Driven By Curiosity

In my search for better, quicker, easier ways to develop content rich websites I happened across an ebook called “Getting Rea;” by a company called 37Signals.com. It got me all excited because they are much farther down the path toward developing the kinds of websites I had dimly imagined.

Their sites are built with a programming language called Ruby. They have used Ruby to build a website development framework called Rails. The combination is Ruby on Rails and abbreviated RoR. I have added pages to this site where I disucss my experinces with RoR in more detail.

Once the initial excitement wears off, there are some significant hurdles. It is harder to find a webhosting company that offers it, there is a serious learning curve, and the setup and install features still have lots of rough edges. However, it looks very promising.

Got an idea for a product but hesistate to run up your charge cards, borrow all the equity in your house, borow from friends, quit your job to get it into production?

Maybe that isn’t necessary anymore. My son used to work for a consulting engineering firm that billed time at $125/hour. At that rate even a simple project could climb to $100,000. That may still be necessary in some situations, but developments in technology and on the web make it possible for those with some engineering ability to do much of the work themselves for much less.

This site describes how we built starter interrupts with only two people, using a one room lab, stocked with $1,500 worth of equipment.

Think about it. If you can build a product yourself on a very small budget you can:

Avoid borrowing
Keep all rights for yourself
Sell for less
Target smaller markets
Afford to have a working prototype to sell/license, not just a concept

It’s worth thinking about.