This week Rob Ashton and I have been battling against the clock to get a minimum viable product for my startup TruthVine out of the IDE and into the hands of customers in five days.
At 3:42 PM this afternoon, we declared victory:
Mission accomplished! @robashton and I have built our TruthVine MVP in 1 week, and it's now live on welcomehallchurch.org/Sermons
— Samuel Jack (@samuel_d_jack) March 8, 2013
There were some course adjustments along the way, as you would expect in a project like this. By the end of yesterday, I concluded that I wasn’t going to get my streamlined audio recording tool completed, so to make sure we had something to ship by the end of the week, I decided to put that on hold.
Today we focused all our efforts on getting the TruthVine Admin website and the embedding experience ready for use. And I believe we succeeded. Rob wrote a migration tool to take all the existing sermon data from my own church website (which I manage) and put it into the new TruthVine database. Having deployed the final builds of the software to our EC2 server, I then replaced the sermon display code in the website with TruthVine’s magic script. Two minutes later it was live. You can visit welcomehallchurch.org/sermons to see for yourself. Of course, there’s still a lot left to be done, styling being the most obvious thing – but that’s the point of a minimal viable product. It’s now out there in the wild, and I can start gathering feedback to determine where to focus my efforts next.
This week has been great fun, though hard work. I’d like to thank Rob again for all outstanding efforts. He has given me a great head start. But now the real work begins: marketing TruthVine, and building it into a self-sustaining business.
Oh – and by the way - if you know a church who might be interested in trying this out, send them to me, and I’ll hook them up with a free trial.
6 comments:
Sounds like a tool that could be useful to a lot of churches. Unfortunately, none of the links on that page are working for me.
Mark,
That's very strange: I've just checked and it "works for me"! Do you mean that you can see the list of sermons, but can't click them?
Thanks for NAudio, by the way! It's a great library, and it's awesome to discover that it's written by a fellow Christian!
Sam
I can see the sermons, but I get 404 not found if I click the sermon title or the name (using firefox)
Mark - ah yes, I see it now. Seems we have a problem with rendering in Firefox. Oh - and IE too, now that I've tried it.
Thanks for letting me know. I'll see if I can get it fixed.
Mark - should all be fixed now: cross-browser javascript issues to blame :-(
cool, all working now. great work
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