Wow, I read it twice. Things I thought about when reading that page:
1) The OP hasn't a clue about market research. There is scale, there is volume, and there is price.
2) Anytime there is a massive lack of standards, there is a huge complexity play. This was a surprise?
3) Two pivots that were not mentioned, really high end home theater setups, and custom remote construction framework.
4) Vision limited by an individual's capabilities. Its good to know what you can and cannot pull off but its important to be able to see a bigger picture so that if you could find someone who could do 'x' (missing piece) it would be a better play.
I wonder sometimes about the urge to move to a bigger thing than the current thing. The post on Entreporn touched on this as well.
Oh and I got to see a spam comment in HN comments, that was interesting.
Chuck, thanks for the comments. At the time I was enthralled by the possibilities of the iPad and wanted to hack together something that was both useful for me and others. I intended it as a side project (instead of a full blown startup).
I don't regret doing it and I'm happy that I spent that month exploring (and brushing up on my Delphi skills!). I'm thinking about open sourcing the project but would need to clean it up some. It's all spaghetti right now.
Oh, and would love to get your feedback on my next project :-)
(And yea, that spam thing at the bottom is kinda lame)
It is a fabulous skill to be able to put together a fairly complete prototype in a month, it does let you start the process of analyzing an opportunity. My rule is that a working prototype is worth a thousand power point slides :-). Use what ever tools you are comfortable with.
That being said, I understand that you were not thinking of this as a 'career' so much as a cool project. In your write up you got to the first stage which was you had pinned down some of the technical unknowns (complexity mostly) and had some market feedback (moderate response). The next chapter would have been should be phase 2 which is "How can I make it simpler?" and "Given the limited appeal, what size market would I need to make it worth my time?" The alternative for a lot of folks is the Harmony One [1] which is $250 list / $150 street so that sets some boundaries around price and acceptance.
The first part of the question is an engineering exercise, brainstorming ways to simplify the who pipeline. The second part is a finance exercise, you have a 'day job' you make a salary and have benefits, vacation, etc etc. Take the total of what you'd "earn" (both tangible and intangible) as the 'don't do it' value of your time, vs your market research in terms of units sold vs price per unit as your 'return on investment' for doing it. Then factor in the uncertainty of your data with your 'future' return and you no longer have to ask whether or not your baby is ugly, you can ask "Is it worth my time to bring this one to term?"
Ideas that are well executed have a way of paying for themselves. You are about half way to something I could use as an operations guy, an iPad app which provides a framework for showing 'dashboards.' Web pages sort of do this but something designed to be a control console using the iPad's gesture capability would be much more powerful.
1) The OP hasn't a clue about market research. There is scale, there is volume, and there is price.
2) Anytime there is a massive lack of standards, there is a huge complexity play. This was a surprise?
3) Two pivots that were not mentioned, really high end home theater setups, and custom remote construction framework.
4) Vision limited by an individual's capabilities. Its good to know what you can and cannot pull off but its important to be able to see a bigger picture so that if you could find someone who could do 'x' (missing piece) it would be a better play.
I wonder sometimes about the urge to move to a bigger thing than the current thing. The post on Entreporn touched on this as well.
Oh and I got to see a spam comment in HN comments, that was interesting.