A lot of people have asked Shoemoney and I what our process is for building things. Usually these are the same people who have been in the planning stages of their idea for the past 2-3 years. They wonder if we draw up a sketch of how things are going to look, or if we write a specification out before starting development. This is how a recent site build came together.

9/27/07 11:00pm:

Shoemoney
ok so i got a idea its a 30 second idea
10:54
» belowabuck.com
10:54
» people can search and it returns ebay auctions under $1
10:54
» from time ending
10:54
David
hehe thats kinda cool
10:54
Shoemoney
so u go there and are like “headphones”
10:55
» boom results for headphones under 1$
10:55
David
an ebay affil site
10:55
Shoemoney
yea

9/27/07 11:14pm:

Grab a similar piece of code and start retrieving eBay items that are <$1. First concern is to see how many get turned out. Things have to take a different direction if its 30 or 3M.

9/27/07 11:23pm:

OK, getting good data now lets refine it a little more. Since the eBay API won’t allow a search on only criteria, without a keyword, we’ll need to grab a bunch of different result sets and then group them together.

9/27/07 11:40pm:

Got enough data to produce good results. Pause to go out for drinks.

9/28/07 1:30pm:

Registered domain, configured apache, moved code from development site to live area.

9/28/07 2:00pm:

Send off Skitch layout to designers and wait patiently.

10/15/07 11:30am:

Finally have design/layout/CSS in hand. Integrate code into design.

10/15/07 1:00pm:

Finishing touches. Site is done.

So as you can see, we spend most of our time waiting around for other people. Its not uncommon for us to have 2-3 projects waiting for someone to finish a bit we need. And there you have BelowaBuck.com.

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