Where the hell have I been for the last three months?

Well, I’ve managed a delicate balance of spending time with the family, doing the proper father/husband thing of re-doing our garden (our house was abandoned for over 5 years before we bought it last fall), AND ramping up my prototype again.

I say again, as some of you may remember that I started this whole thing last fall, and it was with much heartbreak that I stopped the exercise. I was originally inspired to build my prototype from Alexander Muse’s excellent cocktail napkin series, his basic premise was to that you could actually build a product from a cocktail napkin to startup. Just get the thing moving, no excuses.

So what am I doing? I am building a web 2.0 prototype of a new type of social search in my own in my spare time. The prototype started as a concept last summer, but was put on hold due to, ahem, financial reasons (my wife and I bought a new house and we were broke!). Thankfully, in the time that has elapsed, the concept is still viable.

Ok, enough about the past! What am I up to now?

Well the last month has been a huge struggle between two fundamental points: patents and architecture. First off, what I am proposing to do is not new in a sense (shocking), but the way it is implemented is unique. As some have commented to me personally, I should protect my “IP” because either one of the big boys will eventually compete with me, or VC’s and angels will be wary of investing in me for the same reason (or have FUD over whether my idea was defendable). This is a rather nebulous topic that I will pick up in a later discussion (I went ahead and filed a few provisionals).

Now, the architecture has really kept me up at night. Here’s why: As this is a prototype, I could have just built for the now. What that means is I could have just built a simple php front end that fakes what I am looking to do via static html or the like. That in a sense is what a prototype, or proof of concept is meant to do, just prove the concept.

I decided to hell with that, I’m skipping the concept stage and jumping straight to the alpha. My backend will be built using Nutch the excellent search engine originally developed by Doug Cutting, and the front end I will be using an MVC PHP framework like CakePHP or CodeIgniter.

Why am I skipping the prototype? Well, as crazy as it sounds, it has to do with money. I could save a lot of funds by building a prototype, and then moving on from there to find Angel/Seed money to take it to the next stage. However, as everyone who has done this knows, funding (even from the seed level) takes time. 2-3 months for seed, and up to 6 months for Series A funding from a VC. I am not a patient man. So basically, once my alpha is ready, my feeling is I’d like to throw it open for a closed trial and start getting real feedback from real users. The more mature and stable it is, the better chance of getting funding (well, that’s what I hope anyway).

What I am working on at the moment is settling on a colo host for the server, buying a server to host this (my current host is shared and doesn’t support Tomcat), and putting together a team to build it. My plan is to finalize the developers by the end of next week, and have the server in place a week or two later (max).

So goodbye Prototype, hello Alpha!