Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

For those of you who don’t know, Wubud is my latest startup - which has attracted attention recently from some early adopters and bloggers. I was going to provide an update anyway, so this post isn’t in response to TechCrunch or any other blog. It’s a result of people asking for an update on Twitter.

It’s late. No. It’s very late. But all with good reason - I’m happy with our decision to hold off on ‘going ugly early’ for the sake of getting something out there.

Why we haven’t launched yet

We decided to outsource the entire development of our mobile application (not the design) to a company based in Hong Kong. For numerous reasons, it didn’t work out. In mid 2009 we had an application that worked well on a Nokia N95, but when we had the code reviewed by independent experts we realized it wasn’t easily portable to all other devices. It’s important to have our application work on more than 80% of all devices to help with mass adoption, so this reason alone was good enough to scrap everything and start from scratch. Some of our competitors have compelling iPhone applications, but that’s a small segment of the overall potential market.

We now have a team working hard on building a scalable product that is easily ported to all devices and it’s easily internationalized/localized to help with mass adoption globally. Localising a product is more than changing the language – it’s about providing local benefits and content.

As more location based social networks came to the market over the past 12 months, we continued to learn from what they do well, what they don’t do well and what they don’t do at all. Thanks to new companies coming to market, our knowledge about the benefits people look for has improved and as a result, we recently modified some of the product design and integrated more benefits.

Am I happy that we’re late to the game? Absolutely YES! We’re better placed than ever before as it’s still very early to market with location based services and the market continues to be educated by our competitors and other providers in this space. We’d rather be good second-movers than a failed pioneer.

When can you get your hands on Wubud?

I say this with bated breath, but we hope to have an alpha version by the end of January 2010. We’ll invite a small number of users to help us identify improvements so we can improve it further for our beta release (hopefully in February 2010).

What is go ugly early?

Go ugly early is a term used to describe an early product launch, even though it’s not designed exactly how you would like. The idea is to get ‘something’ out to the market in order to solicit early feedback, following up with small iterations to further improve the product based on customer feedback.

We’ve decided to go fashionably late - so fingers crossed…