What's Your Problem?

I often go back and read Getting Real from the guys at 37Signals. It’s a great book (available online for free) about keeping things simple in the software world. Every once in awhile I start to freak out about my business and fell like I need to go get lots of venture capital so I can hire lots of people so I can build tons of features…. Well this is exactly what Getting Real addresses. I was just re-reading the essay titled “What’s Your Problem?” and thought I’d share a bit about how Centripetal Software got started. The premise of this article is that you should build software for yourself because then you’ll be more passionate about it and you are your own user so you can make more informed decisions more quickly.

I have a 4 year old son. When he was born we needed a way to share his life with our families around the world, so I started up a free blog on Blogspot. That turned into our family picture album, we have about 1500 posts over the 4 years including some 5000 pictures and 300 videos not to mention all the stories written down to go with each post. About a year ago I started to realize that this was more than just a blog, it was really our only family album and it had a lot of memories in it, and I realized I really didn’t want to lose it. I started looking around for a way to save it off, but there was nothing out there. So, as any good software developer would do, I started to build my own. At first I was looking to build something to allow us to print it, but that had its limits, so I moved onto more of a backup solution that would allow me to have a local copy of the blog. As I got deeper into the implementation of this I started seeing that it would work for other things that I did online, the first of which was my Basecamp account. I built out some rudimentary integrations with Basecamp to meet my needs. As I began using Basecamp more and more there were more and more things I needed to backup and eventually (after a couple complete re-writes of the code) I had a pretty stable piece of code.

It was one day as I was looking for something in the Basecamp forums that I realized that my little homegrown application might have a broader appeal as there were quite a few people in the forums asking for pretty much exactly what I had. That is when I decided to try to make a product out of my tool. After reworking the solution some so that it would allow other people to use it I threw it out there for some people to try. I was given lots of feedback and was able to iterate on it and improve it quite a bit. I was blown away with the response I got and people were really excited about having a solution like mine available. The time I was investing in this was beginning to be somewhat taxing, so about 3 months ago we took the plunge, I quit my job at Microsoft and went out on my own with the hopes of creating a real business out of this.

Fast forward to today and we have come through a successful beta period with the application and we are officially launching the product on Monday, Feb 1, 2010! We’ll continue to build out the things that we need for ourselves and work hard to keep a solid, stable, working product for our customers that is simply a joy to use.