This is the story of how we developed a product called Hashed. It was originally written and blogged about on Friday 15th November 2013. so here it is unedited…
A few weeks ago the GGA team made the group decision to stop all client service work for one whole week in order to give ourselves a massive challenge: think up an idea for a brand-new product that we will then design, build and launch within a 5 day period. The only caveats were:
- it must be a product that could realistically become a Market Viable Product (MVP) at the end of the 5 days.
- we must use our normal planning and development processes (we use sprint and agile methodologies)
- it must have the ability to generate some (any!) kind of revenue
A pretty daunting task to set ourselves but we all went away enthused the weekend before and ready to hit it head on come the Monday…
Monday morning arrives and the team gets together for Sprint planning as per usual, but instead of the usual run through of client work, we were all ready to debate ideas for what our new product should be. So like the hairiest ever edition of Dragons Den we all pitched our concepts. The quality was, erm, broad to say the least but there were a couple of true standouts that everyone agreed were the best of the bunch and we started focusing in on these to see what we could do to make them a reality.
However it quickly became obvious that although the products were all good, valid ideas, no one was particularly enthusiastic about them. In all honestly, it was the comedown after our initial high and we all felt a bit deflated. So we made the decision to not rush into anything that the whole team weren’t 100% passionate about and we begrudgingly agreed to go back to our client work (if you’re reading this GGA clients: jokes!) and start afresh the next day with some new ideas.
So 5 days became 4 and we hadn’t even got an initial idea, let alone started work on anything! But, as it transpired this whole false start malarky proved to be a blessing…
Day 1 — the concept
In the morning Sam was buzzing.
He’d spoken to someone outside of work about an idea and he was pretty sure no one else was doing it. He explained briefly to a few of the team who were already in the office and we all thought it sounded promising; brilliant even! A quick Google search showed the idea had in fact already been done but, crucially, been done poorly. ‘Not a problem. ‘Facebook knew MySpace existed before they started out’intoned one wise soul by way of support. That’s all we needed to fire us up.
By this time, Bossman Paul Rhodes had made it into the office. He to was giddy with excitement about an idea he had come up with overnight. With his usual boundless-enthusiasm he launched into a pitch that recalled both Braveheart and Winston Churchill at their most animated and passionate. It was a tour-de-force of a speech; impassioned, direct and resolute.
Of course we all ignored him and went with Sam’s idea instead which was much better.
Day 1 — it begins
The product idea is essentially this: a platform that enables people to have conversations around Twitter hashtags but outside of the confines of Twitter itself. It allows anyone to take any hashtag and create a dedicated chatroom for it. Thats it in a nutshell.
Here’s an example:
You’re watching your favourite TV show and following the #hashtag conversations on Twitter. There’s a few hundred thousand people throwing their opinions about and you’re trying to have a conversation with a few like-minded people while following the stream. As per usual its social mayhem and you can’t get your points across in 140 characters to the select few.
Our platform will let you invite those people (and anyone else for that matter) to a chatroom you’ve just created specifically for that hashtag and to continue the conversation in a non-cluttered environment with no character restrictions. Win!
So with this in mind we came up with our MVP and planned out everything we needed to do to design, build, market and launch it within 4 days. We also came up with a name…
… and so Hashed was born and we were all buzzing as as we started to bring it to life.
Day 2 — getting an identity
So as the dev team are busy building the basic system architecture, designer Ollie is tasked with creating a logo, designing a landing page for signups and, most importantly, designing the Hashed chatroom platform. The whole team agree on a white on red colour scheme (Pinterest? Schminterest!) and start implementing the designs as soon as they’re ready. In the meantime the two Paul’s concentrate on creating a tone-of-voice and writing copy for the website.
The landing page is soon live (hashed.io) and we start blitzing social media through Twitter and Facebook. A near immediate buzz is generated as we target key players in the tech industry.
By the close of day 2 we have 48 signups. We also have a collective minor heart attack after one of the devs, who shall remain nameless (It was James), accidently wiped the database of signups, but this was quickly resolved and we were back in business.
Day 2 — IT’S ALIVE!!!
We hit a major milestone Wednesday afternoon as Hashed has its raison d’etre (French for it works and stuff) and we’re able to communicate with each other in the office through our own Twitter profiles! This is quickly followed by the ability to create chatrooms based on a hashtag. It’s an amazing feeling to have it doing what it was created to do!
At this point Paul R did the first of his daily recordings that documented our whole development process. You can listen to his velvet tones here and here.
Day 3 — a long night
James and Kyle are looking shattered after a late night (coding not boozing for a change) and an early Thursday start. Hashed is working brilliantly and now we’re just tweaking the backend (ooh er missus!), making sure it works responsively and testing across various devices. Jon’s also been beavering away on the server architecture-side of things so when we get millions of users we don’t get caught short :p
It’s taking shape and we’re all getting excited.
Paul R is about to leave for a conference called Bromford’s FutureFifty when we have the bright/borderline cretinous revelation that Hashed may actually be in a good enough place to trial it in a live environment at the conference! So we set up a chatroom with the fixed hashtag #futurefifty and Paul gets a bunch of test subjects together to trial it during the event, aaannnddd….
It works! It actually works and people are using it! It’s thrillingly exciting to be sat in our office and watching people in another place chatting on a system that didn’t exist 2 days previously. Alright, it was a bit glitchy but hey — its a BETA product.
Here’s P.Riddys take on the events of the day.
Day 4 — the final countdown
And we’re on the homestraight! Hashed is now fully working and we’ve got it looking awesome across all screens, tablets and mobiles. We’re actually slightly ahead of schedule so we start adding some cool little bits of functionality to refine the MVP. Ollies also redesigned the homepage to be less sparse.
Kyle has also built a Google Chrome plugin that makes all #hashtags Hashed compatible and allows the user to create a HashOut simply by hovering over it and clicking.
Paul T has spent the day documenting the weeks activity and at 3:30pm (30 mins before launch) is just about to start writing the final section right….
…. now!
We go live at 4pm GMT with version 1 of Hashable. We’ve setup a bunch of fixed HashOuts to test over the weekend — #childreninneed, #strictly, #englandvchili, #cod, #imacelebrity — and I guess we’ll see how it goes!
We believe we’ve got a brilliant basis for a successful product and we’ve got some great ideas how to grow, improve and monetise Hashed over the next few months. All we need is users. Lots of them. So please share and signup to hashed.io and help us test it.
It’s been an amazing, exhilarating, exhausting and, for the whole GGA team, the best week we’ve ever spent at work. If you’re a dev, tech or software company and you can justify it, I cannot recommend running a hackathon enough. We’ve all learnt much more than we realised we would and it’s been a humbling experience to work within a team thats so single-minded in drive and determination.One thing’s for sure, if nothing comes of Hashed, GGA have still come out of this a stronger, tighter-knit and more knowledgeable dev team, and that’s got to be a good thing right?
