This is the first post about a product I have been working on in the past few weeks. As the name - DoingText - suggests its purpose has to do with texts - and talking about them. The idea for it came to me on a random sunday afternoon while I was chatting with two friends over skype and we complained not about having the right tool for working on another project. Seconds later it struck me that we would not be the only people having this problem, hence there must be a market for it only waiting for me. So I started working.

My process has been heavily influenced by the folks over at 37signals and their getting real philosophy. Most of the time spent so far has been on weekends and evenings, I still have my “day job” as one of the owners of upstream. One thing that has helped me steal some more time for DoingText is that we introduced our version of the 4 day week a couple of month ago: Friday is research day. And my research is now DoingText. Though having brought probably more than 10 Ruby on Rails projects online I can still consider it research. This is the first project without a set deadline, without a fixed amount of money, without a client wanting to see progress a.s.a.p. - it’s my project and I can pay as much attention to any details as I want (and that’s a lot more than in previous projects). Being able to work this way makes it a whole lot of fun to work on, and I hope you will see that too once you get your hands on the product.

I will be starting a closed beta within the next weeks. If you want to be among the first people to try it out please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow doingtext on twitter. You can contact me at alex[at]doingtext.com or via the comments below this post.