From The Australian, Entrepreneur
THERE are many reasons to start a business.
Some people are driven by money. Others by passion.
But for Omar Kilani, of Sydney, the Remember The Milk web application came about simply because of a personal need and his passion for programming, which he has followed since he was 13.
He wanted to organise himself, and his business partner and fiance Emily Boyd was an enthusiastic user of to-do lists.
In 2004, Kilani relished the programming challenges of the relativity new AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web application environment, which creates a seamless experience for the user.
Meanwhile Boyd, a former NSW Young Australian of the Year, who as a teenager, with her two sisters, founded the MatMice website that is used by more than 1 million children to create personal web pages, was driven by her passion for smart interface design.
The good looking and easy to use RTM web application has 600,000 people using it to do lists and three full-time employees, including Kilani’s younger brother Ab.
It has an undisclosed number of pro users who pay $25 a year for special features that include synchronisation with Treo Smartphones and Windows Mobile.
Pro users also can use the RTM iPhone application, which Apple awarded the Best iPhone Application for 2008.
This award contributed to 60,000 new users during two weeks in June alone.
Three years ago, the duo did not have great expectations for the future of what they thought was “a pretty cool application”.
Their plan was to try to spread the word about RTM through word of mouth.
“We weren’t really expecting much,” Kilani, 25, says.
“People weren’t really talking about viral then. It wasn’t a strategy we thought about. People liked RTM and posted about it and that was it. It grew from there.”
He says it started becoming popular after being saved to the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.
It took only days after going live in October 2005 for the influential Web 2.0-focused blog Techcrunch to take notice of the neat user interface.
It lauded features including its colour-coded system, flexibility in setting done-by dates and the way it allowed tags (or metadata) to be associated with tasks.
“It’s all word of mouth,” Kilani says.
“That takes a while, but after some time it’s like a snowball effect.”
Many companies in the Web 2.0 space have spent millions to get to this point.
But there are few rules on the net.
In August 2004, the duo, who met while studying part-time at the University of Technology Sydney, began developing the application.
Their main investment was time, both working late nights while they kept their day jobs.
Global expansion was helped by a team of enthusiastic volunteer RTM users who translated it into about 24 languages (crowdsourcing).
While no language gets preference over the other, the popularity of RTM in Japan led to the appointment in 2007 of the team’s Japanese blogger, Hiroshi Miyazaki.
Kilani’s and Boyd’s aim is to ensure that RTM is available through as many desktop, web and phone platforms as possible.
“One of our directives is to build as many interfaces to RTM mainly because everybody wants a different way to access their tasks, a different way of doing their tasks,” Kilani says.
“We want it be wherever people want it to be to make it easier to put things into RTM.”
This itself has contributed to promoting of RTM creating a stream of news and blog discussions each time another spin on the application goes live.
Now reminders can be received or added to the system through email, SMS and instant messenger in addition to desktop widgets and the traditional browser interface.
It also can be manipulated via Gmail, Google Calendar and Twitter in addition to the new generation of smartphones.
Kilani, who is largely self-taught, says that creating the application wasn’t without challenges.
The project was kick-started by the arrival of one of the web’s first major AJAX application, Google’s Gmail.
“It wasn’t a steep learning curve but there are a lot of issues to work around,” Kilani says.
“These included things such as browser compatibility and just working out how the programming environment worked.
“Back then there weren’t many people doing this stuff. It was pretty much just Gmail.”
Nowadays venture capitalists are knocking on what they unexpectedly find to be RTMs Sydney door. But the team aren’t ready to sell out yet as they want the right fit.
“It wasn’t like, ‘hey, let’s go and make lots of money’,” says Kilani. “It was more like, ‘let’s go and build something cool’.”