Day 3 was spent writing DAO/DTO classes. It’s probably going to take another day or two to finish these and complete the unit tests. While it’s easy to skip writing unit tests when there’s a tight time line I feel it’s important to do this properly and that means unit tests with 100% code coverage. This should save me time in QA towards the end.

BabysittingGroup.com is born!!

Last year my wife & I had our first child. Just prior to his birth two people told me about babysitting groups/co-ops. It’s amazing the things you never hear about until you have children. What amazed me even more was how this was one idea screaming to be turned into a web 2.0 application. After a little research I registered BabysittingGroup.com. If you’ve never heard of a babysitting group/co-op the idea is simple. The babysitting group is formed by a bunch of friends (so it’s people you trust). Within the group you can earn points by babysitting other members children and spend them by having other members babysit your children. The actual rules for each group can get rather complex which will represent a challenge.

One person in the group needs to maintain the diary (a job that may rotate each month). This person is responsible for keeping track of the points and may also need to ring members to organise the babysitting. BabysittingGroup.com will take over this role making group management more open while saving someone from needing to keep the diary up to date/organise babysitting.

There still a lot of work to be done but I’ve put up a quick page that allows people to register for beta invitations that I’ll send out towards the end of the project.

The first thing I need is an idea

• Search engine
• Blog/Podcast network
• Social networking
• Video/Photo sharing
  

Luckily I didn’t start this challenge completely from scratch or it could take 14 days just to come up with a good idea. I’m going to keep it under wraps for another day while I finish work on the business plan. I know I said this wasn’t going to be set up a business but I think a business plan will be useful for two reasons:

1. It will help me focus the project by forcing me to write down everything I want to do and how I want it to operate before I start coding.
2. If this does take of like crazy I don’t what to be stuck with a dotcom that burns cash then dies a sad death. To prevent that I’d like to have options to monetize it written down.

I read a number of blogs about micro ISV’s and there are lot of people taking on “Zero to MicroISV in X days” projects. The general concept is simple, take a limited budget (less than $50), a limited time frame (7 to 21 days) and build a micro ISV that makes a small profit. Due to restrictions with my current employment I can’t setup a business but that shouldn’t prevent me from undertaking a modified version of the challenge.

So here it is, in 14 days I want to build a Web 2.0 site that can grow to 10,000 users in a year. It all starts here tomorrow…