Collective Detective Blog Archives

This is How We Roll

We’ve recently been getting some questions about what the story is with Collective Detective? I thought it might be a good idea to write a post about how we’re set-up and operate because:

• People were asking: Our accountant, people from high school tracking me down, Mom, etc.
• We haven’t posted an update in awhile
• We’re about to make our annual pilgrimage to SXSW where we’ll be telling our tale. However, many of these people will have had many drinks and/or have talked to many other people, so we thought it best to have a refresher post ready when they wonder how our cards wound up in their pocket and looked us up.
• There are others out there who operate in a similar capacity or are thinking about it. You’re not alone!

It’s a Micro-What?

Collective Detective is what is best described as a “micro-business.” We develop creative projects on the side. A few month’s ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, did a pretty good summary of what exactly this is in an email called “The Future of Startups.” He used the term “micro-startup,” but we prefer “micro-business.” “Startup” is sometimes an abused and trendy buzzword like “beta.” We’ve got a plan around being profitable with our projects quickly and have long-term goals and vision. We’re not looking to build something to offload for a quick payday or build something with no idea how to monetize it.

Anyway, the whole email is a very good read, but here’s the summary I’m referring to:

The zero cost startup has led to the age of the “microstartup.” It’s
no longer two folks in a garage hoping to build a prototype in order
to land a huge VC round, then getting millions of dollars to build out
an office. Microstartups are sustainable from prototype to launch and
on to a core user base, all for around $5-10,000 in costs.

That’s us in a nutshell. Some people buy an old beat-up Ford Mustang to work on in the garage on nights and weekends. For us, new ideas are the cars in the garage we enjoy working on.

Cash or Umm…Cash?

We’re self-funded. We put money into the business account and have a 1-to-N prioritized budget. The money covers reoccurring expenses and accumulates for known future expenses. If the money isn’t there, that next item or task waits until it is — simple as that.

We’re a small team. Coding, graphics, wire framing, paperwork, contracts, business strategy, etc. are all currently managed by two people. We have careers, so we work nights and weekends on our projects. We have a lawyer, an accountant and a few people advising us. As you can imagine, this keeps us pretty stretched resource-wise, so a long development cycle is something we’ve had to be content with. We’re nimble and can quickly adjust, but we’re not yet that fast.

Patience Helps

Collectivus, our current project, has been worked on for years in some way, shape or form, but it was only around a year ago when the concept was really dusted off and reworked into what we now refer to as the “manifesto.” It’s a detailed plan of the entire vision.

A few months ago, we started making planning choices of what to break off from the manifesto in order to create a scope of work that would be the initial release and could be executed against without external funding. This is another important tip regardless of your project size and resources: No matter how passionate you are about aspects of your project, you need to be merciless about what to cut and where to prioritize. You want to release as fast as you can and iterate on that; building some monolithic app up-front is a bad idea. Of course “fast” is relative, especially in our case. It’s not easy and you sometimes need to recognize you’re too close to it and seek outside perspective to get back on track.

It’s Not (Just) About the Money

So I guess the last piece of useful information (if you’ve found any of this useful) is an explanation of why we’ve chosen this path. We certainly have enough industry know-how, connections, and experience to have pursued VC or angel funding, even before the economy went belly-up; we’re bootstrapping on purpose.

Why?

A few reasons:

• First is vision. we have a very specific vision and when someone’s giving you a check, you’re giving them control. The value of that control is very lopsided if you don’t have a product building value through growing usage, brand-recognition, and revenue. We’re not against outside money when the time or need is right, but right now, we can get by without.
• Second is passion. It’s great that people “in the know” are excited to hear about Collectivus and frustrating sometimes that progress on it isn’t faster, but if this project was being driven by a need to get it to market before the grocery money ran out, it wouldn’t be as good.
• Third is harder to explain. We’re not building you’re typical web application, it’s something else. That “something else” quite frankly would have added layers of writing extraneous proposals and plans. We’d rather spend the time just building it and showing you what we mean.
• Last is life. Sometimes you need to put the code down and walk around in the sunshine. We see too many people who are consumed by the start-up lifestyle: All work and never coming up for air. I was that guy in a past life. It doesn’t make us any less passionate about our work when we take a weekend off to go to New York. If someone’s funding us, our work ethics wouldn’t let us rest until that ROI was achieved.

I hope you’ve found this informative. We’re not a typical business, but where’s the adventure in being typical?

Mailbag: Closing Chapters and Writing New Ones

So, we’ve been busy working on lots of things, but I’m spending the day getting caught up on a few paperwork and administrative to do items. One “to do” was to share with you some recent mail, both electronic and postal:

Traces of Hope

We received an email from one of the organizers of an interactive project called “Traces of Hope” by the British Red Cross. The experience is designed to help bring awareness to conflict zones around the world, in this case Uganda.

I wrote back with some suggestions and feedback based on things we discovered when working on campaigns focused on real world issues in the past as part of CD.org.

