Turning Post to Product

Announcing oozled

The Beginning

In November 2013, I started compiling a list of a few of the books, apps and websites that I had saved in my bookmarks. I named the post “Resources” which at the time had just over 80 items.

Since then I’ve updated the post almost every month, with most of the now 200+ resources added within the past 30 days.

I’ve had tweets, emails and comments on the posts with people wanting their favourite products or their own products to the list.

At the time of writing Resources has had over 32,000 visits and over 700 recommendations. It was clear to me that this was something that people valued and wanted to be a part of, and more importantly contribute to.

Why

Collaboration within the tech community is something I’ve always been amazed by, people have huge amounts of energy and time that they are happy to give, for free, into ideas that they believe in. I think this could be one of them.

Who

I’ll be designing the app, and you can follow the progress over at my Dribbble profile.

I contacted my friend Ryan, who I’ve worked with on projects such as Tribal and Instate. To build the front and back end of the site. His attention to detail and passion will make this project a success.

The Plan

We are going to start building the first version (beta) this month and we’ll keep it super simple. A categorised web app oozing with resources, you’ll be able to browse the categories and subscribe to the ones that suit you. This will create your own feed, where you can check back for new items or use the generated RSS to have new items pushed to your inbox or favourite RSS reader.

We’ll also be opening up the site for submissions. The focus will always remain on quality, not quantity so to ensure this remains intact we will be curating the content ourselves. We have ideas on how we can build this out to the community but we want to get the first version out quickly and iterate and improve it over time.

Fin

That’s it. We will launching the first version in May. We’ve got a ton of extra features that we’re excited about but we’ll roll those out once we’ve got running.

We can’t wait to show you the first version of oozled. For more updates follow @teamoozled on Twitter.