Its been a little over a year since I boldly asked "You're a Developer, So Why Do You Work for Someone Else?". A lot of people cheered me on. Several poo-pooed the idea because they're happy where they're at. That's fine, but I love the idea of building something out of nothing and growing it until you can literally do whatever it is that you love.
Time To Put My Money Where My Mouth Is
I never expected that post to get so much attention. I'm glad it did, because that's how I feel, but since that time I've been working on not one, but two projects.
First, the Failure
My first project was a failure. Not because it ran out of money or didn't get any interest, but because I shut it down nearly after launching it. I worked on it nights and weekends for six months and was proud of what I built. It was essentially a web app that helped Boy Scout leaders manage their troops and their boys' advancements. I launched, I made some people angry (apparently some scout leaders are very passionate and when you get something wrong they REALLY let you know), and I got several signups on the first day. Sweet.
Then I found out that the *ahem* corporation that runs that little organization expected me to pay licensing fees for anything resembling or related to their brand. I'm a scrappy little solopreneur and don't have gobs of money to pay their fees, so I decided to call it quits. It was painful because I invested a lot of personal time into that first product, but I learned a valuable lesson: be very very careful about building something that depends on another company or service. Never again.
The Success
Well, hopefully, at least. Today, I launched Feature Zen, a simple bug tracking tool that makes it easy for anyone (not only developers) to track and manage bugs and issues in your product. That is not to say that it's not great for developers (I'm one myself), but it is simple and intuitive enough that anyone on your team can use it (unlike Bugzilla, Mantis, Team Foundation, etc).
Scratching My Own Itch
I'm a developer working at my day job while also hacking away at Feature Zen on nights and weekends. During the day, I am part of a small development team that maintains a public website that gets around 200,000 uniques per month. Its a nice development job with good perks and a decent salary, but I am constantly frustrated by the politics and silly decisions that people make who have no idea how the web works (or marketing, social media, SEO, etc). I have no real say in what tools we use because they're already used to the way things are.
One such tool is Team Foundation Server (TFS). Ugh, I shudder to even think about it. I'm sure that people like it, but to me it is clunky, overly-complex, and clumsy. There are plenty of other bug tracking tools that are just as bad. The only other option to using TFS for us was a spreadsheet (Google Docs), which is ok until you try to track more than 50 bugs at a time. The learning curve and overhead for existing bug tracking systems was just too high for my team to be able to switch over to something new.
We tried out several other bug tracking tools, but they were all too much of a hassle to set up, or had way more options than we needed. So I saw an opportunity to build not only something that I would use, but something that other people would enjoy as well.
I built the bug tracking tool I wanted.
I'm a big fan of the 37signals/Getting Real way of thinking, so I set out to build something simple and intuitive that would get the job done gracefully. I'd love for you to try it out and let me know what you think. After you do, shoot me an email to let me know what you think and what I can improve (bryan [at] featurezen.com). I'd love to hear from you!
Its a first shot at building something I think could grow into something people love. Let me know what you think!
