CollabClub was an ambitious project made by the WBE Community to allow people to share their skills through a time-sharing platform. Originally to be completed in a month as a WBE Labs project it stalled and was never completed or launched. Here’s the story, what went wrong and what I learnt
The CollabClub Origin Story
In late last year I came up with an idea that Developers and Marketers should team up to support each other for their projects. As a non-technical founder, I was always struggling with getting Developer help and I could see daily posts from Developers struggling with Marketing. So the idea behind CollabClub was born.
I’d recently joined the Wannabe Entrepreneur community and I pitched an idea to the founder Tiago to run a joint project with the community, and he was game!
We launched this as a joint project in the Wannabe Entrepreneur Community in January and held our first meeting to start the build, with 8 members contributing.
We used a design sprint to work out what problems the product was actually going to solve, had customer interviews and narrowed down the features of the product. All working online using a design-thinking methodology over video calls with a MIRO board. Here’s some of the design work we did as part of the project:
We did do some promotion – making a landing page, a product hunt upcoming page, Twitter profile, and some marketing here and there – but we never actually got into coding the site.
Thanks to Logology!
Big thanks to Dagobert for Sponsoring the project and providing the amazing logo that we got to choose together from Logology! This is us having fun doing our Startup Personality and it really didn’t take long for us to actually choose because of this!
Our final choice was made using lots of Dots on the CollabClub MIRO board! Eventually the team picked what was my favorite too – the Tree with some cool colors 😀
Special Mention
Some thanks to Kazi for letting us use his platform Mixio to put up the landing page for the project!
What Happened? What Went Wrong?
The project was meant to be a proper sprint and completed in just a month. Although we had a few calls, we started to miss deadlines and the project dragged out beyond February and into March then April, and so on until about June when no-one was really motivated to work on it anymore 😥 It was no-one’s fault – it was an ambitious idea and kudos to Tiago for backing it as part of his community efforts.
I think the main issue was just priorities – everyone was doing this as a side project in addition to their own side-projects or full time Indie Making. It was always going to be a drain on everyone’s time and resources.
Was the Concept Flawed?
About the same time we were making CollabClub another maker made Karma Coin (no not the Crypto) but this:
Sadly it seems as though that project has also been scrapped so there may be an underlying issue with the concept in the first place. Although Karma Coin took a different approach as was more transactional in nature than relationship based as we wanted CollabClub to be.
There seems to be demand for this type of platform or service as shown by questions that keep popping up on various Indie Maker forums:
- Developer looking for a marketer to exchange skills (indiehackers.com)
- Skill trade: Design for Dev (indiehackers.com)
- How do you find help for tasks that you aren’t an expert in? (indiehackers.com)
I’m sure there are more, I just haven’t been monitoring for the last few months, and I’ve also seen an increasing number of outsource your Development or Marketing productized services pop-up suggesting there is demand.
Is there any Future in CollabClub?
The Quick Answer is that I hope there is! The long answer is that it depends really 😀 Now that I’ve been getting into NoCode as part of the 100DaysofNoCode I’m hoping that I can quickly build a platform that’ll help people find complementary skills. Interestingly Karma Coin was built in Bubble…
What I Learned from CollabClub
Forging Relationships
I learned so much from the experience even though it didn’t really work out. I got to know some great people within the WBE Community that I didn’t really know before. I’m hoping that these connections can form into amazing long-term relationships to help and support each other on our Indie Making journey.
A Gentle Push into NoCode
I got know a lot more about the processes involved in actually coding and making these types of products, and it dawned on me that it takes too long to make this sort of thing. The impact that that’s had on me is to push me more into NoCode and one the reasons behind me joining the 100DaysofNoCode community.
Talking to Customers
The Design Thinking process was a great way to force some of the conversations that projects need with customers. That combined with the fact that I was reading the “Mom Test” helped me to understand a lot of the common pitfalls that makers fall into about validating their product.
Design Thinking Facilitation Skills
I got to exercise my design Thinking Facilitation Skills, which I hadn’t exercised for over two years which was great. I had so much help from Luise as well which I am forever grateful for – couldn’t have done it without you!
Conclusion
I loved the experience of building (or not!) CollabClub, and I do hope in future that I can pick it up again as I’ve got a certain soft spot for it and I don’t like giving up!