How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000

This just reinforces my impression that Carsonified is more of a marketing shop than a web development shop - they had as many PR people on the project as they did designers and developers combined??

"The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts."<p>So, the real title of this article should have been "How to waste $10,000 on a pointless web app."

A few are focusing on the literal aspect of building a web app -- why there are so many PR people, why did it cost so much -- while this seems to be an exercise of what a few people can accomplish in a short amount of time, a la Startup Weekend.<p>He even admits as much <i>"I would say you only need three people if you want to strip it back to the bare minimum..."</i><p>The focus seems to be more on how teams can iteratively build new features, a quick app as proof of concept, or take time away from normal business to inject some excitement into the team.

I think they did little with a lot of people. Sorry Carson, I like your stuff, but this is a bit weak in my mind.

They did a great job with this, but it's also a good exercise that other people should try. These days, a lot of development styles ask you to be able to scope your work to the available time (agile, getting real, any crunch time situation).<p>I did a couple two day solo versions of this and it's paid off repeatedly. My goal was to create and launch a website in two days. Usually I went in with an idea, but all the work needed to fit into two business days. The best thing I created was probably IHeartQuotes, a web front-end for Unix fortune files.

I imagine they spent 2 hours coding and and the rest of the time for marketing (like producing the video)?

In the last few years, developing the product has usually been the easy part.<p>Now building a useful product, identifying a market need, and finding users/customers is the hard part. Lets see them do that next time because they missed the ball this time around.

I'm waiting for one of the hackers here to make 'how to build a web app in four days for $500' ... This project wasn't ran "skinny" or even like a startup - but still nice, I enjoy the time lapse desktop video.

Apparently we're hearing about this because of those three PR people, not because of the obvious large-scale payola going on between Carsonified and TechCrunch - it is purely because of the amazing viral marketing talents of those non-coding, non-designing, non-art-directing, non-blogging PR people!

What happens when they realize they built the wrong product or need to tweak it or pivot 180 degrees to follow a good opportunity? Helps to have programmers in house - or be a programmer.

we did the same thing earlier this year but with 11 different teams, who were challenged to make a working product in 48 hours.<p>great experience.<p>of course, we don't have a real company at the end of the event, but the goal is more about getting together, maybe find co-founders -- and well just hack things