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Screen shot of Reveille
A few weeks back we introduced Reveille as a slick new way to tie your Backpack Calendar to Backpack Reminders. Today we’re proud to say that Reveille is now available for anyone to check out.
Only 85 Days…Part time mind you
We built this fairly simplistic, but extremely useful application in 85 days while maintaining our current full time jobs, keeping our wives happy, spending time with our kids and helping with homework, serving at church, etc. So, basically while we were living our normalish lives, we whipped this product out in our spare time.
How we 4HWW’d and Got Real with Reveille
As a “side” project, we had to make the most of our time and efforts. We’re avid followers of 37signals and Tim Ferris so we applied many liberal doses of Getting Real and 4HWW to Reveille. The end result of all the minimalist effort is that Reveille does basically one thing, it could do more, we’d like it to do much, much more, but for the time being it simply does this one thing: Reveille automatically creates reminders for you based on your calendar items.
We’re bootstrapping the project so we are very picky about what we actually spend money on. We actually developed Reveille on a PC turned server in DL’s basement. We purchased a slice from Slicehost to run our production site on. We used Basecamp to help us manage the project so we could easily see what was left to do and make judgment calls as to the importance of those tasks. We took advice from Guy Kawasaki and Dharmesh Shah and we tried to release early and send out a “crappy version 1.0”. Hopefully we succeeded because it was really hard to release it before we felt ready. To provide great service from the start, we’re using Get Satisfaction for our help and support platform.
What took us so long?
Quite honestly, we probably sat on a “good enough” version of Reveille for a couple of weeks, but we were finding little bugs, and sometimes big bugs, that just “had” to be fixed. Don’t worry though…Reveille still “shipped” with a few imperfections. So give Reveille a try and see if you can find them. When you do, shoot over to our Get Satisfaction site and tell us all about it. If you like Reveille and find it useful, use the same Get Satisfaction site to tell us that too. Oh..one more thing, do us a favor and tell all your friends about Reveille.
