Road to Vaporware

Posted August 28, 2014 by Dan Moore in Startups

Have you ever sat with a couple of your friends talking about ideas and how you can make things better, then have the realization, "We can do this!" That was the start for vaporware. After that conversation, it took four of us only one week to start the company.

As part of the first Vaporware meeting, I bought everyone Eric Reis' book "The Lean Startup" and told them this was our bible. We started using it on our own products, launching Drafts to early adopters right away. Even when our company started to change, we continued to use the lean process.

We started Vaporware as a Managed Cloud Hosting Provider. It wasn't tough to chose our name. We wanted a challenge. Everyone in our industry knows what vaporware means - we wanted to defy that.

In four months, we came up with a prototype for a lean cloud model. But once we got to the funding stage, we realized this was not the arena we wanted to be in. We sat down and had a conversation about where to go from there.

After that conversation, two of us emerged. Both Jeff and I have software development expertise. We started working on some projects internally that excited us. But we were beat to market by another company on one of our ideas and ultimately decided not to pursue it. And the other idea is on our back burner. We still have future plans to create a tool for our clients, to streamline our work with them.

In April 2013, I reached out to Brooks Bell to talk to her about doing business as a startup in Raleigh. She suggested that I get involved with HUB Raleigh (now HQ). We joined and met Justin Beard, the Genius and Founder behind SnapYeti.

Justin had a great idea for a social photo marketplace where companies created contests, users submitted and ranked images, and the highest rankings won prizes. (Watch out for our next blog post where will talk about how this partnership grew!) With an extremely small budget and 200 hours of work, we launched a prototype rails application within 3 months. And just recently, SnapYeti was accepted into The Startup Factory's accelerator program.

After working on SnapYeti, we discovered that we love this line of work and the passion that comes from working with startups. Our expertise lies in creating applications from scratch. I specialize in product, APIs, and algorithms. Jeff specializes on the user experience (UI/UX) and SQL optimization.

If you think that your company is in need of a custom application, don't hesitate to contact us (hello@vaporware.net). Or you can visit me during my office hours at HQ Raleigh (310 South Harrington Street) every Thursday from 3 pm to 4 pm.

Vaporware

Related Insights