What's This Kindling Thing?

A year ago, I had an idea about ideas.

Well, let me back up. I’m Chris Dary, Lead Product Architect here at Arc90, and I want to kick things off by telling the story of how Kindling came about over the past year, from its inception to its entrance into the “innovation management” market, and why we think it’s so cool. The story isn’t grand. Really, I’m just some kid who ran with an idea.

Background

In January of 2007, I made the life-changing decision to move to New York from Wisconsin and join Arc. It was a big step, but I was fresh out of college and with no anchors to weigh me down – I figured it was as good a time as any to get out. I did my research and Arc sounded exactly like what I was looking for — it had a great culture and smart, passionate people.

And it was everything I expected and more. In fact, I had some serious culture shock. Everyone around me had… ideas. Big or small, right or wrong, people were always looking to change things up. It was awesome… and a bit jarring at first.

With essentially no plan, and living in the Manhattan YMCA with just the two suitcases I had lugged along, I found myself with a good amount of time to think about all of this.

New Perspectives

It’s important to note why this flood of ideas fascinated me. The people at Arc were used to it – they knew that everyone around them had ideas and were used to hearing about them. And maybe everyone once in a while one of them would come to fruition.

The key thing here is that this was new to me, and as a result, my different perspective inspired me. I wasn’t bombarded with potential brilliance all the time at my old job. And now that I was, I felt like I should do something about it.

Experiencing new and different perspectives can be key to igniting a spark of imagination that has the potential to create something great.

Fueling the Inspiration

I started reading. The first book I picked up was Ideas are Free — a management book written by two business consultants. It was a little off of my literary beaten path – but seeing the notion of idea generation first from a non-technical perspective was extremely useful down the line. It helped me to stay grounded in concepts that are actually useful within an organization.

After Ideas are Free, The Wisdom of Crowds is what really got me motivated to make something tangible out of this concept. It was a little closer to my technological roots and I started thinking about how I could really empower the brilliance of the people around me.

Just Frickin’ Code It Already

The first thing I came up with was Kindling’s name and then I let it gestate for a while. It wasn’t until November of ’07 that I really got serious about Kindling. By then I was sick of thinking and decided to just started coding. This was probably the most important part of the process.

I’ve tried not to get into advice-giving so far, but I’ve gotta do it: if you’ve got an idea, don’t overthink it! Just code. You’ll motivate yourself, find and fix flaws, and actually have something to show for your time. It’s the best thing I did.

Dogfooding

We started using an early version of Kindling in the office in late November and it saw considerable success. Within the first two weeks we saw a pretty wide range of ideas. Things like “Create an Arc90 Fellowship Program,” which was completed, “Externalize our Version Control System,” which was rejected, and “Release Kindling as the first Arc90 Product,” which is being completed as I type this.

The important takeaway here is that creating and using a proof of concept was key to Kindling’s success. The UI wasn’t polished, there weren’t many killer features, and there was still a lot of fleshing out to do. But we immediately saw the value proposition and after a couple of months of strong use, we started to contemplate what it would take to make Kindling a public product.

Product

The birth of Kindling wasn’t a mad scientist style “I will change the world” sort of vision, but that’s what makes it interesting. Invention is bred by action. Even modest action can lead to large results. This is embodied in Kindling, both in how it was created and how it is used.

I didn’t start by envisioning the Next Arc90 Product. I started by thinking about something that I noticed around me that I wanted to make better, and it snowballed from there. This is all very meta because the process through which Kindling was created is embodied directly within its software: small ideas, just like Kindling itself was, can turn into something larger and potentially hugely valuable for an organization. And encouraging those types of ideas within organizations – through Kindling – is something I’m very proud to be a part of.