Runimal.com

The brief version: Inspired by a Patrick McKenzie post inviting others to join him on his 30-day-product race, I’m pulling Runimal out of the slow, dark current of projects I have hidden on my hard drive, and diving into it full-steam*.

* In this case, full-steam means about an hour + 1/2 per day, as possible. Full-time job + marriage accounts for the rest, and I would rather keep those than finish this in a month (in all honesty).

The brief run-down:

Web app in a single (badly formed) sentence: Set running goals for yourself, send challenges to your friends, and track everyone’s progress!
Platform: RubyOnRails? I’m an ASP.NET web dev by day, but I like the RoR stuff I’ve done so far (not much). Whether I can translate my slight RoR knowledge into an actual site is yet to be seen, isn’t it?

Just to throw it out there, I know this isn’t a “normal” BoS mISV product (don’t worry about counter-examples). It’s monetized by ads (at least for v1), and my financial goals are modest. Unlike most of my Ideas, though, this one has (in my mind) a clear path for growth and feature development, and I like the idea of using it.

Where I’m at:

Mockups. I have some first-draft page mockups. Did those first, after the one-sentence site overview. ;)
Design doc. I have the beginnings of a Runimal design document (Lite edition). Has some quick use cases, a stab at figuring out my database schema, list of pages/behaviors, future stuff, notes… Whatever.
That’s pretty much it. No code.

Next steps:

Figure out database. I’m unsure of how to represent the goals properly. More detail in future post? Maybe so.
Make a 2nd draft of mockups, create ‘final’ CSS files, whatnot.
Make RoR app, hook up my design.
Hook up functionality.
???
Profit

I’ll have to figure out the best balance of blogging for me. With limited time, that may err on the side of spend-time-coding. Shoot me a comment or an e-mail if you have a question.

Thanks for reading.