I’m a firm believer that if you establish WHY you’re doing something, then it acts as a touchstone for everything that cascades down from it.
It’s far from an original thought, I’ve seen it expounded by a great many people and a great deal of the most successful organisations are based around exactly that concept.
A great deal more, however, have a Mission Statement. A word-vomit of non-specific business speak that probably has “excellence” in it somewhere, as if no one else starting a project or business had thought to make it excellent. A friend of mine is working for a company that has a “Guiding Star” - a point of reference to help direct everyone in the organisation. Sadly that guiding star is made of 3 different things, which I feel undermines the purpose somewhat.
Simplicity is key.
So I find myself here. The beginning of another new year, following on from one in which I spectacularly failed to launch an epoch-defining bit of software or app. I’m still alive though, so I’ve got another shot.
I’ve been mulling over two ideas for a while now, both quite similar but one which I think is probably more interesting, or that I care about more, than the other.
- A Notification App. Nothing ground breaking here, but this would be quiet by design, pull only and with no/very limited scope for interaction. The need for this being the noise around things like WhatsApp, with a simple Scout group spinning up multiple group chats that you’re invited into but that you don’t feel you can leave, or a School group sending you something useful (e.g. “it’s mufti day tomorrow”), but then your phone buzzing for the next 12 hours, with “thanks Karen, had totes forgotten you’re a life saver”-type messages. Just a thumbs up would be great.
- Live Events List. I would like this to work in two ways: firstly to consume and publish any feeds already published by venues, and geo-tag the events to make them consolidated in a searchable place (e.g. “what events are on within a mile of me tonight”); secondly to make scanning of fliers/chalkboards etc. possible for users as a sort of crowd sourcing - and have all that be published as a searchable feed.
Two is obviously more fun. Mobile app, scanning pictures, OCR, AI to create an event etc. and I’d like it to have a real push on live music in particular. It could also be re-skinned for specific purposes, if someone wants to use the feed/API for just quizzes etc, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be organised along those lines.
So I’ve started with WHAT. Which is the opposite of what I started out saying. However. There is a WHY. There’s the WHY of that project over the other one. What drew me into making that choice rather than the first one, which would really be solving a problem that someone else has, rather than a problem I have. So… WHY?
To promote live events to people nearby and by doing so, making it even more worthwhile for venues in creating and hosting them.
There. That will do. For now. For each feature I create I can ask which of the following is it achieving:
- Promoting live events?
- Increasing attendance of live events?
- Getting eyeballs to see what’s coming up?
- Making it easier for venues/users to let others know about them?
If it’s not directly contributing to that one-sentence WHY, I shouldn’t be doing it. Now watch as I spectacularly fail to adhere to my own advice.
Steven.