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…

What we know is this:

• It starts at midday
• It takes 24 hours
• We’ll have food and drink, but no sleep
• We need computers
• The people involved are all on this twitter list

And, er, that’s it. Dave knows more but he’s keeping it under his hat. Doubtless we’ll be updating some kind of blog, whether it’s this one or elsewhere. We’ll keep you updated.

She may try to tell you that this was an environmentally responsible act, coming down hard on an outrageous waste of electricity, but I think she just fancied a mischievous act of revenge.

UPDATE : The screws and fuse have now been returned to Matt

CSA is about building a mutual relationship between food growers and food consumers so that the risks and responsibilities of food production are shared. There’s loads more info on this on the soil association site.

I joined the group because I’m a bit of a right on eco worrier, because I quite enjoy planting stuff and because I like eating tasty locally grown produce. Perhaps inevitably, I also volunteered to help with the techy side of the website. That meant getting Wordpress up and running so that they quickly had a web presence and then working on a customised template for them so that it looked good. White October have also kindly donated the small amount of hosting space required to host the site (thanks Dave).

A bit like the CSA concept, spending a bit of time doing some work for groups like this is mutually beneficial. The group gets a much better looking website than the standard (often shockingly bad) community group fare and I get to expand my skills and knowledge too – in this case I learnt all about how important it is that Wordpress templates deal properly with images which are too big. Righton!

The Melbourne-based strategist, known on YouTube as “Simontsmall” posted the clip in reaction to losing the account for the New Zealand vodka brand 42Below, to an unspecified London agency.

With all the gloom and doom in the news, it’s nice to be reminded that we lead the World in the creative industries.

Thanks to Nick Clement via Facebook.

t-mobile advert

At that point we had already clocked up over 20,000 views of the video and were incredibly pleased with its performance, but the featured spot on YouTube rocketed the numbers to 200,000 in under a day.

We’re now at around 330,000 views (including those on Vimeo) with over 50,000 people paying a visit to the supporting website from 142 countries.  The response from the public to the video has been a varied mix.  Certainly a lot of American teenagers took it very seriously being either moved to tears or furious at the implication that geeks need or deserve this sort of assistance!  But on the whole it seemed to make people laugh.  I’d recommend reading some of the 2,000 comments on YouTube if you enjoy a giggle.

We had great fun helping the film maker Will Savage put the video together and its success, which far exceeded our expectations and is certainly down to Will’s exceptional talent, has been really satisfying.  I’m still not entirely sure how Ed feels about his new found YouTube stardom, but he certainly gets a lot of recognition for his oustanding portrayal of a sorrowful geek in the video’s comments.  Maybe a fanclub awaits?…

It’s plausible this statement doesn’t apply to all recruitment companies but it is more than applicable to most of our daily, sometimes hourly, callers .  So many are the attempts to get put through to the ‘hirer’ in our case ‘Dave’ that we have to develop new tactics to intercept them to avoid being duped into divulging an email address or worse actually putting them through to Dave.

The point is, if we were ever to use a recruitment consultant, we wouldn’t use the one who rings up and pretends to be a job applicant, or the one who disguises their companies name by just giving us an obscure acronym.  We’d use the honest one who says ‘I’m a recruitment consultant’ and of course the one who doesn’t charge loads of money.  If that’s not you then don’t bother calling.  If it is you, then still don’t bother calling, like I said ‘We’ are hiring a Development Team Leader, not you.

Basically once you’ve registered for free, you can email Sandy with a message along the lines of ‘remind me to send Max a birthday card on 12th March, she’ll read it and send you a reminder email at the appropriate time the good thing is she can remind your friends too.