Jon Fox

This is my first real blog post, so bear with me…

I figure a good place to start is explaining what this blog is for. Its purpose is simply to log my experiences and perspectives as I begin the exciting/scary/interesting experience of doing my first web startup. I’m hoping that this will be helpful, or at the very least slightly interesting to someone out there…only time will tell.

So a quick catchup of where I’m at…

Around the end of the summer of ‘06 I met Josh Morgan through the website programmermeetdesigner.com. I was mostly just looking for an interesting project to work on in my spare time and I came across his post which seemed promising. Through a couple emails we built up what the idea is and got to know each other a bit. The next step was creating a proof of concept. The dates get a little fuzzy here, but sometime in Sept. or Oct. I completed the first proof of concept (very ugly, and only the bare bones of what we wanted, but it worked…) . This is the point where we decided we needed to bring in someone else to do the design. I knew I wasn’t exactly a capable designer and Josh wasn’t a design pro either. We looked at a couple different people, but we ended up with a 19 year old from Sweden named Isaac. And that’s how our team was formed…

The site we were/are developing is a real time debate site called IntenseDebate.com. The idea is basically to fill the gap between a chat room debate and a comment / forum debate. What it basically boils down to is a real-time, structured, one-on-one debate model. We’ve got some other ideas planned to make this even more interesting, but really we’re all just not satisfied with current methods of having debates/arguments online.

While still relatively early in the development process Josh came across an article for TechStars. If your not familiar with them I suggest you read about them from their site. Essentially, they’re an incubator similar to Y-Combinator. The reason this is relevant is that we submitted an application…we didn’t really expect to win, but we thought something along the lines “wouldn’t it be great if…?”. Well, to our great surprise and excitement we were one of the 10 groups selected (out of 300+ applicants) to participate in the program! Talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity!

And thus this blog is born…the goal being to give a running account of my experiences through this exciting time. One thing is sure though…this is gonna be a summer I will never forget.