I dig the mysterious branding. Although it probably terrible for a mainstream market, I think it will work well with an early adopter crowd.
Ping is another example of a lightweight, notification-driven app. Download the app and "subscribe" to different types of notifications such as popular apps to download, new movies, or even tweets from @kanyewest. I see many similarities to where @orarbel is taking Yo (from what I've gathered). Here's my first ping:
Is this just an experiment, @davidbyttow / @chrysb? Obviously you're busy with Secret so what are the goals here?
@rrhoover nice post. I think the side projects are mainly a plus as long as they're thought through.
If it's really a hackathon project released, then the expectations can be more clearly set how you'll handle it afterwards (ie- a little press and then only if it's a rocketship will we invest time in it.)
Or you can be more strategic with the scope. With MyAnalytics, we didn't have it all perfectly mapped out, but there were quite a few benefits we had in mind that making the app would bring to our main product; free products have been great lead gen for especially SaaS apps for quite some time and could easily be considered "side projects".
It was also a nice relief to have green space to think about what a product should look and feel like since KISSmetrics was pretty well developed when MyAnalytics started. Some of my favorite moments working with Hiten were our lengthy discussions on mobile and the new interface options we could use there that didn't exist for our web-app, KISSmetrics.
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