Help, otherwise I will soon go crazy (the real story, the real development of the project)
Greetings, my name is Michael and I will soon go insane. I really need your qualified help.
And now about everything in order.
It was a warm summer day, I was lying on the couch and was just thinking about something. Thought after thought, and I accidentally came across the memory of my old work. I got carried away with reflections about her, and distinct short video clips from that period of life began to emerge in my head:
')
“Evening, I sit with a friend at the bus stop and drink beer, he talks in colors about his new job, which he got a couple of weeks ago. I remember how I listened with interest, how the thought appears that I am not very happy with what I am doing now. I remember how a desire arises in me to get a job, as I ask him to arrange for me to meet with its director. ”
In general, you can describe for a long time what I was thinking then, but it is not important now. In short, I got a job, spent a couple of interesting years of my life there, started many acquaintances and got a lot of useful experience. It is only important that, recalling the situation at the bus stop, I could not in my head tie the memory to a specific date. Moreover, I could not even remember the year of events. I do not know why, but it seriously hurt me. As so, an important event in my life, but I can not remember such a simple detail. This thought did not give me rest. And then I decided to write down on paper all the memories that surfaced in my head when I was thinking about that period. I needed to find a memory with at least some reference to time in order to make it a starting point.
Here I encountered the first inconvenience. Memories on paper were in the order in which they came to mind, and so wanted to arrange them in the correct chronology. To solve this problem, I decided to use a computer. He opened the notebook and began to write down his memories line by line. With copy-paste function, things went much more fun and easier.
As a result, with uncomplicated brute force, I still pulled the desired date out of my head.
And then he unexpectedly noted for himself that I really liked the process of extracting memories, he brought a lot of pleasure, because in the process there were always pleasant nostalgic feelings, akin to when you see Mario or Tanchiki on a dandy. I decided to continue to record the memories of life.
The next problem was exactly how I wrote down my memories.
Initially, they had this look - “January 1, 2000. It was a sunny day, in the morning I had breakfast with what was left after New Year's Eve, then I decided to meet with friends and go to the center, then we decided to go skating . ” The problem was that, firstly, I thought about the memory as a whole for a long time, trying to write a lot of things, and secondly I tried to write nicely, thinking how it would look. For a long time I used a similar principle, it was very tiring. Fortunately, natural laziness led me to the right decision.
I no longer tried to fit in a single memory a whole day or a week and did not try to describe it beautifully. As soon as a 2–5 second video came out of my head in my head, I would write it down with a minimum of tag words: “Evening, embankment, boat, Sergey, talking about school”. According to them, I could instantly restore the situation in my head. This turned out to be the best solution.
Now, waiting for someone or something, I spent time with benefit, retrieved memories and wrote them down on what I got on my arm, wishing in passing that I had no access to the already recorded memories. Such a pastime has turned for me into an assembly of a fascinating puzzle consisting of the feelings of my own life.
As time passed, I received an impressive text file with indexing of my memories. Adding new records and looking through old ones, I increasingly began to think about my life. What decisions were right and which were not. What mistakes I often made. What opportunities gave me life and how often. Why in situations where a jerk was required, I showed passivity and laziness? What life situations have caused the present worries?
To say that I saw the sight of what I saw was to say nothing; I began to see clearly from every interesting conclusion. As a result, I was lucky to disassemble my "I" into small parts, clean everything, lubricate it, throw out the unnecessary and fine-tune it. Turning myself back on, I realized that I had changed a lot. I understood how I want to live my life and what I need from it. And also I had a goal in life - I decided to tell people about my experience and help everyone who wants it.
In the Internet age, the best solution for achieving this goal was to create a service with convenient functionality that solves the problems I described. Then I thought a lot and, in the end, I came to the conclusion that such a service could somehow feed me, and this is a sufficient payment for doing my favorite work, which brings a lot of pleasure.
