FuelFrog is a a free application that allows you to easily track your gas mileage using Twitter. The site's "About" page explains how the app came to exist:
During lunch at a local mexican restaurant, the three guys that were to become known as the FuelFrog team decided to set for themselves a challenge: build a web application in less than three months. They're busy guys, so whatever they built needed to be simple. It also needed to reflect their values and be useful for many people.
By the time lunch was over, they'd settled on the idea: help people track their fuel usage. Within a couple of nights, they'd decided what to name it. A week later, sketches of the application's major pages and functionality were finished. Database schemas were designed and prototypes built. The momentum built over the following days and weeks, and nine weeks after that first lunch, FuelFrog was launched.
Brandon Milford, one of the app's creators, wrote to us to let us know that Getting Real had a big influence on them.
A couple of friends and I recently launched a free application that allows you to easily track your gas mileage using Twitter. It's called FuelFrog and after filling up your car with gas you simply text your miles, price, and gallons to your account with FuelFrog and we trend your gas mileage over time and give you additional insight into the amount you're paying for gas.
We built it by keeping things ultra-simple and released it with only the absolute necessary features. We even left out the ability to delete/edit your fuel records or the ability to recover your lost password. We launched the application three weeks ago and have spent nothing on marketing/advertising and currently have over 2,800 users. People really appreciate the simplicity and usefulness of the application.
In developing FuelFrog we took the approach of "just getting it out there" and have been rewarded greatly for doing just that. All the "other stuff" that "would be cool" can wait and our users like our application and trust that when/if we add those additional features we'll do it right. If we would have made the choice to add two additional features for example, that could have delayed the release by a couple of weeks and would have cost of literally thousand of users. I'm glad we didn't wait!
We asked Brandon which part of Getting Real had the biggest impact on their efforts.
The most important concept for me is building less. If you're attempting to include every feature that "would be cool to add" in the initial release then you're compounding the time it takes to launch the application – time in which users could be signing up.
Also, you're making a lot of assumptions if you're including many features in the initial release. If you build the application and release it with minimal features, your users will tell you what they'd like from the application. It doesn't mean that you have to add every feature they suggest, but it certainly gives you a place to start and additional features to consider for later versions of the software.
I'd also like to mention that David Rasch and Alan Cox are the other two who are behind FuelFrog.
