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.
October 15th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Very cool idea. Need a sprintf on the $1.0 items yet, but it seems functional. Wait… wasn’t it supposed to be “Below” a buck? I didn’t think it was lessthanorequaltoabuck.com -
Cool having a timeline of how something comes together for you guys. I’m sure you do a bit of tweaking later, but POC should always be quick like this.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
haha very clever, doesn’t seem practical!
October 16th, 2007 at 7:15 am
[...] Today we are launching a new site called Below A Buck. Dave kept a log of our conversations and how the site was built over on his [...]
October 16th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Very nice post, good insight. 15 days on design is a bit, but either way it still looks good. Good turn around time from idea to code though.
Just through a quick search though I am getting expired auctions. And the 1.00 auctions seems odd. Will be interesting to see stats if you or shoe post them after a while on how the site has done (for the amount of time put in).
October 16th, 2007 at 7:59 am
[...] Today we are launching a new site called Below A Buck. Dave kept a log of our conversations and how the site was built over on his [...]
October 16th, 2007 at 8:58 am
i wish i could realize so quickly all the ideas i have…
October 16th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Surprised that you waited so long to reg the domain. Ever had a domain swiped from underneath you by domain tasters?
October 16th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Interesting to see how you and Shoe keep the ideas flowing from germination to full bloom. How much of the coding usually gets done by you versus hiring programmers? You guys seem to favor the data feed “flavor” of sites, any particular reason? Great post! I think a lot of us are generally interested in how you guys seem to come up with and execute so many original ideas.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Tim, I’ve written every line of code for every site we’ve done. We outsource the design and CSS.
I’m sure that will change in the future, but for now I prefer to do it myself.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
it’s nice to see once again that difference between successful and other people is in laziness or lack of it. most of the guys will wage pros and cons for months and then spend few more months on choosing alternative approaches for coding, presentation etc ..not because they are smart but because they are lazy or simply “scared” of going into action
.. it would be great to see another post on how you marketed this site (beside posts on this and shoemoney’s blog of course)
October 16th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I like the casual SMG brainstorming process. Essentially Shoe pitched you a quickie site idea and within 3 hours belowabuck.com was born. That even includes 2 hours of drinks.
Neat concept and I can see a lot of bargain hunters frequenting the site.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Well, we should take in consideration that making a website for you guys is like changing a shoe (by now). I am still learning and there are many things I really don’t understand.
October 24th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
[...] I got the idea from Shoemoney and his Below a Buck site, but he lags. Took him 2 1/2 weeks, took us a day. Just kidding, I love shoe and his blog is an inspiration. [...]
October 25th, 2007 at 5:29 am
[...] Part of my inspiration for this decision came from Jeremy Shoemaker - a.k.a. Shoemoney - from a blog entry where he happened to mention this post. [...]
November 6th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Thank you for sharing this David. Very inspiring!
So much so, that I went ahead and created a similar post outlining How a site gets done at SPI.
I love your Extreme Programming style
November 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
[...] at Dave “Dillsmack” Dellanave’s blog, Dillsmack goes through their process of building the site. It is pretty unreal how fast he and [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
[...] Posted in: My Point Of View So yesterday I was reading Shoemoney’s “review of 2007″ and I saw that he had released a site called belowabuck.com and his partner had written a post about the process of making the site. [...]