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Last week we decided that we were ready to host the first version of Kinnection for our family to start using. I was talking to another entrepreneur in Seattle recently, who told me that if you aren’t embarassed by your first version then you waited too long to release. The goal of course is to get feedback from real customers as early as possible. Well I have to say that once Kinnection goes live my cheeks will be burning. The site is really rough in spots and hasn’t gotten nearly enough testing but sometimes you just have to take the plunge.
Mike looked at several options for hosting before deciding on Rails Machine. There was no question that we were going to host somewhere rather than do it ourselves. Neither of us has this experience and we felt that our time would be better served building the product instead of learning all the necessary skills to administrate Linux and make Rails work in production. Mike convinced me that we really needed to go with a hosting provider that specializes in Ruby on Rails. This narrowed the field somewhat but there were still a bunch of providers out there. The next big question was whether we wanted to go with a shared hosting solution or not. While it is way cheaper, the sense that I got from talking to several Rails developers in Seattle was that it is a bit like the “Wild Wild West” with a lot of people doing things that should never be done on a shared server resulting in downtime for everyone else who happens to be hosted on the same box. I decided this wasn’t the right approach for me. Instead I went with the virtual private server approach. It costs a good deal more but I believe that hosting is a critical part of any Web application and you shouldn’t try to cut corners on critical aspects of your business. Anyway, I got a lot of positive reviews on Rails Machines so we went with them. Mike is setting up our rails machine now and we should start deploying this week.
One of the more challenging tasks I faced when starting my company was coming up with a great name for my product. It had to be short, memorable, at least somewhat descriptive, and of course the URL had to be available.
I started by writing down all the words that describe the product I wanted to build. Words like family, social networking, connect, share, stories, unite, etc. Someone already owned the domain for many of my early ideas. My husband came up with combining kin and connection. Since I’m a good southern girl, I was very familiar with using kin to describe family and my site was designed to connect families. So Kinnection was born. Luckily, the domain was free. There are other sites with similar domain names which is obviously not ideal, but I’m still happy with it.
The name tested pretty well with my focus group but there were some who couldn’t figure out what the site was about so I decided to come up with a tag line. I know this is probably obvious for many people who have done this before but at Microsoft, there is a whole army of people who take care of branding so this was my first time. The tag line I came up with was: “Share memories. Stay connected.” I think both the name and the tag line will stick but you never know what will come up during our alpha.
You may notice that all of these posts are coming after the fact. Well we were so busy coding that we didn’t have time to set up a blog plus I wasn’t quite ready for anyone to know what I was up to. So here is a little background on how we are developing Kinnection using extreme programming and Ruby on Rails.
Mike left the software world after developing a repetitive stress injury that made coding extremely painful. You may wonder how in the heck he is coding Kinnection. Well, we are doing it together. If you have ever heard of extreme or paired programming that’s basically what we’re doing. I sit in front of the keyboard and Mike sits next to me. He tells me what to code and I type. It took us a while to get the hang of this but now he is getting used to thinking out loud and I’m getting much more familiar with Ruby and the Rails environment. We have caught a good number of bugs with this approach and I’m learning way more about how my site is architected.
At the end of November Mike and I decided to use Ruby on Rails. I did a little Web development many years ago but was extremely rusty. Most of Mike’s experience was as a Win32 developer so we had a lot of homework to do before deciding how to start developing. The word on the street about Ruby on Rails was that it was great for rapid development of Web applications. After going through a few tutorials together we started on Kinnection and RoR has definitely lived up to the hype so far. Given our limitations, I don’t think we would be as far along as we are if we were using something else.
I started working on the overall design for Kinnection around October 2006. I was a program manager for years at Microsoft so designing products is something I really enjoy. I knew I would need a lot of graphical support and inspriation, so I contacted a former collegue at Filter Design Studios in Bellevue, WA. Robin set me up with an amazing designer who was responsible for the site look and feel, logo design, interaction model, and screen designs for the major functionality. I thoroughly enjoyed working my designer on Kinnection. He really listened to my description of my target customer and overall user experience goals. We meet weekly for a little over a month and the results in my opinion were amazing. We even held some informal focus group testing on the site branding and logo designs. Too fun! Once most of the high-level details were hammered out, Mike and I started coding around the beginning of December 2006.
Kinnection is a Web site designed to help families share memories, stay connected, and preserve family history. Family sites on Kinnection can only be viewed by other family members so you can feel safe connecting online.
I am Nikki Santoro. I started Kinnection after leaving Microsoft in August 2006. My husband has been helping me develop Kinnection using Ruby on Rails. It has been very exciting and educational so far and we’ve only just gotten started. We will be asking our families to try out Kinnection before releasing it to the world. Stay tuned for more stories about our journey.
