#5 Building the Hopper & Making Internet Friends
Hello! We’re officially in the thick of the holiday season—in just a couple days I head out to Washington D.C. to meet my nephew Ford (oh yeah, and celebrate Christmas).
Please take in the details of 9-week-old Ford: his little Buddha-belly, dinosaur sheets, and general awesomeness. Photo courtesy of Alexis & Rob Maximos. Washington, DC—December 2019.
This week I’ve got two topics to cover: 1) Meaning, Inc is building out the prototype to test the Hopper—we’re expecting to have a working app to test… tomorrow! Merry Christmas, to us; and 2) joining online communities—I’ve found two communities that I really like, one for women in tech and another for remote workers. Let’s dive in!
🐰The Hopper prototype is on its way!
The roller-coaster ride of creative production and release
It’s hard work to create something new, to bring it into the world—lots of fits and starts, frustrations, and let’s be honest the occasional temper tantrum. But, the output of that effort can be deeply satisfying, the hard work is behind you, and there’s a sense of accomplishment about your creation.
Then it comes time to share what you’ve made, cue the inner critic:
“I have no idea about how this is going to be received.”
“Oh yeah, this is real good. I’ve really outdone myself this time. Best thing I’ve ever created.”
“This isn’t good enough to release.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. To hell with the fact that it took 2 weeks to build - I should have never made the thing.”
I know it’s not just me, that sharing any kind of creative endeavor—no matter how small—has a psychic effect. It’s a mixed bag of thoughts, emotions, and experiences, (hopefully) resulting in a release. A sharing of your creation. It’s exciting, terrifying, satisfying. All at once.
This is where we’re at with the Hopper, the thinking tool we’re in the process of building—we’re getting closer to sharing and testing the product—it’s both extremely exciting and terrifying! What if it doesn’t work like we want it to, what if it feels flat, what if we have weeks of tinkering to-do, what if nobody wants to use it? Who can know! For now, in order to move to the next phase, our focus has turned to frontend development.
Filling in the frontend
This is a nice little diagram to explain the whole software development thing. Generally speaking, Dave leads user experience/interaction, and Gustavo leads app development. I lurk in the user experience area a bit.
This past week we contracted with a frontend developer to fill a gap between Gustavo and Dave’s areas of expertise. Gustavo is a backend mastermind and Dave is a design whiz—while both of them could get into the frontend work, it’s more cost and time effective to hire this work out.
With our frontend built, we’ll have a working prototype to use! Tomorrow. Don’t get too excited—this’ll be a rough draft. There’s about 8 million rough drafts when creating software, but I’m particularly excited about this one because it will bring our idea to life.
Once we have the prototype, Dave will start tinkering with the user interface — smoothing out the flow and buttoning up the interactions. This entails some amount of working in the frontend code. Gustavo will make sure everything is tied to the backend, so the servers and databases can run seamlessly.
After Dave and Gustavo iron out the kinks, and the Hopper is functional, the 3 of us will take it for a test drive to get a feel for what it’s like to use the thing. The plan is to launch a prototype experiment with a small cohort of folks, likely sometime in mid-January.
Next up: prototype experiment
I’m leading the design of the prototype experiment, which is largely user experience focused: figuring out how to onboard folks to the tool, documenting the qualitative and quantitative analysis we are interested in capturing, figuring out the communication processes with the test group, and more. More details in the coming weeks as the process unfolds!
💻Get a Life, Online!
On my journey into internet self-discovery, I’ve found two exciting online communities: Elpha: a personal and professional community for women in tech, and Workfrom: a remote work community. Here’s a bit about my experiences jumping into the fray.
Elpha: a forum style community
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve spent a good amount of time poring over hundreds of posts on Elpha. The community uses a forum style, where women post about a variety of different topics: looking for help in negotiating a job offer, offering advice as a venture capital investor, venting about the strain of building a business and the impact on romantic relationships, and so on.
Elpha is exciting and relieving to me—finding a community of women who are supporting one another, being vulnerable in sharing their stories, and making new connections to benefit their personal lives and their businesses.
Here’s a snapshot of my exploration of Elpha so far:
-I connected with the CEO of a Chicago-based healthcare startup, Maggie, who was looking for women board members and it sounded like a perfect fit for my friend Gayle. The startup is called Uphold Health, and is focused on end-of-life, advanced care planning.
-I attended a holiday party in SF where I met a diverse group of women, working on all kinds of interesting endeavors: fintech, job matching and career development, women’s health, event planning, and personal finance (check out Natalee’s app Censibly!). I also met Cadran, the CEO/co-founder of Elpha (she also lives in Oakland!).
-I met Helena who is beta-testing her app Gravitate, which matches people in the Bay Area to connect in-person, over food, for conversation. I look forward to giving the app a try when I get back from Christmas travel—who knows who I’ll meet!
Workfrom: a Slack community
I joined Workfrom this week and it’s been a great experience. So far, I’ve only explored the Slack community, where I introduced myself, sharing a bit about my background and about the Hopper. A number of people were curious about what we’re building, which spurred some interesting conversation and connections.
Gustavo and I are talking to one of my new connects on Monday, a developer who likes brainstorming product ideas and wants to know how he can help with the engineering side of our work. I also spent a few hours Wednesday chatting with another engineer/data scientist. He is building a tool to improve social media, making it a more positive experience that betters the world.
I had the opportunity to offer advice to someone about a networking opportunity. And I learned about a number of interesting remote work tools, for example: Krisp mutes background noise so you can take calls from anywhere. With such a warm welcome, I’m looking forward to continuing to explore Workfrom.
🐦On Deck: How I’m Using Twitter
Sometime in the near future, I’ll share my experience in using Twitter—it’s such an odd and wonderful invention, and I’m still figuring out how I like to use the platform. Here’s a sneak-peak into my Twitter world: a conversation I joined about remote work, started by one of the co-founders of Workfrom.
Until next time, Happy Holidays!