It’s actually kind of amazing we’re launching ButtonALL this week.  I’m looking at our Basecamp (yeah, that’s what we picked as our collaborative/PM tool.  You could say, we’re sort of 37Signals fanboys.), and we literally started this project on May 14.  Four guys (that’s one less than the hamburger chain), two weeks, and, Good Lord, we have a fully armed and operational “search engine.”  Technically, a meta-search engine, but, nonetheless, it’s funny how the biggest expense of this enterprise up to this point was a “World’s Biggest Breakfast” platter at Satterwhites country restaurant in beautiful Goochland County, Virginia.

OK, some caveats…“Blueprints” for the project have been sitting around for a while.  4What has a kick-ass software engineer, Mr. Wray Mills, leading the way for our development team.  Wray is the Ruby on Rails Rock Star (say that 5 times quickly) that single-handedly coded Xerpi, one of the best social bookmarking sites on the Internet (more yummy than del.icio.us).  If you ever wanted a “favorites” web page with drag n drop functionality that you could access from any computer, then you should test-drive Xerpi (here’s an example page for any anime fans out there)….

It also helps that Buttonall is temporarily “sleeping on the couch” of Wray’s existing rails server.  This blog, by the way, is being hosted separately on a cheapo $5.95/month plan (cheaper than Biggest Breakfast) preloaded with Wordpress.  The spartan design of the blog is my doing.  I’m still learning how to pimp Wordpress, so please be patient with me.  

This week we are setting out on our ambitious (no-budget) marketing plan.  We’ll try pitching the story to a couple of local media contacts (see if we can get an “earned” story.  Perhaps, they’ll like the whole Richmond home grown angle).  Our first press release will be embargoed until we hear back from them.

Once local media has been notified, we’ll shoot out a national press release, primarily for SEO purposes (get buttonall.com recognized by the spiders).  I don’t think we’ll get any national media enquiries out of this.  That’s only going to happen if we continue to build a good, solid product.  I think our Red Button releases and companion blog will also draw some curious readers in.

Man, imagine if we were doing this full-time…