Bitfile

This took a whole lot longer than I expected it would!

Juggling the development and testing work with existing client commitments was hard. I got basically nothing done on it for the entire month of February as a result (other than gathering 35 early-interest signups).

March went a little better, but it's only really in the last 3 weeks that I've been able to pull the last few pieces together. I ended up going into "must ship" mode last week, putting more and more things on the roadmap for after the launch (instead of delaying the launch any further).

There were definitely one or two periods of massive procrastination on this. Mostly, I kept thinking about all the things that this platform could one day become, then watched my excitement turn into dread at realizing how much work that would entail (and what the failure would cost), so I'd end up just deciding to do nothing instead.

To be completely honest, I'm actually not happy with most of what went live today. I know for a fact I can do almost everything in the app a lot better. That said, the core features are present, they've been well-tested, and they're ready for battle.

The real work begins now. Providing the platform was only ever going to be a small % of the battle. The larger % is trying to convince my target market that they have products worth selling.

At this point I'd already developed most of the underlying plumbing: Sales engine, integration with dummy payment APIs, unit/feature testing, and the core dashboard components were all finished, but I had stalled on two features and real life caught up with me again.

I had initially planned to start gathering signups in the first week of January, but consulting work (that's paying 100% of the bills right now) took over my calendar and I had a few really stressful weeks. I finally decided that I had to go with what I've got, and spent a few hours in a hotel lounge working on the deployment.

I finally went live at 01:43am this morning, having taken the time to develop a teaser video (entirely in PowerPoint!), launched the software to serverless hosting, and queued up the next week's worth of implementation tasks.

This turned out to be quite an important breakfast with an old friend. We're on roughly similar tracks right now (runway, ideas, ambitions, and execution), and after a long chat with him I started realizing two very important things:

1. I actually want to build a vision-led company, surrounded by a small but effective team that's just as committed to the vision as I am, and

2. That's never going to happen if I don't work up the courage to finally take the risk, launch what I've got, and start working to bring about the change I want to see.

Today was the day I decided to run out of excuses for not doing the necessary work - come hell or high water.

After spending a few weeks looking at existing products, trademark and copyright law, legal precedents and other associated jargon, I settled on the brand I was going to use for this product: Bitfile.

It was initially going to be called "Zappy" (because it would be really fast to sell things), but that may have conflicted with an existing product in the market, so I decided to play it safe.

Got the trademark request lodged and accepted, domains purchased, and I taught myself enough Adobe Illustrator to hack together a decent-looking logo. This was the first time I polled a group of friends for feedback, and they helped me refine it into something that (I think) works quite well.

After thinking (and overthinking) about getting started with this, I finally took the plunge and did the first round of work. It involved setting up the project, along with sending out all the inquiries for the platforms, banking services, legal advice and other supporting information to make the dream work.