Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10Don’t Plan. Prototype!

Greg Reinacker

Greg was the founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, a provider of enterprise social computing software. He is currently the founder and CEO of Tradervue, an application for journaling, analyzing, and sharing stock and futures trades. He has been a Techstars mentor since 2007.

Over Christmas vacation in 2002, I did what every good programmer does—I threw away my blog software (Radio Userland), which worked perfectly well, and wrote my own new version.

Within a week I realized I had also thrown out a key function that I used daily, my RSS aggregator. So, credit card in hand, I set out to find a new one, buy it, and get it working quickly, so that I could get back to my real job, which was doing .NET consulting work.

There weren’t many RSS aggregators around at the time. In fact, I think there were about four of them. None of them worked the way I thought they should. During this exploration process a light bulb went on and I wondered, why couldn’t I simply read my RSS feeds inside of Microsoft Outlook, where I read everything else?

I built a super-quick prototype to display some of my feeds in Outlook, took a screenshot, and posted that on my blog on January 4, 2003. Overnight there was a flurry of comments, all of them positive about the idea. Fewer than 10 days had elapsed at this point.

Encouraged by this feedback, I stayed up late one night working on my prototype and posted a 0.1 version of the “Outlook News Aggregator” ...