As many of you know, I am involved with several websites including VOIS, which I am a co-founder of. Please hear me out this is not a shameless VOIS plug. I have never written about my involvement with VOIS on here before, but I feel that what happened to me last week is lesson we could all benefit from. As I said something pretty exciting happened to me recently and I wanted to share my experience in hopes of helping others achieve the same possible results.
Like other dreamers out there, I come up with new ideas for websites often. While many of them I feel are good ideas, they don’t always make the cut or become reality. There is no worse feeling then to see some other visionary bring that idea to life, and watch as this new site receives accolades. Recently I had one of those visions and decided to run with it rather than let it remain simply an idea. Being I put together VOIS, I knew how simple it would be to just post the project on our site and see if I could find someone to not only build the application, but also find someone to design it as well. Here is how my vision for a site called “Tweexchange.com” became a reality, soared to almost being one of the top 10,000 visited websites in the world all within one week, and for under $1000.
A couple of weeks ago there was a tremendous amount of hype regarding Ashton Kutcher and his race with CNNbrk (not owned by CNN at the time) to see who could get a million users to follow them on Twitter first. About the same time I had been daydreaming how awesome it would be to have a website to obtain a Twitter name that had already been taken. So I jotted down some notes on my iPhone and pretty much stopped there. After seeing the exposure CNN got for assuming the CNNbrk Twitter name (even though they claim that they didn’t exactly buy it, CNN claimed they had hired James Cox as a consultant and through some convoluted statement admitted that they had acquired his Twitter account) I quickly realized that Twitter had opened the door for anyone now to buy, sell, or “exchange” Twitter names as a consultant, and it would not be long thereafter that a forum for acquiring Twitter usernames would soon arise.
Feeling that someone would conceive a similar idea, I realized time was not on my side and I would have to act quickly if I was to be the first to create this forum or Twitter name exchange. Being I had access to hundreds of the world’s most talented designers and coders at my finger tips as a VOIS member and since posting the project was free, I knew what I had to do.
I immediately posted two projects. The first project was to make my Twitter app and a second project was for a designer to design the sites homepage and theme. Soon thereafter I received bids on both. I found a local coder in Florida whose bid was priced right and he seemed to know the Twitter api well. The site designer, a regular fixture on VOIS from England came up with the design. I awarded both projects and a few days later my site was ready for testing. That is right….within one week, and less than $1,000 I had completed a website now named Tweexchange.com with a little help from my Vois friends, that was ready for the masses. VOIS had worked great. After Tweexchange was launched, I was so thankful to fellow bloggers like Pete Cashmore at Mashable and Leena Rao at TechCrunch for picking up the story providing instant exposure to the site and making Tweexchange a household name, receiving tens of thousands of views around the world and several offers of interest, all with in a few within hours. Also I have to give a shout out to my friends at The Rackspace Cloud. The Mosso servers did not let me down despite the barrage of traffic.
Yesterday Tweexchange had a traffic ranking on alexa of 13,251 all since Friday or just three days! So for anyone who is sitting on an idea or moping around after being laid off, go post a project and see what becomes of it. You never know, for a few hundred dollars, you too can make your dream a reality!
p.s… more to come part 2 soon……
