It's now been a few months since the Cleeng project started, and we've been really careful about confidentiality - when you file a patent for a web-related invention these days, you'd better be careful.
It is really tricky timing the launch of a new web service. Do it too early and you might lose credibility. Do it too late...well you might just be too late.
This is more or less the roadmap we followed:
- First, designing the concept and build the first few wireframes. I checked extensively what was available and what wasn’t, what competitors were present, and how to differentiate.
- I quickly realized the concept was so simple that no one had thought of it and, therefore, I could file a patent for it!
- Then I started to share the idea with some close friends to get their advice and recommendations, and further fine-tune the concept.
- Well, some of the friends liked it, and they wanted to join the adventure! Cool, so we brought the smart ones on board :-)
- Started designing the site: stuck to the basics, made sure the message comes across. We loved what Dropbox did (BTW: a really smart solution that really helped us manage the project with the remote teams. Full disclosure: we have no ties with Dropbox.)
- The Cleeng patent was filed over the summer. We did all the necessary research and finger crossing. It looks promising. Our patent attorney R. Carrillo really helped us build a solid case.
- Then more recently, we've been working hard on preparing the Cleeng site and the first plug-ins. Several months of coding and hard work from developers in multiple disciplines, from PHP to Ajax, Wordpress to Drupal, and Paypal and other payment methods. Nice to see the work up close. It is so refreshing to see the speed at which a start-up is able to move, compared to my former employers.
Now, we’re in the testing phase and, hey, it works like a charm. It works so well, in fact, that we felt confident enough to start communicating more widely to the public.
So today is the big day. Cleeng solution becomes official. Register to our beta, and follow content monetization strategies on twitter @cleeng.
