Onista

We have been working on our Social Marketplace “Onista” for quite sometime and every week (and every month) we think we are almost ready for launch “only if we fix these remaining little issues”. To be honest, there is no such thing called “little issues”. There are bugs in product (tons of bugs) and we must fix those before launching.
The major lesson I am learning with this experience is that “The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the another 200%”. For us the last 10% of the project is taking forever and I really hope we finish in next 6-8 weeks so we can FINALLY launch.

Following are some lessons I learned and I am making serious notes to myself about these lessons so I can try to plan better next time

• Last 10% of the project will suck up maximum energy, patience, time, blood out of you, so be prepared for that. Always think about this fact before promising anyone (especially VC) that you will launch in next 4 weeks
• Projects can be done “Fast”, “Cheap”, and with “Good Quality” but you can have any of these two and not all three. Seriously this is so true. In our case since we did not have lot of money, we wanted “Cheap” and also we wanted “Good Quality” so we CAN NOT have “Fast”. But this is f****** really really slow
• You should “Seriously” limit the features that you want to have in your product. When we were planning for building Onista, we wanted to have all. We wanted to be much better than eBay, Facebook, Craigslist, Amazon and hence we kept on adding nice feature list in our PRD. Now we are paying the price during implementation. It is taking long time because its f****** HUGE project that needs team of at least 50 engineers and we are 3 (that too moonlighting)
• A well-planned project will take twice as long as expected and a badly planned project will take four times longer than expected. We are in later category. Seriously the plan was BAD to have so many feature in first place. What was I thinking when I thought I can build something better than eBay and Facebook in 3 months while moonlighting?
• Elance and RentACoder is crap (except for testing services). Don’t go that way unless you want someone to write a quick php login script. (I am thinking of putting a project there for developing a new Operating System like “Clone of Windows XP” with budget of $500 to see if someone really bids on my project.)
• Sometimes it is a good idea to get rid of the problem instead of solving it. I am thinking about taking new approach now (my partners don’t know yet) to resolve these hard bugs quickly. Instead of fixing the bug get rid of the feature itself. cool right?
• No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirement – ours won’t be the first to. So be patient

On serious note, YES We will launch soon. We are confident that we will resolve these last 10% of the issues soon and come out with killer product.

Wait and watch.