A quick research showed that in western countries roughly 10-14% of the households move to a new home every year. With for example more or less 40M households in Germany, 26M in the UK, 115M in the USA, 3.5M in Switzerland, etc, and given the fact that more and more people are using the internet to search for a new home, that gives quite a few potential users for this new service. Quite a few. And since our service would also cover holiday rentals, the potential is even much bigger.
It was time to get serious about it.
So I got Cris and Tom involved. The three of us had been working together for years on various (ad)ventures, and I wanted to get their opinions before going further. As usual, we held our meeting at our local italian restaurant. Even before the tiramisu arrived for dessert, the case was clear: we'd give it a go. Not only a try, but a real go. Great! After dessert, Cris went back to take care of our real-world business, allowing Tom and I to spend more time on this new project.
Since my coding-skills had been frozen for eternity about 10 years ago (Perl, FastCGI, etc. - still nice, but not trendy anymore), I contacted our long-time hacker-buddies Alex and Stefan from Inventage to check whether they'd be ready to join and sail along that bumpy road with us (try to picture that!). It didn't even take a trip to the Italian to convince them. Their company would allocate us some resources and develop our new baby in true partnership fashion. Excellent! That's how we met Nico, our new favorite code-geek. It would be mostly him and Alex who would be involved with the coding of the application itself, with sporadic help from other people at Inventage.
The team started to take shape!
But then, it became clear we needed some good design for our project. Our early mock-ups were good examples of 'design-by-techies': as sexy as office cubicles seen from above. Alex quickly suggested to meet Michael and Michael (aka Mike), the creative guys from Bricks & Wide, which were already working with Inventage on customer-projects. Again, it didn't take long to get them onboard. And to round it up, they brought Peter (aka Pesche) from Gridonic. While the M&M's would take care of all graphical aspects, Pesche would translate the results into code, passing it to Nico for integration into the application.
Now, that's what I call a team! We had a very nice setup and things started to move for real...
And yep, I'll show you all these faces in a later post.
to be continued...
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