Aardvark

The Mechanical Zoo, 2008

Challenge

Working product early

A small team of ex-Google employees and experienced entrepreneurs formed The Mechanical Zoo (TMZ) to create a social search product named Aardvark. Aardvark is a convenient service for people to ask and answer questions over instant message and email.

With little time to spare and limited technical resources, TMZ wanted to get a working product in users hands. They needed to validate their concept, test new ideas and collect data on usage patterns for future product design.

Solution

Bootstrap product and team

The solution was to provide a dedicated Carbon Five team using Ruby on Rails in an Agile process to deliver working features early. We launched a first release in six weeks.

Through weekly releases to Amazon's EC2 we iterated on that initial product, incorporating business priorities and user feedback into subsequent iterations. TMZ saw rapid evolution of the software. Our Agile process enabled us to continually deliver value while incorporating new information and team members as the project progressed.

TMZ had several project teams running in tandem and our collaborative approach and Ruby on Rails facilitated this. We shared databases and interfaces with a public web site developed by TMZ developers and communicated in real-time with an instant message gateway that we developed collaboratively.

Carbon Five provided a strong code base on which to build. With TMZ development team we evolved large portions of the initial product into a fully automated and programmable system.

Value

A product in users' hands

The early release of Aardvark built an early user base, attracted top class investors and fed directly into their future product strategy. TMZ was able to take the time they needed to hire talented technical staff while getting going on the development of their core product. We set a fast development pace from the beginning and prepared them to continue as their team took over.