Fed up with the (un)reliability of Chicago’s rail transit system (the “El”), we’ve kicked around the idea of a crowd-sourced train tracking system for a while. Well, one of our fearless Consultants took on the task and created Where The El. The app is a neat combination of Google Maps and twitter. The time frames, which increased exponentially with each step, were amazing. Some real data:
- Time spent talking about how great an El-tracking system would be: about 2 years
- Time required to develop said El-tracking system: about 2 days(!)
- Number of people marketing the system: 2 (who each sent one e-mail to about 10 people)
- Time To First “Real” User (TTFRU; does Google Analytics track that?): about 2 minutes
- Time To First Media Inquiry(TTFMI): about 2 hours