A few days ago we launched Ramamia to our friends + family (a lot of which was on Hacker News). Many people asked us to chronicle the Genesis of Ramamia: how we created the app from a tech perspective, how we communicate (Mark is in Cambridge, Matt is in Miami, and I’m in Silicon Valley), what software we use, and how we take in feedback. Below is some basic commentary from Mark and I. Matt was involved as well, but less on the initial product, as he’s focused on monetization/conversion. The factors we looked at and will look at, will be in a separate post by him.
How It All Happened
The Initial Concept + Development
Mark’s Take
About 35% of Ramamia was done in an adrenaline-fueled crazed block of a day, where the general foundation, authentication system, invite system, photos, message and event posting systems were finished. Then came constant improvements to the system, eventually the auxiliary features for creation of sites, recovery of login links, and a ton of other things.
Jason’s Take
I had just privately left my startup of two years in Early November (that is another huge blog post that I will write someday), right after the election. Ramamia was an idea that was brewing for a while between Matt and I, but there was no time for it. I was still fired up to make a web app happen, and always had this certain gut feeling about Ramamia. The goal was to make the web app dead simple, and to make the specification document one page. We literally got the initial spec down to one page. Obviously things expand, but it’s better to have one page expand than three pages expand. I’m normally a PHP guy, but Mark was getting into Rails. He was kind of shocked, when I said: “Let’s do this in Rails. We need something quick, easy, and simple. It seems like Rails is the way to go for that”. Mark started jamming on the code that night to just set a foundation (i think it was a Friday). By the end of Saturday night, he had a proof of concept going (November 8th). The rest of the night we both tore the app apart to get it simpler and closer to where we wanted it to be.
Getting Ready For a Soft Launch To Family + Friends
Mark’s Take
Over the span of about 2 months afterward, Ramamia was being continually improved, as the team decided on the Ramamia system specifics. An early preview was released for Thanksgiving. Finally, we were getting close to Christmas Day–and we needed to have something out–the rest of the beta was finished and released on the production server.
Jason’s Take
As some of you may know, Ramamia has a heavy latin american focus, so it made sense for us to launch when I was back in Miami for the holidays. Mark was pounding away to get the first version ready to share with friends + family. Once we had major bugs out, mainly IE support (F’n IE has been the phrase of the week), Flash 10 uplloading, and then we made what was referred to as “Project R” public to our friends + family. Mark, Matt, and I have made good networks through facebook, twitter, linked in, offline,etc. and just pushed the app there. Our goal was not usage and getting a big bang, because we knew that wasn’t happening. Our goal was to get feedback so we could rapidly iterate. I’d say, we hit those goals above and beyond how we thought we would.
How We Operate
We use a ton of different pieces of software to operate the tech end of Ramamia:
- Ruby on Rails
- Passenger on Apache
- MySQL for the database
- FogBugz to track bugs (which is awesome–we use the free student/startup edition)
- Hosted on a simple Linode account. Plans to stay there over time.
- Amazon S3 for photo storage
- jQuery (hosted on Google’s Javascript CDN)
How We Communicate and Deal with Distance
We’re a distributed team (described as being on each corner of the US except the northwest) and we’re able to work really well by using Google Docs to get our thoughts together, AIM to talk general chat, Dropbox extensively to share pictures, files, and related documents. We use both iChat AV for pseudo-face-to-face and TokBox when iChat doesn’t work out. We also use RivalMap to track our competitors and do analysis.
The negatives of working remotely are still here, but with web software and being able to be available, almost as if you were there in-person, sharing files on the same hard drive, talking to each other, passing documents around, it’s so much easier to manage a distributed team. Since starting Ramamia, I haven’t met with Matt or Jason once in person.
Getting Feedback
On the 23rd of December, Ramamia was submitted to Hacker News for tearing-apart by the HNers. Met with criticism (which is awesome) and a lot of opportunities to change the application, as well as dealing with bugs. We’ve received feedback from Twitter and blogs and everywhere, and we continually make improvements to the product based on this feedback. We also met a lot of great people who helped us tremendously in improving the product and fixing problems with it, as well as people who spread the word about Ramamia. We thank them highly for helping us.
A couple of days afterwards, we released a new homepage as suggested by much of the feedback we received. It was great to get some feedback and greatly improve the product, and a few days later, we released a revamped design with many of the features people were asking for. Changing family name, auto-capitalisation, fixing some security things people were concerned about.
A couple of days after that, we completely redid the user interface on the application itself, added birthday alerts, avatars, and more performance fixes. Inside of 5 days, we’ve basically redone the entire application. We’ve also added an internal admin section to track usage, statistics,etc.
What’s Next
We’re working on a few more things before a full on press launch in early January. Right now we’re still focused on feedback, working on the overall vision for the company, and preparing a press campaign. We’re still sticking to short dev cycles, thinking in 60 day periods, and how to keep things deadly simple.
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