On November 16th I launched a website called Lose It or Lose It. The basic premise is you lose the weight or you lose your money. You choose dollars per lb and lb per week and you must weigh in every week for 10 weeks at or below your weekly goal. Hopefully by the end you will be 10-30 lb lighter and get all your money back! We make our money when people don’t make their goals, an optional tip at the end if they appreciate our service, and the held money in an interest bearing account.

I have had some interest about how Lose It or Lose It was built. I want to start with why, then go into how, then on to how much.

Why?

Me on the Scale at 282.2 lb!

Over the summer I took the time to close the door on past projects and archive them. While I was going through them, I realized how much time, effort, and money I had spent building junk that never made any money. I decided the next project I worked on would have a way to make money from the start and would not be based on advertising. I hate advertising.

Around the same time, my wife Rebecca and I spent ten days traveling through Arizona and California. We had a blast and I wanted to be able to do more of it. I realized there is only one way to be able to do that, I need to get serious about building some of my own products.

A few months later, around September, I was thinking about how I am always trying to lose weight but never make any progress. I realized I needed an outside motivator where I would be punished if I didn’t stick to my goals, and it needed to be public. I was thinking other people probably needed the same thing and so I put two and two together and realized I came up with a project that fit all of my criteria! I decided to go all-in and build this for real.

How?

Wireframes Spread Out on the Table

I ran the idea past a few trusted people (you know who you are, thank you!) and they thought it was worthwhile so I started. I kicked it off by getting my thoughts onto something concrete as quickly as possible in the form of wireframes hand-drawn on paper. I like doing this for every project because they are easy to throw away if needed and force you to think of the website from the outside-in, the way your customers will see it. Many developers start with what makes them comfortable, the back-end, but your customers don’t care about that… so cut it out!

I sent the wireframes over to Chris Nagele at Wildbit to review and estimate. They thought it would take three weeks to design the entire site so I gave them the money and they started. They did a fantastic job and delivered all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images required to make the site work. They even stubbed out the AJAX responses! This was a great way to do it because I knew how the site would work before I did any significant development. I had started some of the message passing work but I didn’t develop the part of the site that powered the front-end until they were completely done the design!

During design I went back to doing client work to try to free up some extended free time to develop the site once the design was done. I also went in search of a good lawyer to review the site and prepare the necessary documents to ensure our safety and that we would keep the money we actually make. I ended up choosing Andrew Baer of Baer Business Law. It was my first experience involving a lawyer in one of my own projects and a little nerve racking to spend that much money, but it was valuable. I have a kick-ass  Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and How It Works documents and he helped me think through how the business was going to work. I ended up simplifying some of it because of his advice.

Around the middle of October I started development. The first step took about three weeks and up to today I have probably spent close to four solid weeks of development. I am not sure if that seems like a long or short time, but I feel like that is pretty quick. I also started using Cucumber for the first time. It slowed down the development process but I now have a rock solid set of integration tests I can use to make sure I haven’t screwed up anything in a major way. Starting design-first was also nice because I was easily able to write Cucumber tests and make them pass to make the site work. I used Rspec for the gritty details and all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes to make the site work.

I launched with eight AWEsome beta users. My goal was 15 users by the holidays and I have reached that goal, I now have 16 users! I have found it is a little difficult to convert visitors into users. This could be for a number of reasons including

1. They are waiting until after the holidays to sign up
2. They may not be sure if it works
3. They may not have the money to invest
4. It isn’t clear to them how it works

I think all of these can be overcome but it is going to take experimentation and patience.

How much?

People said they were interested in numbers, so I’m going to put them out there.

1. Design by Wildbit: $14,000 – it was less than that due to a friend discount, but this is the full retail price. Finding a great designer (you rock Gilbert!) is key because they are responsible for the public facing side of your product. This purchased the design, HTML, CSS, images, and Javascript required to make the entire site work.
2. Legal by Baer Business Law: $4,725 – this paid for the incorporation, privacy policy, terms of use, how it works document, and 2 hours of “discussion” about using the word “penalty”.
3. Promotions: $3,210 – I’ve promoted the site through a Barcamp Philly sponsorship (yay cupcakes!), Refresh Philly sponsorship, Reddit self-serve advertising, and on January 4th, a Daring Fireball feed sponsorship. Word of mouth has worked the best but that has only gone so far. I’m trying to see if getting the site in people’s minds will lead to a signup sometime in the future.
4. Development by Forge38 (me): I have no idea because I did it myself, but many many hours! I didn’t keep track of hours because I do that every day with my client work and don’t like it.
5. Misc: $500 – This includes having a friend do some market research and hosting costs.

I probably could have done this cheaper, but part of spending the money was making sure I stuck to the idea until the end; that I don’t build it then move on to the next thing. I currently have $450 on the line to lose 20 lb which I will get either way, but really, this $16k website is what is on the line. If I don’t lose weight, then others won’t want to sign up!

So far I have 16 users with a combined investment of $5,500. They have lost $115 (yay revenue!) and 141.6 lb!

Next!

Lose It or Lose It iPhone Application

So, what’s next? I’m looking for an angel investor or similar to help me grow the business. I believe I have proven the concept to be valid in that it helps people lose weight and can actually make money. I would like to build “Keep It Off or Lose It” to help those people trying not to gain weight as well as pay Will Ronco of Awesome Software to finish the AWEsome iPhone app he prototyped for me. The app would make the weekly weigh-ins even easier!