From idea to implementation
The next stage was the start of work. I decided to burn the bridges and drop everything I was doing at that time in order to concentrate fully on the project. Awareness of subsequent reality should have been motivated and not allowed to relax. First of all, I sat down to prototype a future project. Keynote from the Apple iWork 09 office suite helped me a lot with this. Each service screen I created as a separate slide, I drew graphics with the help of the built-in toolkit, and the buttons were links to other slides. So it turned out a good visualization of the desired prototype.
By the way, here are a couple of slides from the first prototype that seem funny to me.
With a prototype in hand, one can determine how many people are needed for the project and what the timeline will be. The project should have been ready in 2-3 months. Now it remains to solve one small question - to find money, which at that time I did not have. Sitting at home and thinking about the decision, I accidentally threw my eyes on the camera-SLR, the brain intuitively counted it in money, and then my eyes lit up - it was a real decision. In a matter of days under the sale went almost everything that was bought over many years. In fact, I left only a laptop and a mobile phone. The money received for the first time was enough.
I decided not to bother with renting an office, buying equipment and a staff of cleaners with office managers. Now is the time that it is generally not clear why throwing money out of it. Why do people spend 2-3 hours on the road a day? This is almost 750 hours of pure time per year, 47 days of fulfilling life, which can be used wisely. And how much money is spent on travel, gasoline? And how many brain cells die during communication with other such “going to work”? I definitely decided for myself that I did not want to mock myself and the people with whom I would work.
As a result, the work began to boil remotely, and a self-assembly server was installed for development and testing on the coke station. Trac was raised on it. Google (mail, docs) and Skype services were chosen for the communication.
After a month and a half, the first prototype appeared, its screenshots were not preserved, but it is not very different from what is drawn on the slide below.
Testing the prototype showed a complete failure of one of the key ideas - a single window in which all the notes about the memories were placed. When there were a lot of them, moving memories from beginning to end turned into sophisticated torture. The solution to the problem was the creation of two windows - a draft and a clean copy. All created notes got into the draft, and it also served as a buffer of the pure copy. Chistovik also became the keeper of notes in the correct chronology.
Now about the placement of windows relative to each other. One window over another simplified the task, but still it did not become an ideal solution. But the placement of windows on the sides seemed the best option. This solution allows you to quickly manipulate notes.
Work on the prototype was seriously delayed, the money ran out and I had to urgently look for someone to borrow it. Fortunately, this problem has been resolved.
Then came the understanding that the existing design needs to be changed. Creating a new design, working out trivialities and correcting errors that pop up due to poor browser compatibility has increased the deadline three times.
How to pay off debts and start making money
Now I will talk about monetization. Initial thoughts on this score were different: either sell the number of available memories for money or sell monthly subscriptions. But definitely it was necessary to earn something. First of all, the Ukrainian payment system LiqPay was connected, then I went through all the checks in two more systems, Moneybookers and PayPal, but I haven’t reached their hands yet to integrate them into the project.
The complexity of the choice and the statement of many experts that “if the product is good, the users will pay for it themselves” did not let me sleep. And now the moment came when I decided to make it free, developing only with donations. Then, by the way, I had another thought - do not disturb the user with unnecessary registrations. Appeared mode "try", which allows you to evaluate the entire functionality of the service. If you don’t like the service, you can simply leave and all the memories you’ve entered will disappear, and if you do, they will be saved during registration.
The more time spent on development, the more worried the idea was that debts would soon have to be repaid. And after all, you need a lot of money in order not only to finish the project, but also to launch it and then develop it further. I decided to sell my sports car. Work continued again.
Last Judgment
And then came the moment when, from a functional point of view, the service was completed.
It remains only to write a text that can explain everything to users. This task became my Achilles heel ...
