Rich Martell – Founder and CEO of Floxx discusses his Hackathon
The 24 Hour Hackathon
We are going to spend 24 hours coming up with an idea completely separate form anything else that we are doing.
We’ll be designing it and building it, shortening the whole time scale. So instead of taking three months over designing an app we are boiling it down to just 24 hours.
We started at midday and by midday the following day we’ll put the results on the website live.
Don’t worry about months of testing, or putting something in development, just build something that tries to do what you want it to do
Building the concept
Facebook are now changing their site and are doing a timeline, so you can go back in time and see what you have posted, say, three years ago.
This gave us the idea that it would be interesting to dig a little deeper into the data that Facebook has.
Maybe produce a stats page or an infographic personalised for you – we will allow people to log with their Facebook and we’ll give them all these interesting stats that they wouldn’t know.
For example, a line-graph with their friend-history with a chart saying how many friends they have requested and how many have requested them.
The Goal
We hope to end up with a product that is ready and there to be used by people. There is a concept called the ‘Lean Start Up’ by Eric Ries. His book is a start-up bible. He discusses the Minimum Viable Product.
Something that tries to solve a particular problem or is fun. Put it out there and get feedback and then work on it. If no one uses it then you know its dead but can iterate on that. It won’t be the most polished thing but it will be fun and interesting to use.
Monetizing the product
There are lots of commercial opportunities out there. With online businesses it’s more about making money from being popular. Facebook and Google started off not making any money. Getting people online and making connections comes first then start to think about monetizing and [you] can make a lot of money.
We aren’t interested in making money with this – but with our bigger apps that’s what we look to monetize. The Hackathon is just showing off.
See the results of the Floxx Hackathon here.
