I read a great article this morning about Evan Williams, the founder of blogger.
The article talks about Evan’s ability to take a simple idea and turn it into a useful product. He did that with blogger, which in turn started the whole blogging phenomenon. And he did it again with Twitter, which is starting to gather a huge user-base.
Of course, every time I read something like this, Net-at-hand is in my head the entire time I am reading it. I think about things I could do differently or ways I could improve the service.
Net-at-hand is not a new idea at all. There are probably more services that are similar to it than I could count. The more I use Net-at-hand, however, the more I realize that it serves a useful purpose. Services like blogger or wordpress don’t build the kind of websites that Net-at-hand focuses on, which is more of a general-purpose site suitable for businesses and organizations to use in promoting themselves. And other services are not mainstream enough to have a significant mind-share (be the first thing people think of when they need to quickly set up a website).
Net-at-hand does not do everything that I want it to do yet, but it will. Of course if I had bunches of money, I would be able to spend all my time turning Net-at-hand into what I should be. At the moment, Net-at-hand development is focusing on the pro version, which lets me add features that will someday make it into the regular version. I am working on an e-commerce and shopping cart module which will let people run a store from their Net-at-hand site. I think that the pro version will just become version 1.5 of Net-at-hand at some point in the future.
Anyway, I am off topic. The article about Evan Williams was encouraging to me because he is a great entrepreneur but does not fit into the typical “Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur” mold.
I definitely do not fit into that mold; maybe there is hope for me yet.