The past week has been fairly intense here, so I haven't had time to blog the latest developments on the startup. As well as having some day job deadlines to deal with, a Friday deadline for a demo resulted in a couple of days working 8am to 5am.

We got a lot done though - finding a name, designing the website and logo, describing the service clearly for the first time, hiring another developer and even some improvements to the code.

Finding a name is one of the hardest tasks for a new startup, and we went through quite a few options before finding something available that works. Even something as obscure as uwigi is taken, though that is probably a good thing given that it is such a horrible name. Fortunately we managed to find a name which is both relevant to the service and correctly spelled - TwoNeeds.

Although I am a very good developer, I am completely hopeless at making a site look nice. The rest of the team is even worse, so we ended up outsourcing to someone in the states. We found the designer through 99designs, though not using the crowdsourcing model - As long as you can find someone competent, a trusted relationship with one person is much more productive.

For the demo itself our main problem was that the service doesn't lend itself to discoverability when there is only one user. We ended up going with a script/screenshot based presentation, implemented in javascript with elements of the real system to make it look less like powerpoint.

And now back to work - I have some rather thorny UI flow issues to sort out.