THE DREAM IN ACTION

This is a guest post by a very early to the game, iGoogle widget developer who turn a small project into a huge profit. Cameron Hall, a co-worker of mine, and a graduate of Cornell University held onto his widget just long enough so he could use the credibility as a resume builder. He ended up (unintentionally) maximizing the widgets monetary value and getting big cash and was able to land a job with a GE management training program with the story.

Enter Cameron Hall…

In February of 2008, I sold less than 100 lines of public code requiring less than 20 hours of work for $28,000.  What started as a personal project to make my Google homepage more personal, turned into a 300,000 user worldwide phenomenon

in less than a year and a half.  My post below takes you through the life of my National Geographic Photo of the Day gadget from its creation in mid 2006 to its sale in early 2008.

I don’t recall when I first created the Google gadget, but it was sometime around May 2006.  I was in college and was testing out Google Personalized Homepages.  Yes, that’s what it was called before it changed to iGoogle.  In classic Google fashion, my homepage was white, clean, and in desperate need of color.  So I did what any developer would do and started to check out the API and what was required for creating a gadget.  Google gadgets are typically HTML and JavaScript wrapped in some very basic XML.  Since I had experience with each of those languages, I decided to give it a whack and develop a gadget.

The first version of the gadget was around 100×50 pixels and simply loaded the thumbnail of the National Geographic photo of the day.  To do so required absolutely no programming logic and literally loaded http://nationalgeographic.com/pod/pictures/thumbnail/pod_thumb.jpg with a link to the photo of the day page.  After a couple of months, I got an email from a user asking if I could make the picture bigger.  I was shocked to find that people other than myself were actually using the gadget and care enough to send me feedback.

I decided to take a little time and see what I could do about increasing the size of the picture.  After a couple hours of work, I had a much better gadget that loaded an image that filled the entire space.  From that point on, the gadget went through incremental changes at the request of users or if I thought of something.  The changes span everything from increasing the resolution to adding a description or caption for the photo.  It was always a hobby and I never took the work too seriously.  I applied the same logic to other gadgets and built a Wikipedia photo of day, Weather channel map, and delicious bookmark searcher.  All of the gadgets were created because it was something I wanted and couldn’t find it out there already.

In May of 2007, I received an email alerting me that they were planning on using the gadget in the Google Developer Day keynote presentation.  Again, I would have never imagined that a little gadget that was built to get some color on a clean page would receive so much attention.  However, the biggest surprise came in January of 2007 when I was asked to sell the gadget for $700.  I freaked out because the thought of selling the gadget never crossed my mind.  At that point there were about 35,000 views daily and a month after receiving the offer I declined the offer to explore other options.  Jumping back to May, I receive another offer except this time it was for $2,000.  However, at that point I was rolling into my senior year and was using it as a talking point on my resume.  That single gadget placed me in the top 5 gadget developers and so I planed on keeping it until I found a job.

Throughout the Fall I received offers from multiple parties all around the $6,000 mark.  Once I accepted my job, I put the offers against one another and received a $28,000 offer from the original requester.  At that point, I wanted to strike while the offer still stood and accepted to sell the gadget for $28,000.  The selling process was really smooth, except for PayPal who will freeze your account when you get a large sum of money.  I filled out a form and Google setup a redirect from my URL to the buyers URL.  It’s important to note that I never sold him the code.  In fact, anyone can take the code from the site and repost it as their own.  As a result, I sold him all my users.  Right before the transfer took place, I had 1,000,000 visits daily.

I continue to develop my gadgets just as I did before.  If I was asked to sell another one of my gadgets I would, because I could always move my gadget to a new address or add ?anything to the end of the URL.  I know that the buyer placed an ad on the gadget once I sold it to him.  I don’t know how much he earns, but I doubt you could make a living from developing gadgets.

My advice to you would be two simple things.  First, take a challenge and build what you want or need.  Chances are other people will need and want it too.  Second, listen to your users.  They will often have thoughts that are different from yours and will help you see your product from another point of view.  Beyond that, I got lucky.  I never looked for a buyer, but I did hold out until the price got too high.  I could have easily begun to loose subscribers and the value of the gadget would fall drastically.

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What side project have you worked on that ended up becoming much more than you originally had intended? Did your project turn into a business that allowed you start a business? Quit your job? Retire?

Share you success stories so that we can all learn and be inspired and bring then dream to action.