Sometimes Completing a Project Is Better Than Anything Else

Reflect7 has still been at a crossroads. You see, we’re trying to figure out a way for us to monetize our sports apps at the next level. When, I say the next level… I mean taking them from 8k-10k a month to 100k a month. However, we still hate the feeling of being tethered to Apple/Google. We’ve been considering adding additional social/gaming mechanics into the apps, but we feel that an app like that could be difficult to monetize; also, social heavy apps tend to require a lot of VC. We want to avoid VC, we feel bootstrapping a company is a right of passage for any entrepreneur.

Corey is clearly not satisfied with the sports apps, for the reasons stated above. He has suggested that we start a new product. A SaaS product that actually solves a problem ala 37 Signals. I agree with Corey. However, I made two points. 1) I’m not willing to start a new product unless it solves a problem that I already have - a problem that I have is management of software projects. But I don’t want to start some radical product that just sounds nice or glamourous. Plus, I’ve been slowly working on a management tool. 2) I presented the fact that we have never really completed a project. I suggested that we tweak/improve the sports apps into a state that we would all be satisfied with. We can then say that we have an accomplishment under our belt, and that alone could help provide the momentum into the next project. We could even hire someone to take over the maintenance of the sports apps.

Everyone was really enthusiastic with this idea. Everyone agreed. We were then able to generate a list of features that we thought needed to be included. We even agreed to trim a lot of the fat in our current apps.

I think this approach will be quite the accomplishment, as I said before: we have never ‘completed’ a project. We all agree that we don’t like half-ass products. It’s time to start to build a product that does only a few things, but does them well.