After a while I wrote the text and, placing it on the site, began to invite my friends and acquaintances. The first stream of users rushed, and with it the first reviews about the service: someone liked it, someone did not understand how to use it, and someone — why should he even remember his life at all? Having collected the majority of opinions, I came to the conclusion that the service is incomprehensible. Really appreciating my strength, I realized that most likely I would not be able to write a description accessible to users, so I decided to order it from a renowned copywriter. The resulting text was definitely better than mine and I re-sent the invitations. This had a positive effect, but the result was still far from what was desired. So the service lived for some time, there was an increase in users, but he did not pull on records.
After some time I drove to visit one of my friends, who had previously been given a link to the service. We talked for a long time, and now the conversation turned to the project. I asked how he told him, he said that he tried to use it, but did not get much pleasure. I was very surprised, I downloaded the service on his computer and asked to show how he used it. What was my surprise when I saw that he, trying to extract and write down the memory, makes my initial mistakes. It turned out that the new text is also not effective. In the end, I myself decided to explain everything to him. He told about the meaning I put into the concept of “memory”, told about how to extract and record them correctly. I took the keyboard and asked him to remember the event of life, based on my rules. I wrote down everything he said. And, about a miracle, after 10 memories, I did not have time to write down everything that occurred to him, and after 30, he took the keyboard and immersed himself in the process.
I decided to conduct an experiment, I drove by that day to two more of my friends. And bingo! The same trouble, they also did not understand how to use the service. After a master class, I went home to think about what to do with all this. The next day I was very happy when all three friends called back and began to share their impressions of the service and where the process of memories led them.
Definitely all the descriptions needed to be changed again, this time I posted a semblance of a mini-tender on the freelance site. I tried to give people the opportunity to understand the service, and from their point of view to describe it correctly. I chose the two best test tasks, and we began to write texts again. Guess what problem I had again?
… I'm desperate! I begin to feel the inventor of sticks with sugar, who committed suicide because the world did not understand his invention and used it incorrectly. I do not know how to describe the service so that it becomes clear to everyone.
And I want so much Success Story, because there are still a lot of development plans:
I really want you to try to use the service. I am interested to hear your opinion about it, and how it can be correctly described or improved.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Service Address - vspominator.com
Update:
After reading all the comments, my eye twitched, I got closer and closer to the inventor of the sticks. Service again did not succumb to understanding, so I will try to explain everything again:
1. Take any event from your life that can make you feel. In order to speed up this process I will attach some photos.
I don’t know if I have coped with the task, but these photos are personally catching me, looking at them I recall different situations from my childhood. Not childhood as a whole, namely, 2-5 second situations from it - how I sat down to play for the computer for the first time, I saw a sego from a friend, and walked after school.
2. Now we will try to digitally register the tags to these memories in my head - “Chip and Dale”, “Guest from the Future”, “First Class”, “Ended lessons, school, play ball, portfolios on the ground”, “Sadik, swimming pool, children, wicked teacher "," Dandy prefix, tanchiki, ducks "," Sega, sonic prefix "," Computer search, livingstone games, paratrupper, goody "
3. Viewing the tags of memories in digital form should instantly start playing memories in your head.
4. Due to the peculiarities of the memory, the reproduced memory launches other videos in the head. They need to quickly catch a word and assign tags to them.
5. A large number of notes tagged about your memories, allows you to relive the feelings that were associated with them. And also to return to them at any time.
6. In order for magic to appear, list the tags for 20-30 memories in this way.
Here is the essence of the service. This is not a blog, this is not a photo album, this is not a diary, this is not a social medium at all. This is a personal tool that with your help assumes the role of an indexer of your memories, the product of which is the ability to navigate through your memories with high speed. Which in turn improves memory, gives pleasant feelings and helps in self-analysis.
And yes, the most important difference between the service from others, it allows you to move and rearrange the notes in the order you need, and it does not matter what date you put it. Try to carry out these manipulations in a blog or tweeter.
The idea about the video is very correct, already sat over it to think.
And now about everything in order.
