Dandelife Opening Up  − 7 January, 2009

So this announcement is a long time in the making. Since May 2006 when I started building Dandelife, I had every intention of bringing as many people as possible into the fold to help me with my product vision. It's been two and half years and dandelife has become something of a boon and bust for me. It's been great as a community. I've spent countless hours becoming friends with people here, reading stories, getting inspired, and getting back in touch with many long lost friends. Dandelife has also been a wonderful way to get work. I've built a nice consulting practice taking what I'm learning here and applying it their own products, be that dating, sports or social network related. Dandelife has been a wonderful calling card and prooves that I have what it takes to build products and communities. So, yes, Dandelife has been a boon.

Dandelife has also been a bust. Over the past two and a half years, I have spent over $100,000 of my own money on development.  This is money I never would have had if I had kept my day job. For that I am grateful. But $100,000 is a lot of money for a guy like me. 

As I started to look at what $100,000 bought me, I started to realize that Dandelife was having a diminishing value of return for me. Outside of the consulting work I've gotten because of it, it has made very little money. Indeed, if I were to stop development entirely (which I am not prepared to do, yet) my expenses for hosting Dandelife would still outpace any revenues generated from our advertising (which I've kept sparse purposefully).

Regardless, I have a very clear vision for Dandelife. Dandelife should be self-sustaining. That is, it should be a slow-moving product. Something that does not change much over time because its sole purpose is to serve as an archive for one's life. I've always wanted to keep it very simple. Somehow along the way, I lost my confidence in that vision. I also started chasing money. And with that effort got sucked into thinking about how the site can be made more appealing when instead I should have been concentrating on making it more reliable. 

 

Then in July of '08 two things happened. 

1 - We had a 2-day outage. 

2 - I lost my development team. 

One, of course, was a consequence of the other. From the very beginning, i was using the wrong people to help me build the site. I couldn't afford anything more. Without alternatives, I was forced into maintaining a relationship that was both bad for the site and bad for me. The site eventually buckled under the pressure and we spent two days trying to get it online. BTW, the site did not buckle because of heavy traffic. It buckled because the engineering was so poor.

In July, it became clear that I should focus my efforts on fixing Dandelife. No matter how hard I wanted the site to be successful, and no matter how good the pitch for Dandelife was, I always feared success. Staying small and non-profitable became an excuse for failure to scale. Why won't this site grow? I kept asking myself. But in my heart of hearts, I knew why. I was pouring all of my effort into product development and in particular finding and fixing bugs, that I had no time and no confidence in marketing the site.

When it came to "fixing" Dandelife, it meant fixing everything that was wrong with how Dandelife came to be. I got rid of my development team. I paid for a code audit. I took the news bravely. And I bunkered down for 6 months un-doing the mistakes that had been done to the site over the years. Meanwhile, I also explored new revenue models. It became clear to me that search engines LOVE Dandelife. What's more, so do people who want to make a difference in the world. The more I talked with those close to me, the more I realized that Dandelife could be very valuable to a lot of people if it were open source. 

In 2009, Dandelife will become an open source project. That's where it's going. I think the Internet could use a thousand Dandelifes. I also think that I am willing to invest more money into Dandelife as the need arises. Maybe the same people that want to build onto Dandelife for their own needs will employ me to do it. Maybe other projects will find a use for Dandelife and merge us into them (or vice versa). 

The first step toward going open source is to launch the changes we've been working on (with a new developer). That will happen this month. We're damn close to being finished with those changes now. The biggest change is that Streams will disappear completely. We will keep integration with flickr, twitter, typepad and livejournal. But all other streams and our streams presentation on the site will be gone. We're going back to stories. The second big change is that the site will be a LOT more reliable. I'm aiming for 99.9% uptime. And page loads should be very, very fast from now on. It pains me every time I have to wait for a story to submit or my comments to come through. It's not fair to you either.

Then there's something else you might see. You might start seeing more people around here. Why? It's not because  of any new feature. It's because I will be focusing less of my attention to development and more of my attention to marketing Dandelife. Dandelife is here to stay. And it has already blossomed into a great community. I have no doubt that there are a number of people out there yearning for a place like Dandelife and need only for me to reach out and make them aware such a place exists. 

Stay tuned for more announcements like these. After the new version of the site is launched, I'll be posting more about efforts toward making Dandelife open source. And, of course, I welcome feedback from anyone who comes across this post. Let me know what you think. Good or bad, if it's about Dandelife I want to know.

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