dr Hue’s “colourful personalities” competition. You can read some of the best entries we’ve had so far on the blog.
  

Anyway, there’s 2 days left on our eBay auction and we just*had* to blog about developments.

Bidding war:

• We got to the office this morning and bidding had doubled overnight - a jump from $660 to $1275! Speculation here is rife that we may be able to each buy ourselves a nice dinner with the proceeds…
• We have since updated the eBay auction page, with more details about what the purchaser gets too. It’s loads of stuff! The DrHue domain names, code base, blog, brand assets, marketing IP, Facebook page, Twitter account (now over 600 followers! With built-in profile pic scanning auto follow reply direct message thingy!) AND IP rights to use all the content on 24hour-startup.com and a 1 day handover session with our 3 top guys!!!!
• We’ve also answered a couple of important questions on the eBay auction that may be relevant to other bidders. (One was about whether we’re up for working with the buyer, and another was about how many sales DrHue has made…)

Hype:

• The press are sniffing around. As well as coverage on the Business Zone site, and Planet Anarky blog, Richard Tyler from The Telegraph has been in touch. So, hopefully that’ll mean DrHue.com will get on their website, and maybe into the Sunday Telegraph itself. In fact, just as I started writing this, they sent a photographer - really nice guy called Eddie Mulholland, pictured here with our hero, Dr Hue!
  

We have a tech spec:

It’s a tad overdue, but we now have a pretty detailed technical description of what DrHue.com does, and what improvements would need to be made by our buyer.

The site is getting EVEN better:

In response to some feedback we’ve had, Rich couldn’t resist playing with the code. So, I’m told that in about an hour, we can expect to see an extra 6,000 products LIVE on DrHue.com (thanks Tesco!), and improved category functionality AND, EVEN BETTER a category management system back-end for the new owner to use. Phew!!!

…AND Will Savage is working on a MPU banner ad he got 90% finished in the time… I’ll update with that later!

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So, 6 more days to go… and what will the final figure be? And more importantly, WHO is going to buy DrHue.com?

The dust has settled and the team have all had the sleepiest weekend of their lives. So, it was nice to come back into the office and see that a lot of people have been talking about us over the weekend.

Thanks to everyone who has written about us, and tweeted about us. We’re all really pleased you liked what we did – it makes the weird sleep patterns this week all worth while! In particular…

• Thanks to Neil Cocker for repeatedly blogging our progress. I know Dave, being a fellow leek-lover, was chuffed we’d hit the big time in Wales!
• We were also particularly pleased with a comment on Web Host Chat – The UK hosting forum. Ed-Freethought described 24hour-startup.com as “A somewhat crazy idea driven my a bunch of marketing men with nothing better to do by the looks of it!”. For the record Ed, the geeks amongst us would like to point out they’re not marketing men, and the marketing men amongst us would like to point out that this has turned out to be quite a good bit of marketing!
• Also, over on Twitter, it was nice to see that someone at our (new) favourite printer manufacture – Brother – was loving Dr Hue!

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Dr Hue’s blogger competition is also bearing nicely coloured fruit too, with people all over the place telling Dr Hue about their favourite colours in a bid to be sent a lovely wee prize.

So pretty!

Some of Nick’s favourite entries so far:

• YELLOW via a big Cambridge United fan!
• A PURPLE diatribe by Seraph…
• Something BLUE, by Keiron!

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We’ve been looking at the numbers, so here’s some stats!

• 24hour-startup.com has been seen in 62 countries and has had nearly 5,000 visitors in just a few days.
• DrHue.com has been viewed in 39 countries already!
• The most popular colour search on DrHue.com is purple.

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All of which has resulted in…

The eBay auction reaching $600 USD by end of play Monday!