It was a warm summer day, I was lying on the couch and was just thinking about something. Thought after thought, and I accidentally came across the memory of my old work. I got carried away with reflections about her, and distinct short video clips from that period of life began to emerge in my head:
')
“Evening, I sit with a friend at the bus stop and drink beer, he talks in colors about his new job, which he got a couple of weeks ago. I remember how I listened with interest, how the thought appears that I am not very happy with what I am doing now. I remember how a desire arises in me to get a job, as I ask him to arrange for me to meet with its director. ”
In general, you can describe for a long time what I was thinking then, but it is not important now. In short, I got a job, spent a couple of interesting years of my life there, started many acquaintances and got a lot of useful experience. It is only important that, recalling the situation at the bus stop, I could not in my head tie the memory to a specific date. Moreover, I could not even remember the year of events. I do not know why, but it seriously hurt me. As so, an important event in my life, but I can not remember such a simple detail. This thought did not give me rest. And then I decided to write down on paper all the memories that surfaced in my head when I was thinking about that period. I needed to find a memory with at least some reference to time in order to make it a starting point.
Here I encountered the first inconvenience. Memories on paper were in the order in which they came to mind, and so wanted to arrange them in the correct chronology. To solve this problem, I decided to use a computer. He opened the notebook and began to write down his memories line by line. With copy-paste function, things went much more fun and easier.
As a result, with uncomplicated brute force, I still pulled the desired date out of my head.
And then he unexpectedly noted for himself that I really liked the process of extracting memories, he brought a lot of pleasure, because in the process there were always pleasant nostalgic feelings, akin to when you see Mario or Tanchiki on a dandy. I decided to continue to record the memories of life.
The next problem was exactly how I wrote down my memories.
Initially, they had this look - “January 1, 2000. It was a sunny day, in the morning I had breakfast with what was left after New Year's Eve, then I decided to meet with friends and go to the center, then we decided to go skating . ” The problem was that, firstly, I thought about the memory as a whole for a long time, trying to write a lot of things, and secondly I tried to write nicely, thinking how it would look. For a long time I used a similar principle, it was very tiring. Fortunately, natural laziness led me to the right decision.
I no longer tried to fit in a single memory a whole day or a week and did not try to describe it beautifully. As soon as a 2–5 second video came out of my head in my head, I would write it down with a minimum of tag words: “Evening, embankment, boat, Sergey, talking about school”. According to them, I could instantly restore the situation in my head. This turned out to be the best solution.
Now, waiting for someone or something, I spent time with benefit, retrieved memories and wrote them down on what I got on my arm, wishing in passing that I had no access to the already recorded memories. Such a pastime has turned for me into an assembly of a fascinating puzzle consisting of the feelings of my own life.
As time passed, I received an impressive text file with indexing of my memories. Adding new records and looking through old ones, I increasingly began to think about my life. What decisions were right and which were not. What mistakes I often made. What opportunities gave me life and how often. Why in situations where a jerk was required, I showed passivity and laziness? What life situations have caused the present worries?
To say that I saw the sight of what I saw was to say nothing; I began to see clearly from every interesting conclusion. As a result, I was lucky to disassemble my "I" into small parts, clean everything, lubricate it, throw out the unnecessary and fine-tune it. Turning myself back on, I realized that I had changed a lot. I understood how I want to live my life and what I need from it. And also I had a goal in life - I decided to tell people about my experience and help everyone who wants it.
In the Internet age, the best solution for achieving this goal was to create a service with convenient functionality that solves the problems I described. Then I thought a lot and, in the end, I came to the conclusion that such a service could somehow feed me, and this is a sufficient payment for doing my favorite work, which brings a lot of pleasure.
From idea to implementation
The next stage was the start of work. I decided to burn the bridges and drop everything I was doing at that time in order to concentrate fully on the project. Awareness of subsequent reality should have been motivated and not allowed to relax. First of all, I sat down to prototype a future project. Keynote from the Apple iWork 09 office suite helped me a lot with this. Each service screen I created as a separate slide, I drew graphics with the help of the built-in toolkit, and the buttons were links to other slides. So it turned out a good visualization of the desired prototype.
