Zero2BETA is a coding project put together by Baher Al Hakim of CloudAppers and Spinbits. The idea is to give coders the tools to take ideas from early stages to deployment in a few days. Baher was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about the project. Here is what he had to say.

What’s the idea behind zero to BETA?

Zero2Beta is an experiment on intense design and development of a useful web app from concept to launch in a couple of days, and release it to the public.

It enforces the practice of coming up with a unique idea, design an application around it, deploy it and get out in the public as soon as possible. The self-imposed limitations in terms of time and resources will push us to focus on what really matters and rise above trivial decisions into working on the absolutely necessary parts needed to have something working quickly.

What type of applications are you hoping to develop?

Web apps that are simple, quick, to-the-point, minimal and useful. Building on the “Small is the new big” concept, Zero2Beta is about creating something that can be useful because it’s simple and minimal. Something similar to the rationale behind 37signals.

Who is working on these ideas? How are they compensated?

Teams from CloudAppers and Spinbits were involved in the first installment “App1″ in Zero2Beta, and we’re not expecting any kind of compensation. It’s a fun and exciting experiment on its own and all of us have learnt a lot from it.

If “Next” app or the future apps have any chance of generating revenue or becoming a business, the money/shares will be split among participants and will be used to fund later projects as well and keep Zero2Beta going on.

What development tools are you using? (RoR, PHP, MySQL) Does it matter?

We used RoR for App1, which is a great choice, given its agile nature and short prototyping power, it allows us to build something usable in a very short time. But we’re definitely interested (and considering) trying other frameworks like PHP (RAD Framework) or Python (Django) during future installments of Zero2Beta.

It’s all about trials and experimentation, and that surely extends to platforms and frameworks.

What is your dream project?

I don’t have a dream project, the whole point of Zero2Beta is not to leave any idea in our minds, long enough for it to become a dream.

Ze Frank has nailed it when he called those kinds of ideas/dreams braincrack, because the longer you keep them in your mind, the bigger they get, and the more satisfaction you get from imagining them as a success, which amount to big barriers standing between you and executing your projects.
I think projects are meant to be executed not dreamt about.

What is the hardest thing about building products on such a short time table?

The hardest is without doubt distilling features and choosing what should make it in the beta release, we always start with a long list of features, and more get added as we go on with the execution, but at the end we need to release something functional.

An interesting story happened during our App1 “Next” is that we had to kill a couple of major features, including the core idea of the whole app, in order to release something within the time limit, it wasn’t easy and left a bitter taste for some of us, but we had to do it.

The pleasure of killing features!
Killing a major feature

It was a revealing and enlightening experience for all of us, and definitely worth the 2 days we spent on it, and I personally can’t wait till we start working on App2, and use the lessons we learned from the previous one.

(Images) (Forum)