Check out the site and we wish the team the best in taking a different approach toward bringing attention to a noble cause.

Blindness

We also received a package at the Collective Detective Compound containing promotional materials for a viral marketing campaign around the movie Blindness. The package contained a card embossed with “i am blind” in text and also in braille, two pairs of wrap around shades (like you’d get after having your eyes dilated) with “iamblind.org” printed on them, and a self-addressed stamped envelope for a PO Box in Toluca Lake, CA.

It was very awesome of the campaign organizers to track us down (we’ve moved recently) and send this to us. We started CD.org in ‘02, so it’s nice that six years later, colleagues and friends still send us stuff as part of their campaigns.

Archives

The last notable piece out of the mailbag is from a member of the original CD.org:

It’s great to see CD back online and to read about your plans. It sounds very exciting.

I was wondering if the old forums are archived somewhere. So much wonderful brain power and hard work was reflected on it, and it serves as a history of that genre’s gaming community. It would be a shame if it was lost. If you have a chance, could you please drop me a link to it, that is if it still exists.

We archived that version of the site in ‘05 and it was available until late ‘06 I believe. We recently changed servers and did some massive updates and the site is archived, but no longer publicly available.

It’s amazing the longevity and interest in the community and what we all participated in, accomplished, and the experiences we took away. It’s a great feeling to have been a part of something like that. We appreciate it and thank everyone who ever stopped by.

At least once a year we get an email asking about buying the archives or an inquiry into putting it back online. Due to the privacy of the detectives, selling the archives is highly unlikely to happen. Putting up the old site up for even nostalgic reasons would involve massive upgrades to the application to get current with dependent software packages and to secure it against security vulnerabilities. Besides, the Internet is full of tools that are generations ahead of the 2002 custom-built ones on CD.org:

• Our Trail system, could now be set-up with free wiki software like pbwiki
• Our IRC network could be done over Twitter or any IM chat software
• There are plenty of feature-rich forums and comment systems out there — you can even set-up a WordPress meta-blog and use distributed comment systems like Disqus

Of course, having a web application which unified all of these tools was a great reason for the success of CD, but in today’s internet, distributed tools, information, and multiple communities are a better way to go. Get the info “up in the cloud” as it were.

What These Things Have in Common

The thing that loops all of the above together is that we wanted to thank everyone in Collective Detective’s past, from our most awesome supporters, to our critics, friends, lurkers, and customers. However, our future is in a much different direction than our past; we’re a different organization on a new mission. We’ll occasionally have something to say about past projects and we’re happy to dispense advice to anyone who wants to learn or hear about the things we’ve learned and experiences but we’re not focusing on the types of viral marketing promotions we’ve promoted, created, or consulted on in the past.

For the nostalgic, if you look closely you will be able find a lot of CD influences in Collectivus, our next project. We’ve also taken and applied a lot of the lessons learned from CD.org and beyond. We look forward to writing more chapters about our the projects ahead, now that we’ve closed the chapter on what came before.

Identifying with Internet Inspiration

I’m chronicling the development of Collectivus because I appreciate it when others share their stories and I wanted to contribute as well. With now ten years in the ‘Net biz, I have benefited from the advice and learned from the successes, failures, and online adventures of others. As developers, we search for how-tos when we get stuck; as entrepreneurs, we look for advice, tips, and lessons to apply to our own ventures; as designers, we look for new techniques, inspirations, and trends (both on their way in and out) to be aware of. And so on. The world moves at Internet speed because we can share and process information so quickly. Many times an article or helpful post or comment on sites both large and small have helped or inspired me. These influences are baking themselves into Collectivus and all projects I have a hand in — oh, and sometimes people are just curious how a project came to be.

I had seen something similar a few years ago. Ryan Carson and team at Carsonified ran a blog called “Bare Naked App.” It detailed the building of an app called “Amigo” in 2006. I remember reading through it at the time and thinking how refreshing it was to see what a team was going through in detail, while building and launching an app like that. That’s something the Carsonified crew continues to do today and I see a few other projects sharing their stories as they build new businesses. That’s awesome.

Interesting side note: I met Ryan in person at FoWA in Miami this year, but embarrassingly I didn’t connect the “Bare Naked App” project to him until I started thinking about writing this post. D’oh!

So why not spell out the entirety of the Collectivus game plan right now? Hopefully, there’s an air of mystery, anticipation and interest that will develop over time. Publishing all the wireframes, mocks, user stories, descriptions, and other information all at once isn’t a good strategy for building awareness and interest. Besides, I’m not sure exactly what will happen next either. Details change, sometimes daily. Not in a “directionless” kind of way, in an iterative and adaptive kind of way. The plan is to continue to share information as we can as it happens.

Whether you’re reading it hot off the “post” button or part of an archive in the future after Collectivus launched and you’ve became curious where it came from, we hope you find these posts interesting and maybe useful.

Thanks for reading!