Startup Fever
It's been a week since my partner Jin and I started work on an idea that we believe could take off. We could even pursue it beyond our time at Bitmaker if we get encouraging feedback from early users.
What's the idea?
Our mission is to help you be impulsive, and get in a state of constant exploration. We do that by organizing and featuring three new 'Outings' every weekend, each of which have a certain number of spots available (usually 6-10). These Outings represent a wide range of activities and price points, and they're geared toward discovery and forming new hobbies/interests.
The 10-second pitch?
Do something for the first time. Make new friends. Get spontaneous.
Go on an Outing.
We're called OutWith.Us, and you can sign up now to get notified when we launch. Since the minute we decided to start work on this project, it's been a constant rush of emotions. Elation as we figure out implementation details, coupled with wave after wave of doubt as we get feedback on our ideas and ask if anyone would actually use it. We've been hit with Startup Fever (has this term been coined already?), and we haven't even built any functionality yet. There's so much to do, and a sinking feeling that if we don't do it all in the next week we'll immediately fail. I know that's not perfectly rational, it's just an obsessive condition. The fever's got us, and I think we're stuck with it until we IPO or fail.
So far, it's been a constant process of refining our product idea with feedback from the people we're talking to. Every day, we perfected the idea little by little until now we feel that we have a solid basis of an idea that we can start building and coding.
Before any actual code has been written however, we've dedicated a lot of time to working on graphical assets, design language, and putting out our landing page with a Mailchimp sign-up form. We believe it's important to brand ourselves early on, eschewing the "lean" methodology of focusing entirely on building an MVP. A little bit of work on design details and marketing goes a long way in showing potential users that we're serious about what we're doing, and that we care about getting things right.
It's a tough hard slog, but I've never been so motivated. Here's to the Startup Fever!
Cheers, Ahmad














