Why I made Swym

10 February 2012, London, Innglunnnd

Inside this totally FREE yet amazing article:

The thought process of a self-doubting self-flagellating soon-to-be-discovered visionary (total value $5977)
The secret to presenting your last-minute app at a Hacker News meetup with 50,000 attendees (total value $459)
A gob-smackingly hilarious yet enlightening video (total value $1297)
A passing reference to the next Trillion dollar idea (total value $Trillion, duh)

Look ma, another idea!

Swym is an idea I had some time last year. A simple idea to share things you make. It started off as just a "Won't that be cool?" thought, which I'm sure you are familiar with. Here's the obligatory self-referential example which shows how it works:

Hrishi Mittal made Swym using Ruby on Rails and jQuery with Edward Clark.

You share your project or app or creation in those simple words and all of those underlined words are linked tags. Click on any tag to see other things or people related to it. Whoaaa mind blown.

After some time scribbling around and expressing the sheer genius of my idea on paper, I proceeded to file it under yet-another-frivolous-social-idea which has probably been done already and no one wants. I ignored it and carried on working on more Serious(TM) ideas.

A chance to speak at the HN London meetup

A month or two later, I got a chance to speak at the Hacker News London meetup. I'd been bugging the organiser Dmitri for months to let me present my $startup_at_this_millisecond_in_time. He said the September meetup was all booked out, but I could present at the October one. So, I said OK and made another steely mental resolve to really get on with my shopping app idea and blow everyone's minds off in October.

Then I got lucky.

Dmitri wrote back later that day saying that a new free slot has appeared miraculously for the September meetup. [1] He asked me if I wanted to present. Of course I did!

This was less than a week before the meetup. My shopping app was still a horrible v0.000001 which didn't work very well (still doesn't, ha!). But I decided I was going to polish it up and show it to the world anyway.

Evil plans are best

So there I was plugging away, ready to show a bunch of programmers my shiny new tool for choosing laptops for mere mortals. Then for some reason (probably boredom), two days before the meetup, I remembered the idea of Swym. [2]

Oooh, what if I... instead of presenting this laptop shopping thingy...

Noooooo I can't do that!

So that's exactly what I did.

Out with the laptops, in with the swym

I decided I was going to build this I-made-something sharing thingy and present it at the meetup. I just had to do it. If there was a set of people who would totally connect to it, it was these fellow hungry nerds who were travelling from far and wide for free beer and pizza to nervously tell each other about the cool things they were working on.

I worked like crazy for the next two days to make something of a semblance of an app. My ever helpful friend and kickass designer Ed was super kind to add a bit of design touch. Sometime during the madness, I came up with the name Swym, which made the perfect acronym, can be pronounced easily (swim) and had a decent domain name available. [3]

Angels don't carry chequebooks to tech meetups

I was feeling ok when I showed up at the meetup, but as the speakers before me presented their talks one by one, I started getting extremely nervous.

I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be presenting this stupid shitty app in front of all these amazing people. Maybe I should escape through the back door with a couple more beers and a slice of pizza.

My talk went surprisingly well. I started nervous but I got my groove once I got going.

And the crowd loved it! I think! Ok, one rich dude definitely did, but NOT ENOUGH damnit!

Hang on... what was the title of this post again?

Ah yes, why I made Swym. [4] Here's why:

I'm just a bit tired of the 'I want this, I have this, I read this, I watched this' stuff. It's fun, but I think we need more of I made this.

Enough of I Like Like Like this stuff that these other magical people made and I'll spend all my time spreading the good news (oh the self-inflicted irony). Enough.

How about I *made* this with my friend Billy who's kickass too, using all these amazing tools that all those other amazing people made? You could do it too.

Pump up the crosstalk

There's Github, Dribbble and other niche networks where creative people get together and share and collaborate on cool things they make. But these are mostly insulated from each other. Why does one have to beg to get into a designers' social network? How can I, as a programmer, learn good design if those who are good at it won't let me into their studio? I think it will be more fun if we talk more to each other.

Prodcer > Consumer

But that's the minor point. The bigger point is that there are all sorts of creative people out there, who probably never express their creativity. They are too busy consuming to produce anything of their own. Or too scared or too inconfident to put out anything they produce. I think if more people came out and shared their creations and the process of creation, then more consumers will get inspired to become producers.

Youtube has done that in a big way for films and music, and Instagram is doing it for photos. But I think there's scope to do that in a wider, more playful way. I expect programmers and designers will relate to Swym most easily, but I don't see any reason why my wife can't share the secrets of her amazing banoffee pie recipe on here or my brother share his whacky films.

Discovery

The linked tags idea just enables discovery and makes it fun to explore people and their creations. I've seen that every time someone posts a project to HN, people ask how did you make it? Well now, there's a simple place to share that, and look it up later because it won't get lost in a forum archive.

Sharing knowledge is the killer app

As I did in my talk, I'd like to mention this brilliant quote from David Kadavy, the author of the excellent book Design for Hackers.

"Hackers are able to accomplish so much in a little time because they come from a community that's built upon sharing knowledge."

Let's spread this culture.

Doubt is the enemy

You're probably thinking: ok Hrishi, your thinking sounds totally original and revolutionary, but you made this last September and all you've done since then is write a blog post?

Well, I was busy working on more Serious(TM) ideas, alright?

I kept wanting to work on Swym, but held myself back because it was yet another shiny social idea (It's all Joel's fault). Yet, everyone I told about Swym loved it.

So today I decided, what the hell. I'll bring it back to life. My friend Rohit pushed me to just do it in the spirit of the idea itself. It's so much fun to work on! And in fact I know, it's not even just a shiny social idea. There's a simple straightforward business model baked in (you could Sell What You Make; see what I did there?).

But for now, I urge you to Share What You Make.

[1] Dmitri is of Russian descent, so I can only assume the previously scheduled speaker did something to displease him and was silenced.

[2] actually it wasn't even called Swym then. I'd tried to come up with some names, like Maketub and even worse ones. Then I met Swym. Oh what a cool name.

[3] In case you didn't realise, I've shaken the foundations of the word swimming. "I'm swimming" now means "I'm sharing what I'm making". Are you swymming? Geddit?

[4] You didn't watch the video, did you? I can hear you thinking: I hate watching videos. I read so much faster. One of these days, I'll get around to making that Sh*t Hacker News says video.

PS In case you're still wondering, the secret to presenting your last-minute project at a Hacker News meetup is to book a speaking slot months in advance, continue working on whatever your main uninspiring project/startup is, pull out one of your fun ideas from your ideas drawer two days before the meetup and then build and present that. Oh and tell the organisers it's a secret app, in case you change your mind again and decide to present something else. Who needs focus? Go with the flow!