A little glimpse at the development team

We decided to take a few pictures of the “office” we’ve been in the past few weeks. Its our parents’ basement with 4 computers set up with the loud hum of a dehumidifier slightly drowned out by music playing from poor quality computer speakers. But anyway, here are a few pictures I took today.

Here is Andrew working on the site:

Heres me in probably a 4 day old undershirt / mesh shorts combo giving a thumbs up:

Another shot of Andrew with our post-its wall in the backdrop:

The post its wall we started a few days ago. We decided to write an slap on the wall a post it of any accomplishment or completed task for the website. You might be able to read some of them. You should note that the purples out weight the oranges. Mine are in purple

Finally we have the three computers we’ve been working on. That crummy CRT monitor is what I make all the images with, so enjoy those:

Thats about it for now. We might (but probably wont) take more of these. Come back for the next update, we’re drawing closer to the release of Spotsie.com, we only have a few more landlord features to add in.

Best,
Mike

We’ve added a whole bunch of features

We can pretty much see the launch date for the site. Over the past couple weeks we’ve added a lot of user features like saving places, friends, and contacting landlords. We’ve dressed up the property pages, and got started on the tour and learn sections of the site.

Over the next week or so, we’ll be concentrating on developing a dashboard for users, finishing up the Browse Property page and search features, cleaning up some of the little details on the site, and getting started on the landlord Property Manager and Reporting tools. That should be the last leg of the race, so you can anticipate a beta release of the site sometime around the middle to end of August.

Best,
Mike

What’s the Game Plan?

Right now, we’re adding some of the last major features that we wanted to include with the site. We’re working on getting users’ profile pages up and setting up a property manager for landlords to edit the properties that they’ve listed. That will probably be the most time consuming part of the process.

We’ve scheduled to get the site up and running for a beta release in 2 weeks, so sometime in the beginning of August. From there we’ll be contacting landlords in the Bethlehem area to start adding their properties and getting them excited and interested in the (free) service we’re offering.

From there, once we hopefully get a lot of listings for Lehigh University, we’ll start advertising it to students there. Lehigh will be the only school we’re going after right away, so if it works there, we’ll try to get it to more schools. We’re open to suggestions about getting landlords to use the site.

Throughout the next few weeks you can expect more notes about our development process.

Best,
Mike

Welcome to the Spotsie Blog!

We set this blog up during the development stage of Spotsie.com to track thoughts on problems and design issues that we’ve overcome. Later on, we’ll post info on updates to the site and upcoming features that we add. Read it to find out more about the developers behind this little site. Ciao!

Best,
Mike