On Monday a week ago Mark and I locked ourselves in our flat here in Trento and geared up for a 2 day hackathon. We spent previous 3 months getting into Lean Methodology and doing (or at least trying to do) tons of customer development for our current project. The problem with customer development is that it sucks when what you really want to do is hack on things. I had a few of these discussions with other hackers at Techpeaks and we seemed to reach similar conclusions on that. So we decided to hack for 2 days and we built Openmic.
We’ve had an idea for Openmic for a few months. Voice is an incredible medium for transmitting ideas, moods and tons of subtle information that is lost when converted to text. Yet there’s little sound on the web. There’s Soundcloud, Spotify and Pandora but that’s about it. The web is silent. Some might say it’s for the better but we felt like there’s an opportunity to explore and see what happens. And so 40+ hours later the first version was out and we shared it with a few people at Techpeaks. Although we had a few use cases in mind, we left the product seem pretty open and generic - drop an image and annotate it using voice.
In the next few hours a few of our friends got back to us with a few funny images they annotated. A group of 10 people or so put together a collaborative birthday card for our buddy Ricardo. I used Openmic to give our friends’ startup feedback on their landing page.
We were absolutely stoked to see people doing all these things with Openmic and have them come back to us and ask for more features. So we figured we might as well keep going and spend the rest of the week on the project.
This was a week ago, and today Openmic is out. Give it a try and drop us a line. You should also subscribe to our newsletter - we talk about travels, hacks and how to combine these two.