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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!!!

Development:

Histograms, nested sets and saturation: It’s not easy conversation over in developer land. Suffice to say – it’s all good, it’s all progress and all starting to fall into place. It’s always a nice feeling when the site finally get’s it’s skin.

Design:

The site design team are mopping up the last pieces of the jigsaw, filling in the gaps and relying on more and more matchsticks to keep the creatives coming.

Marketing:

Blogger outreach: The DrHue Blog is up and blog.drhue.com. As you can see the first post is a little treat for those who simply adore colour – the chance to win a free mystery gift in your favourite colour simply by blogging / tweeting about Dr Hue (his is for real – you can actually win!).

Apparently, this screen-shot is showing how our code is isolating the object in the image and then pulling out key colours for use by our search tool! Honest!!!

Everyone’s far too busy for in-depth interviews, and so tired they’re incapable of proper conversation anyway (we’re all waiting for our “4th wind”… The Prodigy are helping). So, here’s a quick round of one-word updates from a few key figures to the question how’s it going?

Dave – running the technical team – “OK”

Robbie – writing the business plan – “Slowly”

Will – photshopping some colurful stuff – “Splendidly”

Nick – Skinning Dr Hue’s blog for our marketing campaign – “Notbad”  (he didn’t really get the concept)

John – Controlling the stereo – “Louder”

Rob – Writing this – “Meh.”

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One thing to note is that the office ran out of milk 2 hours ago. Black tea and coffee all round. And we have no idea how early the shop opens.

Oh and, a little treat is also being prepared as part of a blogger outreach campaign – more on that in the next post, but keep your eyes peeled for the chance to get involved!

Here it is, in all it's glory.

Yessssssss! We’ve finished a workstream. 7 hours to go and the logo is done. What do you think?

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And, we’re now seeing what a search results page will look like:

Want blue? We got blue.

Biggest news after 4 hours of the most manic work any of us has ever done is… wait for it… the Dr Hue holding page is now up! You can go there now and sign up for updates.

Actually, that’s not much news at all is it? (Sorry – I’m knackered!) The REAL news is what each of our teams have been up to. (Oh, and that the eBay auction is now up to $250). Here’s a summary from the teams!

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Design

Excellent progress here. Obviously with a proposition like “shop by colour” the biggest task is going to be navigation of the site. The plan is to make it really easy for people to choose a colour (either by clicking, or uploading a ’swatch’ image to sample), and then make it easy for people to refine that search, bringing them closer to the colour of product they want… then people can worry about what type of product they want!

He's getting more helpful by the minute... (Clicky for bigger)

There’s also a lot of work going on with pens and paper as to the way that search results are displayed and refined, and the secondary navigation (i.e. by properties other than colour!) Should have more pretty pictures of that stuff soon!

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Tech

The techy dudes have progressed at an amazing rate on 4 fronts:

• Data import. John’s been working like a madman at this. He’s now pulling very close to to 13,000 products to our database…
• …which Ed’s built and nearly finished creating Search for, and has all the relevant fields for our colour information…
• …which is a TOUGH nut to crack! Rich is doing that and it’s looking really cool. He’s doing some amazing magic with OpenCV, paving the way to match our search results with…
• …colours derived from people’s uploaded photos, which Dan is sorting out with some JavaScript / AJAX and PHP awesomeness!!!

This is an amazing achievement, but, unfortunately at this stage the guys have no idea if they can pull these 4 streams together, and then skin them with the design templates in time for our midday deadline… which is in 9 hours! (Whiskey bottle status update; down to 2/3 full!)

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Marketing

Yep, this stream has now started in earnest. It kicked off with a remarkably intense brainstorm, considering it started at neary 1:00AM, and carried on until 2:15!

"Seriously guys, let's do it MY way!"

"OK, cool, let's do it your way."

To cut a long story short, two hours later we had our campaign thought… Dr Hue’s Colourful Personailities. What does this mean? Well, it dropped out of thinking about who would most naturally want to “shop by colour” – i.e. people who are really confident with colours and use them to express themselves… and also thinking about other people who wish they were!

Colourful Personalities

So, this is a social media campaign, designed to celebrate people who are colourful, publicly. These guys are our influencers, and by going after them first, and showing them how easy Dr Hue makes it for you to shop by colour, the idea is that – as aspirational people in the fashion and home furnishings markets (our two key markets), people will copy their behaviour and start to use Dr Hue too. Of course this is where all the super-simple UX design will really come into its own.

Pantone stylee

First Aid for colour shopping!

Pick a colour...

Making a splash

Crosshairs

SO, which is YOUR favourite… let us know in the comments and you might influence the final one. After all, Nick’s got a good few hours left to finish it!

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Also, Ben’s been working on the main man… Dr. Hue himself:

Dr Hue; He does magic science stuff with colours!

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On the development side of things, we’ve hit a few snags – wouldn’t be a proper development run without that, eh?

• Rich is working out how to isolate objects from their backgrounds in product shots, isolating regions of colour. Not easy!
• Ed is debugging some database action.
• And John is wrestling with the affiliate feeds (apparrently listening to Sepultura helps!).

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And finally… HUGE thankyous to Corinna for baking three cakes for the team. I’m off for some more Brownie…

Any prospective buyers, look away now.

Anyway, hours 8 and 9 have flown by in a blur. But there’s been some awesome progress.

In order to make Dr Hue perfect for people who want to “shop by colour”, we needed to do a focus group. So, a bit of twitter-action rustled up long-time friend on Nonsense, Anna Hutton. Anna is pretty much the perfect one-woman focus group for this for 2 reasons:

1. She manages a shop that sells the kind of things we envisage people will buy through Dr Hue – Oliver Bonas.
2. She’s an artist, and one who places particular emphasis on experimenting with colour and space.

Perfect!

Thanks Anna! xxx

Dave and Rob interviewed Anna in front of sketches of key pages on the Dr Hue site. Two important things dropped out:

• More emphasis needed to be placed on people being able to find complimentary colours. Previously our search tools focussed on matching colours – which is important, but now we’re thinking about how to deal with that too, and make suggestions earlier.
• Our search results won’t all have photos (the feeds we get from the stores often only have 1 photo for a product with, say, 4 colours available). So, our original plan was to return these results too, along with the “wrong” photo… the chat with Anna made us realise people will just think the site doesn’t work. So, now we’re looking at a way to separate those out.

ONWARDS!!! (Yes, I am getting a bit delirious.)

Burp!

We also ate a load of very tasty pizza from Soho Pizza – which is awesome, by the way.

UPDATE: we want as many affiliate product feeds to play with as possible… anyone got some for us?

Can't we just photoshop this?!

However, because of the (totally understandable) wrangling over a name, the creative side of things is playing catch-up – with the dudes still on sketches! So, logo design needs to happen FAST and so does web design. Eeek!

Does anyone know a magic spell to turn web developers into graphic designers?

(On the plus side, we just ordered loads of pizza.)

OK. 4-5pm was a BIG hour!

The branding team have now decided upon a name and we have the domain names registered. ‘Dr Hue’ is the winner, with ‘Killa Colour’ and ‘Hue Choose’ coming in a close joint second place!

Also, Will’s cut a little video from the idea-choosing process earlier today:

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The development team have now reported that feeds from affiliates are starting to come through, we now have Dorothy Perkins and Wallis and are working on a few really big large ones as we speak – we could really do with as many of these as possible, so if you;re reading and can help, please do!

Thanks to the Twitterers for all the ReTweets, @Replies and #24hourstartup hashtags on Twitter so far, and to all the bloggers posting about it!

Oh, and now that the noise and arguing has died down a bit, the webcam now has sound!