The Qajack Shower Moment

If it’s good enough for Will Ferrel with his viral smash (is that technically an epidemic?), The Landlord, it’s good enough for me.

This morning I enlisted the help of my 3 year old daughter to help create an intro video for Qajack.

She had to wear a post-it saying: Qajack {Ka-Jack} is gambling with…. She had just used the phrase ‘I’m going to chase down that bong’ at least that’s what it sounded like, so I felt vindicated not upping her pocket money and getting her to participate for free. I mean that’s what Web2.0 is all about?

Qajack has become the thing we think about last thing at night and first thing in the morning. It has started to consume, David, myself and Daniel. We’re a couple of weeks away from private beta and already it’s useful to reflect on the processes involved in it’s creation thus far.

We adopted the 37Signals Getting Real mantra, iterate, iterate, iterate. Qajack has been a 9 month project so far and it’s changed from the signed off templates, with later additions; the users activity feed becomming the hub of the site, the ability to comment on Questions you are participating in. Working out a strategy to win Jacks and perhaps most stereotypically start-upish, decide on the business model!

Daniel claims it came to him in the shower. David called me to say ‘have you read Daniel’s email yet?’, he never calls unless it is exciting, I had thought myself down a pro-version cul-de-sac.

Without revealing too much, because we got to maintain interest for the big launch and hopefully get some traction on Techcrunch by giving them the heads up, it’s ad-based, but it takes contextual advertising to a whole other level, by making the advertising part of the game play.

The problem most start-ups have, that are ad-based is ‘why will people click on the ads?’, sure make it contextual, tick, make it seemlessly fit with the user experience, tick (unless you’re Facebook), make people want to engage with an ad because it will reward them… tick, tick, create a community, which like a search engine is predicated on people looking for answers and thus already in a mind set to engage and explore, tick, tick, A+ straight to Oxbridge for some punting.

I began to approach seed stage financing in April, with hindsight, much too early in the developmental process and since then Qajack has morphed and we have learned from it. Funny money is no longer swishing about in VC land. But strangely that fact makes me think we’re more likely to find the money we need to scale and open up beyond beta. So come January I’ll be handing round the hat and bellowing the application’s unofficial tagline; Play with what you know to all who will listen.

Without irony and just a touch of arrogance, we got something special here.

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