How we won ‘The Best Designed Product’ Award from The Prince’s Trust this week

Wow, I won an award this week!

Last year myself and a small group of enthusiastic consultants entered The Prince’s Trust Charity’s ‘Million Makers’ competition with the idea of developing a ‘private eBay’ application for companies to trade goods inside of private corporate networks. Unlike eBay the seller agrees to wave their proceeds and give them straight to charity.

The project manifested itself as Trusted Trade.

6 months later and guess what? We won an award this week at The Prince’s Trust Million Makers event. Here’s the blurb:

“Last night at the London & South East Prince’s Trust Million Makers final, Ed Laughrin and David Ferguson collected the ‘Best Designed Product’ award on behalf of the Shell Team.  Their Trusted Trade website, which enables people to donate goods for auction, raised a total of over £9,500 profit for the Trust.  Given the profit was made from £1,500 seed funding, that’s an incredible ROI of 633% in 6 months.”

Cool! It’s great to get some recognition for a pure charity project that took a lot of effort and time outside of ‘the day job’.

A big thanks to Edward Laughrin and David Ferguson for their commitment and drive on this project.

How I built TrustedTrade.org: The site is built on the excellent Ruby on Rails stack. MySQL database. Various plugins are used and it integrates with PayPal for payments.

Startup success is about ‘enduring agility’

Looking back at the technology startups and apps that survived and thrived in 2009 it struck me that the companies doing well 1-2 years into their launch are the ones that were really the most agile and continued to evolve and integrate with continuous and insatiable enthusiasm.

2009 was all about integrating your platform with the big networks and technologies - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, iPhone, etc. But success for many startups was not about the feature list they had when they launched, but how much they keep adapting after that. The winners clearly had a kind of ‘enduring agility’.

The launch of a new app, web service or startup is clearly just the beginning of a long fight to get to that first and second round of funding. But the bottom line is it takes endurance for a startup to keep adapting and coming back over and over again with increasingly tuned product features. You need time, money and and a team with plenty of gutsy enthusiasm.

Think about the dozens of new launches that hit the pages of TechCrunch and VentureBeat on a daily basis. There is plenty of choice for almost any kind of web service or app you need. But whether your talking about photo apps, travel apps, news apps, or social media apps, it’s difficult to really ‘seperate the men from the boys’ until you start using the service and really understand how it meets your needs as the customer.

Even the best app on day 1 is going to fall short of customer’s expectations simply because it’s new (probably a beta launch) and may not have simply had that much customer exposure during testing. The startups that realise the launch is only the starting line, are the ones that are primed to keep running and keep iterating - release after release.

So in a world flooded with hundreds of overnight successes and failures, let’s just say the ‘new success’ is all about consideration, iteration and good old fashioned perspiration.