By the way, here are a couple of slides from the first prototype that seem funny to me.
With a prototype in hand, one can determine how many people are needed for the project and what the timeline will be. The project should have been ready in 2-3 months. Now it remains to solve one small question - to find money, which at that time I did not have. Sitting at home and thinking about the decision, I accidentally threw my eyes on the camera-SLR, the brain intuitively counted it in money, and then my eyes lit up - it was a real decision. In a matter of days under the sale went almost everything that was bought over many years. In fact, I left only a laptop and a mobile phone. The money received for the first time was enough.
I decided not to bother with renting an office, buying equipment and a staff of cleaners with office managers. Now is the time that it is generally not clear why throwing money out of it. Why do people spend 2-3 hours on the road a day? This is almost 750 hours of pure time per year, 47 days of fulfilling life, which can be used wisely. And how much money is spent on travel, gasoline? And how many brain cells die during communication with other such “going to work”? I definitely decided for myself that I did not want to mock myself and the people with whom I would work.
As a result, the work began to boil remotely, and a self-assembly server was installed for development and testing on the coke station. Trac was raised on it. Google (mail, docs) and Skype services were chosen for the communication.
After a month and a half, the first prototype appeared, its screenshots were not preserved, but it is not very different from what is drawn on the slide below.
Testing the prototype showed a complete failure of one of the key ideas - a single window in which all the notes about the memories were placed. When there were a lot of them, moving memories from beginning to end turned into sophisticated torture. The solution to the problem was the creation of two windows - a draft and a clean copy. All created notes got into the draft, and it also served as a buffer of the pure copy. Chistovik also became the keeper of notes in the correct chronology.
Now about the placement of windows relative to each other. One window over another simplified the task, but still it did not become an ideal solution. But the placement of windows on the sides seemed the best option. This solution allows you to quickly manipulate notes.
Work on the prototype was seriously delayed, the money ran out and I had to urgently look for someone to borrow it. Fortunately, this problem has been resolved.
Then came the understanding that the existing design needs to be changed. Creating a new design, working out trivialities and correcting errors that pop up due to poor browser compatibility has increased the deadline three times.
How to pay off debts and start making money
Now I will talk about monetization. Initial thoughts on this score were different: either sell the number of available memories for money or sell monthly subscriptions. But definitely it was necessary to earn something. First of all, the Ukrainian payment system LiqPay was connected, then I went through all the checks in two more systems, Moneybookers and PayPal, but I haven’t reached their hands yet to integrate them into the project.
The complexity of the choice and the statement of many experts that “if the product is good, the users will pay for it themselves” did not let me sleep. And now the moment came when I decided to make it free, developing only with donations. Then, by the way, I had another thought - do not disturb the user with unnecessary registrations. Appeared mode "try", which allows you to evaluate the entire functionality of the service. If you don’t like the service, you can simply leave and all the memories you’ve entered will disappear, and if you do, they will be saved during registration.
The more time spent on development, the more worried the idea was that debts would soon have to be repaid. And after all, you need a lot of money in order not only to finish the project, but also to launch it and then develop it further. I decided to sell my sports car. Work continued again.
Last Judgment
And then came the moment when, from a functional point of view, the service was completed.
It remains only to write a text that can explain everything to users. This task became my Achilles heel ...
After a while I wrote the text and, placing it on the site, began to invite my friends and acquaintances. The first stream of users rushed, and with it the first reviews about the service: someone liked it, someone did not understand how to use it, and someone — why should he even remember his life at all? Having collected the majority of opinions, I came to the conclusion that the service is incomprehensible. Really appreciating my strength, I realized that most likely I would not be able to write a description accessible to users, so I decided to order it from a renowned copywriter. The resulting text was definitely better than mine and I re-sent the invitations. This had a positive effect, but the result was still far from what was desired. So the service lived for some time, there was an increase in users, but he did not pull on records.
