Mediascend's Weblog – Musings, ramblings and observations regarding video on the web

Takeoff – Our First Web App!

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

We are spending nights and weekends (and stealing some hours during weekdays…don’t tell my boss) building a web app. It’s called Takeoff and will be available in the not too distant future at takeoffvideo.com (don’t bother going there yet). It will be aimed at video producers.

We have a busy video production department that does lots of projects, typically with clients in other states or countries. So collaboration must be done remotely. We relied on email & ftp in the beginning and it was a mess. Imagine getting 20 emails from a client with lines like “Around 56 seconds I can’t see behind the thing”, or “I couldn’t open the video. What’s wrong?” So we looked around for better tools and couldn’t find anything we were jazzed about. So we made our own. And being the nerds we are, we thought that others might like our solution.

With some market research and software development, we think we’re onto something. We still have plenty of stuff to figure out, such as the pricing model we’ll pick. I’m going to elaborate further, but there are many interesting options for pricing: freemium, pay-as-you-go (utility), totally free, etc. Plus we have lots of UI to iron out before we’ll consider it ready.

One thing we all agree on here is that changes and features will be almost entirely customer driven. It’s called “Customer Development“. Basically, you get something out there that focuses on the crucial thing(s) and let your customers determine what comes next. Survey them, stay in touch, don’t predict much, and they’ll tell you what to do. See how it’s done. The result is more loyal users, faster releases, and a more useful product. It’s pretty much a no-brainer if you think about it.

Anyway, we want it to be a game changer. Next week we are having a “Takeoff retreat”, where we’ll sit around for a few days and come up with the final plan. After that it’s a sprint to release. We’re psyched. We’ll keep you posted. For those who have been in this situation, any advice would be appreciated.

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