Product Challenge: New product in 30 days

Discussions
#1

I have decided to build a new product and finish it in 30 days.

So here is the plan

  1. This would be a data related product (which tool isn’t?)
  2. Brand new UI
  3. Leverage reporting features from my existing product
  4. Package it and make it available by or before the end of 30 days

Launch
I am going to launch it on my current product website because:

  1. I don’t know what is the demand for this kind of product
  2. It complements and demonstrates lot of the usefulness of current product
  3. I don’t have to work on separate web property, marketing, SEO (the whole 9 yards).

Why

  1. I was planning on doing a case study for the reporting aspect of this product and realized that there is a real pain that it would solve if it had the proper UI for data intake and navigation. The main aspect of this product is around having good reports and dashboards and that is what caught my attention. I have seen couple of products and reporting in them is not great in my opinion.

What is it?
I don’t want to reveal the whole product but I plan to share screenshots very soon.

Update 1: 4/29/2017
Rather than design the data UI, I thought of taking a short cut and finish the reporting aspects of it. As I said the UI is around 50% of the work and dashboards are the other 50%. I found couple of data samples on the internet and so downloaded them and added few missing columns to it. One aspect of the UI is to generate this file so it helps to start backwards. Wrote a simple transformation script in PHP that parses this data and adds additional columns to it. Next steps would be to get it loaded into the database.

3 Likes
#2

Nice. All the best!! I’m working on a new project as well and 30 days seems like a good challenge, although it’ll be really tight for me.

I’ll be looking forward to your updates and share mine as well.

We should do these kinds of challenges more often. Couple of times a year at least .

#3

I was kind of shy doing this but I think it is a good idea. Looking forward to see your updates as well.

All the best

#4

OK, great. Why did you post it here? Public accountability?

#5

@rfctr, I think so. I don’t know if it adds value to be on a blog by itself so I thought this would be a better place.

#6

This is a fantastic exercise that builds confidence for future projects.

I just finished a 30 day challenge for myself where I created a tool I thought would be useful for myself. It turned out to be harder than I thought to make a live previewing developer tool but was a good learning experience.

#7

Finally, today is the day I make this new product available

http://www.infocaptor.com/log-analyzer-logtiger

I know it did not meet the 30 day challenge due to kids, vacation and current product dev and support.

Product: LogTiger - Log file analyzer

I know there are plenty of log analyzers but there was a motivation behind building another one. First I wanted to build something that did not take several months or years. This can happen only if it depended on the current product in some way. InfoCaptor being a dashboard and reporting tool, all it needed was data. So building a log file anlayzer turned out to be a good candidate as there is plenty of data in the logs. This also provided a venue to demonstrate the dashboarding feature of infocaptor which are pretty good compared to what is available in the market.

The complete product from end to end took under 30 days (25 actually) but I couldn’t allocate them all at once. It is available only for windows right now and here is the link

http://www.infocaptor.com/log-analyzer-logtiger

It supports Apache combined log format. We will make Njinx and other formats available very soon (provided there is a market for this)