The Difference Between Having an Idea and Bringing a Dream to Fruition
The year was 1993 and I had just finished my 10th class exams. A glossy auto magazine with a lovely picture of the then-new W124 Mercedes E-Class caught my eye. Amidst the (mostly) glowing praise for the car, the automotive journalist talked about how any suspension system could either be tuned for comfort or sporty handling, not really for both (back in the day when even expensive cars had steel springs). In my mind I dreamed up this idea of a suspension system that could look ahead at the upcoming road surface with sensors and adjust the suspension to cater exactly to the road surface (potholes as well as bumps), knowing the wheelbase of the car,the speed at which it was travelling, it’s steering angle etc.
The 2018 Audi A8 has just such a suspension…
It took a multi-billion dollar conglomerate hundreds of millions of dollars spent over more than two decades to realize a school boy’s idea.
That’s the gap between having an idea and bringing a dream to fruition.
Countless hours spent researching, designing, testing and perfecting systems and sub-systems to achieve the end-goal.
We here at Plowns are in the happy position of having brought our dream of encouraging creativity in children to fruition. Behind the simple concept and interface lie thousands of man-hours of sweating the details, working out the kinks, trying this, that and the other and refining, refining, refining… and we are still in the early stages of this journey!
I personally have had 7-day work weeks for the past 1.5 years, holidays have been “down-time” only in name, and for over a year there was nobody I could “delegate” to. I have been sysadmin, DB admin, developer, designer, architect, QA, graphic artist (long live Gimp!) and have played many, many other roles along the way, but the enthusiasm hasn’t waned a bit! All this time Plowns has been a 24x7 service, with just one small outage.
Being a startup, changes are continous as we learn, improve and adapt — both our thinking and the product. It is not uncommon to have to change many aspects of the fundamental design of the Plowns backend every 3–4 weeks in response to changing needs, without breaking anything, transforming all the old stuff into the new stuff, all the while running a live product with no user-visible issues and a tiny team. The journey has been as challenging as it has been rewarding.
Unlike the automotive industry, being a startup we have to change things around in weeks, not years. As we work towards making Plowns the platform for storing, sharing, highlighting and discovering the creativity of children, we will spend tens of thousands more man-hours (now with a bigger team!) researching, designing, building, testing and refining each and every aspect of the platform, the product idea and the UX.
Looking forward to it!
