At 12:00 on Thursday 26 November 09, an auction was posted on eBay listing a business for sale that hadn’t even been conceived yet. At the same time, the White October team along with our friends from Nonsense and Hutchhouse sat down together in a Soho basement and were told that they had 24 hours to brainstorm, brand, build and launch this new business.
This was an experiment that we had decided to undertake after a “what if…” conversation in the pub between myself and Robbie Greatrex of Nonsense. We had no idea what would happen, but were confident that if we put our team of high calibre people in a room together for 24 hours, something impressive would be sure to emerge on the other side.
The day was documented on www.24hour-startup.com with a live video stream playing constantly on the home page. Visitors to the site saw us gather around, debate ideas, vote for our favourites, plan our development, create a brand, conceive a marketing strategy, eat pizza and cake, pull our hair out, high five, and in the case of Ben, Creative Director of Hutchhouse, sleep.
News spread quickly on Twitter with so many people talking about our venture, the term “24hourstartup” was one of the most popular words being tweeted about in the UK.
One of many technical meetings
The idea that we settled on (2 hours into the 24) was a website that allowed customers to search for products based on a colour. The site would take product feeds from affiliate schemes and analyse the text and images to extract colour data for each project to allow them to be searched by colour.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was the image analysis to determine colours. It was with only a few hours to go, and after about 20 hours of non-stop work by Rich, that we finally got this working and plugged into our test site.
Finally, after 24 hours of hard work and collaboration, at 11:59 on 27th of November 2009, we switched on our finished site, DrHue.com (do you see what we’ve done there?!) for the World to see, while we left to celebrate in the pub.
I’m incredibly proud of what me managed to come up with in such a short time : a fully functional and viable business, brilliant in its simplicity. At the time of writing the business is up to $510 on eBay, which is pleasing to see. But the result of the auction is not really what this has all been about : it was an opportunity for us to put ourselves to the test, to be ambitious and daring, and give our customers and others around the World an intimate insight into how we work as well as what we’re capable of.
Would we do it again?… we’ll get back to you on that once we’ve caught up on a bit more sleep…