Chris came to us with a huge and innovative idea, but a limited budget. He wanted to create a platform for designers to help them decide over their proposals -designers create several proposals for every chosen design-, something he couldn't find a tool for.
If the budget in every project is important, here it was crucial to succeed. We worked out an iterative process which, still between the limits of his credit, allowed his project to came to life soon, enabling him to generating income or, if wanted, present it to investors.
When working this type of projects, first step is to define the core of it: the basic idea and the basic players. And for the very big part of the projects, doing so means to differentiate between what would be nice to have, which we can call "important", from what is required for it to work, which we call "needed".
First iterations of work will be aimed to get the "needed" working. If you plan to spend much time working what is needed, you have probably done a bad job defining: the core idea should be working fairly soon, even if that means rougher and rustier than desired.
And that is also the beauty of the iterative process, you start to see your project forming way before it's finished, which allows you to make a reality check. You can get rid of those planned things that weren't so important after all, and add instead things that you noticed crucial when testing the first stages of the project.
In any case, the development of Desinion was fairly smooth, and its success even more. In the very first weeks after publishing, and with almost no marketing whatsoever, the website had already a couple thousands of visitors, people were starting to sign up and other websites to talk about it.
After this first successful run, a few months ago, Chris and us starting to work on some new cool stuff for the website, which has already seen light this February.