Genius! I have 2 kids and spent the last 3 weeks fretting about camps and getting kids into camps. Its all word of mouth at the moment. Brilliant idea!
Thanks! Are you in the Bay Area by chance? I'm Emmie, the founder. New site design to push out this weekend, please take a look again soon. (we wanted to push it out before the TC article, but it was too unstable)
My wife and I (mainly her) just finished planning for my son's first summer of camps, and it was a pain. So much so that I remarked that I should build a webapp to manage it for us and his classmates.
Thanks for building this, I can't wait to look at it.
Unfortunately, it's probably a little late to launch to target this summer. Planning has already started and been done for most. For a lot of camps, you need to put down deposits pretty early to secure a spot. But, for the couple of weeks we might need to fill in, I'll certainly take a look. (Bay Area)
Please come to the UK - my wife and I spend a remarkable amount of time trying to organize stuff to keep our son constructively occupied!
[NB One thing I would love is some way to enter into a discussion with our son about what he wants to do and to rate different options - at the moment we do this through email and printing stuff out, which is dreadful.]
Hey! Actually, I just found out that there were camps in the UK. I met an ex pro-football player who used to run his own programs in the UK from 1999-2009. I'll definitely explore expansion to the UK! I love it there, and drive a Mini :). Good points on the discussion with your child--we'll have camper profiles soon to allow for kids to bookmark their own things
From what I understand, things are a bit different here - most camps/activities are for a week or less, so for a summer holiday of 7 weeks there is a lot of time to fill and a lot of organizing to do.
looking forward to seeing the new site. i am the founder of a similar site in NY Kidklass.com. i look forward to watching you grow along with us, its important work we are both doing.
We just launched Dabble, our app and website last week. We would like to hear thoughts & impressions from you folks. We're a team of 7 engineers working from SF and Buenos Aires.
We wanted an app that could give us a sense of a place and those that came before us. We launched last week at DEMO. Here is the 6-min DEMO pitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5efdZfLEYI
Is this different than the Dabble that TechCrunch covered in 2006: http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/23/dabble-launches/. Looks very different (platform and project concept), but the similar name makes me wonder if the same team was behind both.
This is an awesome post. Thank you for this. Thinking about a start-up as an experiment, not a business, until it succeeds is the biggest takeaway.
That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April.
None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.
These early launches are not expected to "stick" - either that, or I've just been terribly unlucky. The only value you need to extract is real-time feedback about what you got right and what you got wrong. Then you tweak it and launch again, and again, and again. And eventually, you reach "product-market fit." And then it sticks. If you're lucky.
But the early product is not expected to be scalable. It just helps you avoid the problem of launching a late product with all the same major flaws.
Just curious, what was it about alpha and beta that don't stick as opposed to now? Have you stuck some users in the mean time?
I also get stuck on the question of how many features is 'enough' that users won't immediately leave, which is when you can begin testing your business assumptions
Their launches are not beating customer expectations as they once used to - think iPhone 1, iPod, Nano, Air and compare that to today's launch of the iPad. Was that launch revolutionary, or modest?
This point alone doesn't mean that they are not a bet worth taking. But that, taken along with the fact that they're now facing tougher odds growing 20% or 30% per annum on already massive sales figures makes it harder to justify investing in them in order to make huge returns. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/apple-confronts-t...)
Lastly, and most importantly, society, especially a free one, always finds a way to mobilize against those that are deemed too powerful. The simple argument here is that in order to scale past the law of large numbers and continue to deliver "predictable" growth to the Street, companies sometimes have to push against the limits of acceptable business practices. We have seen that with Walmart, Microsoft, Exxon, BP, AT&T not to mention the robber barons of old.
Free societies, especially representative democracies check such growth with regulation (sometimes necessary, sometimes far reaching, but in its ideal - self-correcting). The same sorts of regulations that prevented AT&T (of old think Ma Bell) and Microsoft from extending its reach, will soon affect Apple. One can argue, it already has. What with lax supervision of its subcontractors in China etc (Foxconn)
That said, I am very impressed with how quickly Apple responded to these accusations, and tended to being more open than closed. An instinct not easily attributed to Apple.
In closing. Apple is probably a safe place to park your cash to hedge inflation. Perhaps even enjoy 4-5% YoY growth averaged aver 10 years. But blockbuster, maybe not.
If what you built is a consumer product, and accessible to friends and family - then you know you need to move on when friends after being coaxed into using your product still don't give a damn.
