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It is with some sadness that I’m taking the SLBounty.com site down. It is even harder to acknowledge that the service failed after all the effort that went into creating it. However, I learnt much from this experience and thought it worthy of at least one post.
If you wish to know more about what SLBounty.com was, how it looked, and what it tried to do, you should read A tour of SLBounty before continuing.
I think we got much right, a few things wrong, but most important of all we made one fatal mistake.
The good
- For a while SLBounty.com was the first Google result when searching for “Earn Lindens”.
- SNOOPYBrown Zamboni, then of Electric Sheep, requesting Daisy Daisy avatar.
- Reaching a 100+ registered users.
- Receiving an offer to purchase the site.
The bad
- The home page was slow to load at times.
- The workflow for reaching an agreement was too complicated.
- Ridiculous password policy for users.
The mistake
I think the biggest mistake we made was trying to formalise what is essentially an interactive and iterative process. In general the process for getting custom work done isn’t as procedural as specifying what you want, reviewing tenders for it, and then selecting a supplier. There are too many subtleties that can’t be coded for. Most people have some vague idea of what they want made, but struggle to specify all the details up front. Also, the exchange of money for creative work depends very much on the relationship. What works for one client may not work for another at all. In short I believe we delivered the wrong service. A general job advertising board may have been a better option.
Lessons learnt
- Making a site work isn’t good enough. It needs to work well!
- Selling is vital. The hard work starts after the site has been created.
- There is always at least one user of a site that finds every flaw. (Thank you!)
- Do everything you can to assist your users, especially the early adopters.
- Developing internal web applications is much easier than public facing ones.
- Development takes much longer than you imagine.
- ASP.Net makes web coding easy, doing it well though is a different story.
- Make the site as easy as possible to use. E.g. having a password policy that requires lowercase, uppercase, numeric, and symbolic characters is not friendly.
- Make sure you have website usage statistics. How else can you know what is working and what isn’t?
- I could list more, but these are the first to spring to mind.
Conclusion
Developing SLBounty.com was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Thank you to everyone who registered and sorry it didn’t work out.
