Today is a big day in the development of KlickFu–earlier this morning we delivered (internally) our first working product!
This is a thrill for the team and me for several reasons. First, anytime you hit a milestone you have been working toward for a period of time there is always a justifiable feeling of achievement. In this case, it has been over a year since I created the original concept for KlickFu, 10 months since I had the idea to improve it that caused me to get excited enough to leave my comfortable day job and pursue KlickFu full-time, and about 5 months since my co-founder, Rod, came on board to start building the initial prototypes that led to this first real working version. So we have been anticipating this day for a while!
Aside from the time it has taken to get here, for a product guy like me, whose original motivation for starting the company stemmed from the passion to create and deliver this new system for PC gaming, there is a special excitement in actually seeing the real working version for the first time. Of course, I had a reasonable idea what it would feel like to use the app when I first contemplated it, a better idea when I worked with a developer to create a fake Flash prototype, and an even better idea when I wrote a quick Python script to mimic the app functionality in a static window. However…
Playing with the real application on a real system with no special software installed was a thrill, especially knowing all it has taken to get this point in terms of building a team, creating the SDK, and overcoming numerous technical hurdles in the process.
Of course, we still have a ton of work to do. In any real sense we have not gotten yet to the starting line–that will come when we have a shrink-wrapped alpha version I can distribute to close colleagues as well as some investors and partners. However, today, Sept. 10, 2009, is a good day for KlickFu… this is the day the real product with the legit user experience worked for the first time.
OMG, congrats! This is a huge milestone. You should start a tradition of celebrating the big ones!
Thanks, that is a great suggestion! Any ideas?
I think the celebrations should reflect the culture you foresee having there. Take what you (plural) like doing – the activities you want to promote – and make them bigger, put them in hyper drive for the celebrations and milestones.
Good point, we will probably be fairly low key for product related milestones. In my book, delivering a great product you and the users love is mainly its own reward. Although I am sure we will celebrate major company milestones like reaching XX number of users or earning the first dollar of revenue!