After some time I drove to visit one of my friends, who had previously been given a link to the service. We talked for a long time, and now the conversation turned to the project. I asked how he told him, he said that he tried to use it, but did not get much pleasure. I was very surprised, I downloaded the service on his computer and asked to show how he used it. What was my surprise when I saw that he, trying to extract and write down the memory, makes my initial mistakes. It turned out that the new text is also not effective. In the end, I myself decided to explain everything to him. He told about the meaning I put into the concept of “memory”, told about how to extract and record them correctly. I took the keyboard and asked him to remember the event of life, based on my rules. I wrote down everything he said. And, about a miracle, after 10 memories, I did not have time to write down everything that occurred to him, and after 30, he took the keyboard and immersed himself in the process.
I decided to conduct an experiment, I drove by that day to two more of my friends. And bingo! The same trouble, they also did not understand how to use the service. After a master class, I went home to think about what to do with all this. The next day I was very happy when all three friends called back and began to share their impressions of the service and where the process of memories led them.
Definitely all the descriptions needed to be changed again, this time I posted a semblance of a mini-tender on the freelance site. I tried to give people the opportunity to understand the service, and from their point of view to describe it correctly. I chose the two best test tasks, and we began to write texts again. Guess what problem I had again?
… I'm desperate! I begin to feel the inventor of sticks with sugar, who committed suicide because the world did not understand his invention and used it incorrectly. I do not know how to describe the service so that it becomes clear to everyone.
And I want so much Success Story, because there are still a lot of development plans:
- Finally, normal texts and lessons on service.
- Service translations to other languages ​​(English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese)
- New illustrations for other languages
- Grouping memories by topic
- The ability to upload pictures
- Launch radio with inspirational music
- Integration with social networks
- Version of service for iPhone and iPad
I really want you to try to use the service. I am interested to hear your opinion about it, and how it can be correctly described or improved.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Service Address - vspominator.com
Update:
After reading all the comments, my eye twitched, I got closer and closer to the inventor of the sticks. Service again did not succumb to understanding, so I will try to explain everything again:
1. Take any event from your life that can make you feel. In order to speed up this process I will attach some photos.
I don’t know if I have coped with the task, but these photos are personally catching me, looking at them I recall different situations from my childhood. Not childhood as a whole, namely, 2-5 second situations from it - how I sat down to play for the computer for the first time, I saw a sego from a friend, and walked after school.
2. Now we will try to digitally register the tags to these memories in my head - “Chip and Dale”, “Guest from the Future”, “First Class”, “Ended lessons, school, play ball, portfolios on the ground”, “Sadik, swimming pool, children, wicked teacher "," Dandy prefix, tanchiki, ducks "," Sega, sonic prefix "," Computer search, livingstone games, paratrupper, goody "
3. Viewing the tags of memories in digital form should instantly start playing memories in your head.
4. Due to the peculiarities of the memory, the reproduced memory launches other videos in the head. They need to quickly catch a word and assign tags to them.
5. A large number of notes tagged about your memories, allows you to relive the feelings that were associated with them. And also to return to them at any time.
6. In order for magic to appear, list the tags for 20-30 memories in this way.
Here is the essence of the service. This is not a blog, this is not a photo album, this is not a diary, this is not a social medium at all. This is a personal tool that with your help assumes the role of an indexer of your memories, the product of which is the ability to navigate through your memories with high speed. Which in turn improves memory, gives pleasant feelings and helps in self-analysis.
And yes, the most important difference between the service from others, it allows you to move and rearrange the notes in the order you need, and it does not matter what date you put it. Try to carry out these manipulations in a blog or tweeter.
The idea about the video is very correct, already sat over it to think.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/106650/
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