Recently while working on File Phantom, I’ve come to the realization that I really don’t think that I’d have finished my software if it wasn’t for my business partner and it’s not that my partner is a programmer. He actually isn’t at all. He’s focusing on the website, marketing, graphic design and other parts of the company. He’s handling a lot of the other tasks but the reason I wouldn’t have finished was because I like having someone to show my latest project to and to keep me on track and unless the person you go to to show your product to is going to get something out of its success, they won’t care.

I started the project around September and was developing it for about a month pretty solidly but I didn’t have a partner. Then I reached a burnout stage on it. I wasn’t feeling motivated to work on the software anymore. It wasn’t progressing that fast because I spent the whole first month working on really cool abstractions in C# and after a month, I wasn’t seeing the progress I wanted to see in it. These abstractions that I was building though have wound up saving me massive amounts of time and headaches.

So after that first month, I really backed off development. I think for about a month I really didn’t look at the code at all. At the time I was also working for Sponsorhouse part time and they were getting ready to launch a new version so there was some extra work on that and then the regular school stuff. I wasn’t really sure if I even believed in the project anymore. I knew my application was going to hide files but what else could it do? I didn’t know and wasn’t thinking about it all that much. Then I stopped working at Sponsorhouse.

At about the same time, I was in touch with Chris Kirkman, this great graphic designer that I knew and we’d done some projects in the past. So I told Chris about File Phantom and he seemed really excited about it so we partnered and at that time File Phantom didn’t have a name so we came up with the name and bought the domain names and started coming up with strategies for what we wanted to do with it. Suddenly, I was energized again to do development. I could do development and then show what I was building to Chris. Before I’d show it to some of my other friends and I could tell they just weren’t that interested in this “file manager program thing” that I was building. If I became really rich off of this product none of my friends would be rich with me as a result so it doesn’t matter to them what my software does. Maybe if it could help them write papers for school they’d be interested but otherwise, it doesn’t benefit them in any way.

As a result of this new energy and having more free time, I started working on File Phantom considerably more. Since I’ve worked in web development, some database development, desktop application development and web services, I was pretty quickly able to build the application and a supporting authentication/payment server setup. It also helped that I had spent the first month just designing the abstractions because when it came time to actually build the UI of the software, all the libraries had already been built which was nice. I just had to plug in functions to the UI parts and see if they worked like I thought they would.

File Phantom is in beta right now and we’re really trying to focus now on the UI, documentation and the website. About 95% of the functionality is there that we need to be in the application and hopefully polish is all that’s left to do before we actually launch the product in January.

¶ 10:38 PM