Montreal Tech Watch

Felipe Coimbra has launched 2nd of January twtpoll, a web service which allows twitter users to have a poll functionality for their followers.

The service in itself is not innovative in itself (there are dozens of web polls available out there); what’s interesting though is that he did the design and implemention in one night, making it an overnight web startup.

Calling twtpoll a “startup” might be a stretch, since Felipe didn’t probably do a formal market research or doesn’t have any revenue model sketched out for twtpoll, but by developing this application in one night, it’s easy to see the entrepreneur thinking about other new ideas and new web services, and develop them right away with an “overnight” prototype, to see if there’s any traction or market interest. That’s a paradigm from the traditional paths for entrepreneurs, where you have to plan carefully, since schedules are in months & years.

In this case, twtpoll was featured on TechCrunch.

Availability of APIs and application platforms (look at Facebook’s, Myspace’s or the iPhone’s platform), coupled with development frameworks which makes programming more productive, makes this kind of ventures possible. I like the idea of an entrepreneur/hacker who can wrap up a prototype by himself, from his/her original vision, almost like a craftsman. If the prototype do get some sort of traction, it’s easy to to imagine the entrepreneur gather more resources and build from that original traction. And who knows what lies ahead, as more and more sophisticated tools come, barriers of entry are lower each year, making overnight web applications like twtpoll more common.

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