I got infected with the startup virus during my internship at the HP headquarters in Palo Alto in 2006. As I was already very interested in the mobile space back then I decided to work on a mobile related startup together with a friend I knew from school. I was still studying Business Computer Science when doing the project in 2006/2007.
We thought about many different ideas and decided to implement a website in Germany that was kind of similar to Dodgeball back then. It was focused on people, places and events and one was able to check into a place by sending an SMS message to our servers. If one of your friends was nearby you received another SMS that contained their location. We called the site Miimo (“me mobile”).
I was already programming web applications with Perl back then, but Ruby on Rails was becoming quite popular and I took a look at it to develop the system. I instantly fell in love with Ruby and the Rails framework and we decided to use it for our project.
I developed a working prototype of the system in about 6 months but soon realized that I was the only one being capable of actively pushing the idea forward. My friend and partner was very busy during his studies and didn’t have the time and skills to help me to develop Miimo further. Additionally, we had featuritis in the beginning and wanted to do way too much for a first release. Finalizing all the features that we thought of took way too long.
I decided that it is not possible to continue in such a situation and that I need to get to know more geeks to help me to develop such ideas. We decided together to end the project. We never incorporated a company so we were able to focus on new things quickly.
By doing the project I learned to program with Ruby on Rails, how to implement one’s own idea and that starting with a friend as a co-founder is a hard thing to do.
