There are some things – buying your first home (check), getting married (check), having babies (no check) – that seem like you’re never ready for. Those things are always blocked by some other thing in the horizon that you want to wait for before taking the big leap. Determining when you want to get your application is ready to put in front of users apparently is one of those things.

Since the beginning of this year, Neil Green and I have been working on MyNextDive. We’ve always said that we needed this or that feature before we’re ready, but either the features move further and further away, or more ‘must have’ features appear. It was comforting to us that we had technical hurdles facing of us (familiar), instead of non-technical ones (unfamiliar).

MyNextDive has been available online for a few months now, but we’ve never made a concerted effort to get people to our site. If you wanted to find us you could, but the Internet just doesn’t work that way.

So we’ve put a line in the sand. We’ve dropped the features that has so far eluded us, some of which are half done. Some really kick ass features. We’ll come back and revisit them later, but we can’t let them be a drag to us any longer. We need MND going and dragging us along, and not the other way around.

So what is MyNextDive? We want to build the ultimate application for planning scuba vacations. If I have to pick 3 things I want MND to do, it would be:

1. Make planning and discovering scuba trips fun and exciting for divers.
2. Create a place where scuba divers can get together and plan a group vacation together.
3. Create the most comprehensive directory of dive sites on the web.

As you can see, we have a long way to go, and we could use some help. If you’re a scuba diver, please check out MyNextDive and let us know what you think. If you have friends that are scuba divers, please tell them about our site. If you’re just curious and think ‘scuba’ is a funny sounding word, we’d love to hear from you too. Just note that it is still rough around the edges (we’ll be slapping on the mandatory web2.0 ‘beta’ label soon), so please be gentle.

This decision to launch has already provided immediate benefit, because it forced use to focus our energy on figuring out those things unfamiliar. Now we have found a clear path of action, and the clarity is so that I’m very excited for what’s coming next. Stay tuned.