The Refresh project is not dead, it’s just frozen

There’s a chill in the air. Slade and Wizard are once again helping to sell sofas and toys. Yessir, “summer 2007” has come and gone with no sign of the Refresh project.

It should be obvious by now that Refresh is on indefinite hiatus. I don’t give space to unfulfilled ideas, so I intend to remove it from my portfolio. I’ll add a featured project panel in its place. I’ll try to relate my reasons for this change of direction.

I did quite a lot of research and development work on Refresh but as I did, certain things became more apparent. What else became apparent is that those realisations would apply to anything at all that I might choose to do:

Development

I would need to develop solutions for a great number of interface elements and internal processes in order to build Refresh. Handling payment transactions was going to be a project by itself.

Time is Money

The free time I have for independent work is limited, because it naturally competes with my personal life and other interests. When I sit down at my computer, I assign a real and specific value to my time – my freelance rate of £30 per hour. Time that I can justify spending on a project that doesn’t pay is in short supply.

I believe I have the staying power to work my way through a dip before a project rewards itself, but the time and energy it would have taken to make Refresh a reality was simply too much at this stage in my life.

Marketing

Shipping a product to no existing audience or buzz isn’t wise. A key reason for releasing the free version of simpleContact first was to patiently build a user base before the commercial release.

Anyone can buy attention through advertising, and I certainly will do so. What’s far more important is the kind that you can’t buy. Users have been generous and helpful in their comments. I will be able to make some announcements on this front soon.

What next?

My attention is now focused on other specific projects. Working this way allows me to break these challenges down into tasks that I can tackle within my available time.

Refresh has become an endgame, a byword for the Big Project that I’ll undertake at some point. Maybe the future of my career. The project I’ll be ready for when I have some smaller successes under my belt. It may bear no resemblance to the original idea (which I kept a bit of a secret) in form or function, but the fun is in the journey!

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