Heads up: This post is 12 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
LAUNCH MADE EASY
I remember how exciting it was to reconnect with high school friends on Facebook. LinkedIn took away my burden of punching in contacts in an excel spreadsheet. I use Path to share private photos with my family. My network is extended and communication is frictionless.
I don’t remember when I started to feel less excited in connecting with new friends. It feels as if I have already been connected to those important to me by now. May be for that reason, I am more keen to know what I share with my friends, what do we have in common, and not who to connect on Facebook.
How often do you and your friends shake hands and say “Let’s do a project together in the future.”? Unfortunately most of these promises end there, in that handshake. To me, this is an opportunity missed, so recently I started to put these promises into action. Most of the ideas we came up with were pretty geeky, maybe not be for everyone. But what if we could connect to people who share our interests all over the world? Then we could make these ideas become reality. In the end it is the journey that counts, the joy and fun we have creating something with someone you like to work with. It’s like playing with LEGO, you keep on building.
In CUUSOO’s system, there’s a feature to “keep the project unpublished.” I realized that I could hack this and use it to share my projects with my friends in secret mode. It was not the original intent in the design of CUUSOO, but it’s perfect for a virtual garage project. Of course, if the project goes well, we could always publish, gather interest from the community we share interests with, connect to manufacturers and begin to take pre-order - just the way CUUSOO has worked as a pioneer of social creation for the past 16 years.
For a while now, I have been launching projects in stealth mode. Then I started to invite my team at CUUSOO. They found this as much fun as I did. And guess what? Just recently, the team decided to put some budget to create a better “secret project” function, so in a couple of months it will be available for all of you.
Together with my team I am happy to announce we will be rolling out a more social way of living up to our promise of LAUNCH MADE EASY. A place where we all can enjoy the experience of creating something with someone.
Best wishes for 2014,
Never stop creating.
Kohei Nishiyama