Winners and What’s Next

Thanks to everyone for all the great comments on the final post of the Y Combinator Challenge.  As promised, I’ve put all the names of the commenters into a hat and the winner is…Joel!  I got a real prize for this one, courtesy of a great new Seattle startup called GreetQ.  Instead of explaining it myself and making it sound less cool than it actually is, here’s an explanation from Jen, one of the founders:

“My Seattle-based company, GreetQ.com basically provides a service where our customers can personalize paper greetings cards online and queue them, Netflix-style, to be mailed on a scheduled date. Our Netflix-style queue model seems to appeal to people.They also love the convenience and simplicity of our site including the fact that in a flash they can send a memorable greeting for a friend’s birthday or for the holidays.”

As someone who forgot his 15-year-old sister’s birthday last week (sorry, Amy!) I decided not to take any chances and used the service to schedule a card to be delivered to my other sis for her birthday.  The selection is great, the site was easy to use and they’ve got a discount for first-time users – definitely go check ’em out if you get a chance.

Anyway, congrats Joel, I’ll shoot you a mail with a voucher code to get your free card.

All right, so what’s next?  Back when I started the challenge, one of the commentators over on Hacker News had a great suggestion.  After coming up with 30 ideas, pick out the best one and build it out.  So – why not?  Starting today, I’m going to give myself thirty more days to take one of the ideas and see if I can get a prototype up by Halloween.  I’ll still be posting new ideas here, and have another project starting up next week that I’m way excited about – should be a crazy month, but lots of fun.  Wish me luck – I haven’t coded in a while, so I’m definitely going to need it.