Sometimes baby chicks just need to incubate.

As you can probably tell, my brother and I took most of the past five months off from serious Simpleweight development. We made sure to continue using simpleweight in some capacity or another. We prepared a blog post or two (some are still unpublished waiting for future dates). We made sure simpleweight was working and continued to provide personalized service to our subscribers, but we delayed some feature development.

Like newborns learning how to adjust their own body temperature right after birth, we wanted simpleweight to incubate.

By stepping away for the summer and fall, we were able to gain some perspective and motivation. Not to mention, we were also able to enjoy the time off for play time with families, running a triathlon – great job Ryan, bring a new baby into the world – that’s why Scott is tired, and generally just concentrate on fun and other work.

Funny thing about stepping away. When you come back to a passion that you set aside to incubate. One gains a greater understanding of the whole picture. Our huge simpleweight to do feature list we had is not as huge.

We can re-evaluate:

• Do you really need this new feature we’re planning?
• Is this the best way to complete that task?
• Is this getting real with weight management?
• Our we meeting our stated goals and mission?

Let’s step back: What’s our Philosophy?

Our philosophy is to make weight management so simple you’ll actually do it. Food In = Food Out.

Funny thing about newborns. They just seem to know how to moderate their temperature and know how to eat and grow. Same thing with chicks in an incubator. They get out of the incubator and then grow and grow with a beauty a child adores. Natural organic healthy moderated growth.

That’s our plan. Take our new perspective and follow the natural organic moderated growth pattern of simpleweight. We’ll go where the simpleweight users take us.

So, What’s next?

• We’re (I should say Ryan is) migrating Simpleweight to the latest Rails 2.0 release. We’re making some bug fixes and stabilizing some internals.
• After we iron out these technical details, We’re going to add some new features we’ve been promising such as implementing the Simple Weight Club, Simpleweight Workouts, Forums, and User Interface changes. (One at a time of course, it’s much better and easier to do it the slow weigh.)

Stay Tuned for more information on our pending release.

Remember, If there is one thing we can do to help you achieve your weight management goals, tell us, and we’ll do our best to help you!

Let us know what you think should be next for Simpleweight?

Photo Credit: Watching the Hatching via Flickr, by Troy B Thompson

Back stage, the building of Simpleweight.com. Why did we build Simpleweight?

With any project or goal, we personally like to define our own success. Yes, we are human, and of course we value other people’s opinion, but we really try to rely on our own internal value system.

Consequently, before we started creating simpleweight, we defined how we would know our project was successful. If you look at our pricing structure (only $18/year), you already know we’re not out to make a fortune. In fact if you take into account our referral system ($5 per referral), you are certain we’re not going to make a fortune!

So you ask, why did we build simpleweight.com? Here are our goals for success:

• We learn about technologies that are new to at least one of us. Such as:
  • Ruby on Rails
  • mySQL
  • Linux
  • Apache / Mongrel
  • AJAX
• We deploy Simpleweight to the public and generate 10 hits a day.
• We learn something (anything) from our simple weight project.

We decided that if that’s all we got, we’d be happy.

May 2007 editor update: If you are reading this post, we have achieved our first level of success; we’re happy.

But then we asked – what would make us even happier?

• We help ourselves maintain our own goal weight by using simpleweight.
• We help our friends and family maintain their own goal weight by getting them to use simpleweight.
• We learn about Entrepreneurship.
• We learn about small-team self-development and self-marketing of web applications to the general public.
• Simpleweight revenues cover it’s expenses. In other words, we break even and our wives don’t kill us for shelling out money every month to maintain simpleweight!

June 2007 editor update: We’re working on achieving these success goals. Please join now and refer your friends to help us achieve the next level of simpleweight success: happier .

Well all that certainly would be great… but what would make launching simpleweight fantastic?

• Help large numbers of total strangers maintain their own goal weights by getting them to use simpleweight.com.
• Create a profitable business that provides a good side income.
• Provide new features that take the stigma out of maintaining a happy and healthy diet
• Learn the complexities of maintaining High Traffic, 24×7 Public Websites.

Now that would be fantastic!

Ok, now that we’re fantastic, let’s push the envelope and make Simpleweight ecstatic:

• We help make a dent in lowering the Obesity and Overweight Population Levels around the world by getting users to use Simpleweight to manage their Food in = Food Out equation.
• Create a highly profitable business venture which gives us the maximum financial freedom and financial security to pick and choose what (if any) projects, jobs, and vocations we want to pursue at any time in the future.
  Note: Contact us now if you’d like to provide our financial freedom by purchasing simpleweight.

There you have it. We basically want to learn a lot and help everyone we can along the way. I hope you’ll join us for our journey as we try to meet some of these goals!

Sincerely,
Scott & Ryan – you’re Simpleweight proprietors, developers, and fellow users.

P.S. Please tell us if you think simpleweight accomplishes any of our goals or if you have goals we should add by leaving a comment or contacting us. Thanks and see you real soon.

This post is part of a series about the business and development of simpleweight.com. We continue to learn so much, and we want to share that learning with you.