Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, but something needs to start them on their way.

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The first time my company sold something to somebody I did not know, I was so excited I could hardly sit still.

My phone buzzed, indicating a new email.  I pulled it out of my pocket, popped open the email client, and found this message waiting for me:

Hi there,

Somebody made a purchase  

-The Blurity server

Hooray!  I had programmed the application to email me when a purchase was made, so the format of the message was not surprising, but to see those code paths exercised in real life was a thrill.

I quickly checked the purchase data.  Was it somebody I knew?  No! A stranger!

A person found my product and found it useful enough to justify parting with their hard-earned money.  Amazing!  Incredible!

And a bit guilt-inducing, too.

Blurity was a bit less ugly by that point, a bit faster, and a bit higher quality, but it was still pretty awful.  To say I was embarassed by the state of the product would be an understatement.  At the same time, I was having a lot of fun doing the development.  It all seemed wrong in a way, but I reminded myself that the customer made the purchase voluntarily.  Besides, I’d give him a refund if he asked for one.

I honestly expected to get an email from the guy saying that he was expecting something different after the purchase, or that he made a mistake, or that I should feel guilty for getting paid to do something I enjoyed.  But that message never came, and there never was a chargeback.

No product is perfect in its early days.  An engineer has truly made the transition to businessman when he can accept that perfection in early releases is both unnecessary and unrealistic.

Ship or die.  If you have to ask yourself if it’s good enough, it’s good enough.

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The first time that a customer made a “legitimate” purchase, I was elated.  By “legitimate” I mean, the customer was a stranger to me AND the processed image represented a significant improvement over the blurry original.  (I monitor the uploaded photos in order to better understand what types of blur people want to remove.)  Not only was the algorithm capable of making improvements to real-world photos, but others had implicitly agreed.

My analysis of the photos of other potential customers had led me to tweak Blurity to better handle those blurs.  My analysis of their behaviors led to UI changes that simplified interaction and improved conversion rates.

If your expectations and the customers’ actions differ, change things until there is alignment.

—

The first time that customers made “legitimate” purchases on consecutive days, I felt like I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  What a thrill!

I think that all entrepreneurs are optimists, but there’s always a bit of self-doubt.  Am I smart enough to do what I’m trying to do?  Will it work even though I’m going against conventional wisdom?  Will the market, the customers, notice and care?  Can I pull it off before my capital runs out?  A pattern of sales serves as terrific validation.

Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  Three times is a pattern.

—

Now, to look forward to the day of profitability…

Blurry photos, be gone!

Blurity has a new look, faster interaction, and — most importantly — a much-improved deblurring engine.

Is it perfect? No.  Not by a long shot.  But I do believe that Blurity now meets the inclusion criteria for the category of “somewhat useful.”

That said, there are some caveats.  A few ways to be disappointed:

• Submitting a huge image and expecting processing to be done nearly instantly.  It takes a while, as in five or more minutes, to process most images.
• Trying to use it from a non-Webkit smartphone.  If your phone runs Android, iPhone OS 3.0+, or WebOS (e.g., the Palm Pre), your experience should be quite decent.
• Expecting miracles.  If the blur in the image is extreme, if the noise in the image is crazy, if the image compression is incredibly aggressive, if the image is really small, if the photo is horribly overexposed… well, then, Blurity probably won’t work too well.  It works best on moderately blurry, not-too-noisy, not-too-compressed, reasonably large, reasonably well-exposed photographs.
• Selecting a bad focus point.  The focus point should be the part of the image that you most wish would have been sharp.  The deblurring is applied to the entire image, but the focus point is used to model the blur, so it’s important that you choose something reasonable.

I sincerely appreciate the feedback that you all sent my way after the initial release.  Many of the changes in the new version were driven by those comments, and many of the future changes will be linked to comments that I have yet to act upon.  Comments on this newer version are appreciated and needed.

With the site now at a point where it isn’t a complete embarrassment, I’m going to begin a marketing push that extends beyond my blogs.  Expect to see and hear more in the coming days as I actively promote it for the first time.

Give Blurity a try.  Make your blurry photos sharp.  Let me know what you think.

(Cross-posted on Keacher.com)

Work on my startup’s photo-deblurring product, Blurity, continues.  After a soft-launch at the end of October, I decided to “unlaunch” at the end of November to improve the product and incorporate the large amounts of helpful feedback that I received.  Thus, the current state is “not launched.”

Like many software projects, particularly those involving complicated technology on limited budgets, the schedule has slipped a bit.  I’m making progress, but things have been taking a bit longer than I would have liked.  C’est la vie.  Look for a second go in a few weeks, when my inner businessperson rips Blurity out of the hands of my inner engineer.  At some point, you’ve got to ship.

Blurity! is here.  Image processing technology once limited to academics and scientists has been brought to the masses.

Have a blurry photo?  Upload it, select the spot that should have been clear, and let the service do the rest.

Ok, enough of the marketing talk.

Here’s the deal: I’m launching Blurity! today, very quietly.  The site is super-ugly, the image processing is slow, and the underlying processing algorithms could use a serious boost in quality.  Lots of bugs too, I’m sure.  In short, it’s a very early prototype.

Why release now instead of holding out for a more refined product?  Simple: release early, release often.  I’m pretty sure that most of what I have in place will end up changing, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense putting the polish on something that is in such severe flux.  In addition, people seem more amenable to providing useful feedback on something that doesn’t appear to be finished.

So there it is.  Give it a try.  I’d love to hear what’s good and what’s bad, what you like and what you don’t like, what’s clear and what’s ambiguous.  If you find it useful, so much the better!  If not, give it a few releases and watch the quality improve.

Tell me what you think, either in the comments or by email (jeff.keacher(at)nesota(dot)com), and leave a way to get in contact with you, and I’ll send you a coupon code for a free image processing credit.

Blur is dead!