Yesterday, I (proudly) sent the following mail to the office:

“We have just officially entered PersonL (last minute) into this years TechCrunch50 Contest

We had half applied, decided it was too late, and then they mailed me yesterday and asked me to complete the entry by tomorrow…

So we got cracking and churned out a much upgraded web site and content in just two days (planning, writing content and everything).

Well done to the team who did this: Martin (design and input), Pascal (most of the dev and styling), Tim (Powerpoint, Flash and graphics) and Ferdi (making sure it all came together).

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Rob helped out a bit on testing from a usability perspective. I wrote the content.”

The amazing thing is, i think it is the best website we have ever built on such short notice.

So this is how it rolled out… I (Peter) had half completed a very late (only heard about it very late) entry for PersonL on the TechCrunch50 website when the general consensus in the team was “it’s too late.” So I stopped and we focussed again on our 23rd August *internal* deadline to get PersonL out of beta and into commercial-release-still-in-beta-phase .

On of the “background tasks that we just haven’t gotten to yet” list, getting our promotional site up and ready has been sitting semi-permanantly at about number 5. But an email from TechCrunch on the 30 July changed all of that…

So why did we manage to get such a great result in such a short space of time. Some thoughts:

• All the team members involved know our product and business intimately
• We had all the tools at hand (all required technologies)
• We had very fluid and regular correspondence between the business people, the technical people and the marketing people
• We were not too focussed on cost estimates and “big spec upfront” but rather business results best met – basically this was very Agile
• We had a Project Manager on the project with a singular focus on delivering a swift result
• We were all having fun

And was fun! (Note to self, I must work hard to convince more clients to engage with us in this way. It is simply so much better for everyone concerned…)

Now just holding thumbs for TechCrunch50.