Experimenting and moving on

@davidadamojr asked me this morning why I 'trashed' goAhoy. goAhoy was a web app I worked on sometime last year. The idea is simple - manage and distribute phone calls between members of a group. It was really fun to build (challenging too though) especially with toying with an entirely different technology area - telephony (using Twilio). I built, published and got few [trial] users but I never let the project go beyond the public invite stage and later 'unpublished' it.

I have looked back at the lot of apps I have developed on mobile and web and I'm like woooo! From the funny to the stupid, weird, crazy, interesting, useful, fun, just name it. Many of these things don't even go beyond my system and I have killed almost all the few that sneaked through. [In fact, I think the only app I have online for now is Twhii. And no, I have no plans of killing that as it has prooved extremely useful to me and lots of users]. Damn, I have even toyed on a search engine. The few ones I have had online for a while include billManager, nubley (a directory of Nigerian micrbloggers), ngbot (mobile community and download store. Ran this for like 7 years from first year at the Uni with @namzo. Oh, I missed this) and myContacts (contacts backup and management). On mobile, there is a money record/management app, a notification app for missed calls when your number is not available, an app for discovering and chatting with people around you and a couple of others.

How do I feel at the failure of these things? Yes you may say bad. But then not bad like really bad with regrets of the time and effort. Yes I would have been more fulfilled and happy if any of these at some point had hit the limelight and was that success every startup look up to, but I have no regret for the time, effort, resources and money put into creating them. If I have to do it again, I will. And I will not stop building things, toying with ideas and experimenting with APIs. In the end, we are developers, and that's what makes us good at what we do.