That is pretty much it, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I would be interested in presenting this material to user groups if they would find value in it. You can also follow Lose It or Lose It’s progress via the blog or twitter!

Holy Confirmation INDEED!

I have a bone to pick with account activation. Many sites require you to “activate your account” but what I really think they want and mean is “you need to confirm your email address”. Why do you need to confirm your email address? Nothing takes the place of actually going to your email account, seeing an email, and saying “Yes! I received the email and it didn’t land to my spam folder!”.

Now, many of the sites that require account activation don’t require reactivation when you change your email address. This leads me to believe that many people have forgotten why they are requiring activation!

I propose a process in which you are doing and calling it exactly how it is. Here it goes:

1. The users table has confirmed_email and new_email fields and the User model has a method called email that picks from those depending on what they contain.
2. When a new user signs up, their email address is stored in new_email and they are sent an email confirmation email with a link to confirm their email address. This doesn’t mean they can’t log in, it just means they have a message at the top of the screen and possibly limited functionality until they do confirm their email address.
3. When they click the link in the email, the email address stored in new_email is moved to confirmed_email and they go about their merry business.
4. When the user wants to change their email address, they are presented with a field where they can put in their new email which gets stored in new_email
5. An email is sent to the currently confirmed_email saying they are attempting to change their email address. This is done to prevent the email from being changed maliciously.
6. An email is sent to the new_email with a link to confirm their new email address
7. When the link is clicked, new_email is moved to confirmed_email

So there you have it. Unless I hear otherwise, I’m going to start using this process to confirm a user’s email address.

I don’t think I’ve ever typed the word “email” so many times in my life… email email email email email.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup

The very first presentation I went to at Railsconf was “The Gilt Effect: Handling 1000 Shopping Cart Updates per second in Rails“. I was expecting a good technical talk from the title but it ended up being a great business talk as well. Basically what GILT does is take left over luxury goods and sells them in an invite-only, time-limited shopping cart. Normally manufacturers don’t want to keep discounting the goods publicly because they don’t want to devalue their brand, they would rather burn them.

This is a great example, like ketchup, of a business that will bring in more revenue in a downturn. Less people are willing to spend money on luxury good so there are more left over. I have always kept my eyes open for examples of these in the hopes of coming up with one of my own!

Here is a picture of the badge we created along with all of the other badges.

NYT Open Badge + Friends

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPQeKwMnKzk]

Jason Tremblay is a Philadelphia local who I met a little over a year ago. Recently, we started working together on a little project called iSepta where he did all of the user interface design. I was blown away with what he was able to produce as well as the development feedback he gave. I literally could not stop grinning from ear to ear.

Geoffrey Grosenbach is fairly well known in the Ruby on Rails world for the screencast and ebook company he put together called Peepcode. He has done everything for that site from design to development as well as all of the editing and voiceovers. Everything he does looks spectacular but he also has the deep technical knowledge to make most of the screencasts and ebooks.

Tom Preston-Werner has become widely known for such projects as Gravatarwhere he did all design and development and Github where he did some development but all of the design. He’s also known for a project called Fuzed which is a Rails server stack written in Erlang. Yes, Erlang.

About 4-5 years ago, I was in college going for a degree in structural engineering when I decided I had too many ideas not to learn web development. I finished out my structural engineering degree and worked in that field for 2 years before finally going out on my own in July 2007. What that means is while I was learning how to make sure a 60 story condo building was able to withstand an earthquake, I also was trying to learn ruby, rails, html, css, and javascript. That was tough, but I made it through and I think I can finally call myself a developer.

So, where am I going with this? I think I have finally decided that my next professional goal is to learn the last thing to becoming a full stack web developer,design. I am already proficient at everything from the back-end development to javascript, but I have always thrown my hands up in the air when it came to design. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to tackle this like I tackled learning web development over the past few years.

If anybody has any suggestions about how I can go about achieving my new goal, please feel free to speak up! I have a feeling this is going to be quite a bit more difficult than web development since design is so subjective.

Our number one goal with this application was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. Although SEPTA’s presentation of schedules works great on paper pamphlets, it leaves something to be desired on mobile devices as you can see in the screen shot on the left. We decided to throw away any preconceived notions of how users should interact with train schedules and think we came up with sexy solution that you see on the right.

Features

• Start/Stop: Catching the next train is as easy as choosing your start and stop stations, which will return information for the next 5 trains.
• Recent Trips: Your five most recent trips you have planned will now show up on the home screen along with the next three trains for each trip.
• Route Numbers: The appropriate route number is now displayed with each train

Upcoming

1. Route Names: This will really connect people with what they see at the station. So rather than displaying just “R5″ with each train, soon we will display “R5 Thorndale/Paoli.”
2. Alert Notifications: SEPTA does provide realtime information on trains that are running late or have been cancelled which we will be integrating shortly into iSepta

One more thing…

Text message support! Simply text “iseptanow start station name to stop station name” to 41411 and receive the next 3 trains. For example, typing “iseptanow market to doylestown” will return the next 3 trains from Market East Station to Doylestown. You only have to type enough of the start and end stations to make it unique, so “iseptanow mark to doy” will also work.

Stay in the Loop

Make sure you keep up to date with what’s going on with iSepta by subscribing to our RSS feed or following us on twitter. And as always, let us know what you think! Suggestions? Comments? Anything!

Credits

iSepta developed in partnership with the talented Mr. Tremblay who developed the awesome user interface. This project would not have been possible without Indy Hall where all of us met.