Well that was quick… already time for another update. This has been probably the single most productive month of my nocoder existence. Feels like I’ve hit a level of proficiency in Bubble where I’m truly en fuego. I’ve been able to knock out some really important features this past month.
Let’s examine last month’s list and see what got done…
So this is a huge cornerstone piece and finally gives us a robust, unified notifications system that gives the user a great deal of control to receive updates about stuff he/she cares about and under his/her terms. If you go to your profile you’ll notice a new block of options under the last section that enables you to granularly define what stuff you want updates on and how frequently you want to receive communications.
Want real-time updates? No problem. Want to throttle comms so you only receive one roll-up message daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly? You got it. This sets the stage to now also enable the user to choose a mix of comms channels whether it be email, WhatsApp, SMS, Discord and messages via potentially any other medium that has an API to send a message.
This was a big feature to build but I’m really glad we now have it. I chose to build it custom from scratch after researching implementing using sync to a 3rd party system like ActiveCampaign. This took longer but gives us way more flexibility and none of the syncing headaches of maintaining 2 sets of all contacts and tag matching across systems. This feature should go a long ways towards improving engagement and retention and keep people informed on the stuff they care about.
Did not execute this ^^ though all the pieces are now in place with the pubsub message bus being the precursor to this. Just need to create some trip-wire logic to do lookups upon new project approval and write pending messages to the queue for the appropriate recipients. Easy peasy.
Likewise I did not get to this. A bunch of other unforeseen features took precedence. Good news is Marko knows how to do his thing for our next pair of Lisbon events and for sure before the next events I’ll have this babysitting function automated and sending messages via the pubsub system.
So I realized using the “One Thing” lens that fighting no-shows was the wrong expenditure of calories and that the one thing that by delivering it makes this irrelevant is attracting real investors to be the judges at this next one and put capital into some of the projects using the system. That should improve no-shows greatly and the ones that are still no-show after that change weren’t going to come with any amount of accountability instrumentation.
I built the member pages that make it possible to traverse members, projects and events now fluidly. Borrowing inspiration from Ray Dalio’s “Baseball Card” concept for facilitating employee collaboration these one-page member profiles should help greatly in team formation and people finding the right projects.
Other Wins
I knocked out a bunch of other features including:
- Custom-tailored onboarding instructions when applying for an event so they receive only instructions relevant to the role they’re playing.
- Fixing a number of UI/UX issues on mobile.
- Making a “Watch this Project” feature right on the project page for logged-in users.
- Adding a reservation step to the bounty program so a prospective worker can flag that they’re working on an issue and commit to a delivery date.
- Fixed one-way payments so trades no longer require consideration (can now just pay people freely)
- Added capability for project creators to specify a token allocation for Problemattic (this will be our model going forward) and now the system auto-fulfills this token grant upon project approval. We can then make decisions about where to allocate extra energy with this being just another variable in that equation.
- Deleting an asset now no longer deletes the wallet thereby preserving any lineage if it was traded.
What else
While building all this stuff I managed to also coordinate our next pair of events. I’ve got a full plate right now planning for our next hackathon weekends. I’ve decided to split what was previously a Saturday/Sunday combo into a back-to-back Saturday event for April 15th and 22nd.
I had a major epiphany on the missing piece as far as how everything ties together in terms of aligning all the stakeholders and implementing bounties at the Problem level. I’ll explain this whiteboard in a future post once I’ve implemented things. For now I’m not entirely sure this isn’t just me hallucinating the grand unified theory here but I think this is how we execute retroactive public goods funding IRL in a domain outside of crypto projects and make this model work for social impact projects:
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
I’m gunning to implement everything we need to make our next pair of events in April successful. I’ve successfully courted a few impact investors to plunk down real capital for winning projects and I’m now trying to integrate this concept of one layer higher with the Benefactor model doing a bounty at the Problem level. The main things i hope to implement in March are:
- Metrics, Results, Outcomes, Benefactors and Outcome Bounties: this is the missing central piece from the above diagram.
- Compelling gamification for pushing event promo out to others: Right now I’m the one running around town putting up posters, emailing community leaders, posting in various community slack groups and that doesn’t scale. With the tokenization of the projects enabled by the new trading platform + the referral tracking system I built, I can now do proper attribution and grant a small originator’s fee cut of project tokens anytime someone comes via a referral link and ends up creating a project that gets approved.
- It’s time to implement a proper email deliverability service and get all the social media accounts setup and automated feeding out of a central source.
- I want to expose all Trades and make it so everyone is playing an open hand showing even pending unapproved Trade proposals. This should make for a really interesting dynamic and enable (amongst other things) our investors to make real-time visible offers to the projects during the judging.
Project Success
We’ll see what projects come out of the April event but I’m intending to put some energy behind making one of them successful so we can finally celebrate a win and show some real impact. I’ve spent this whole time building the factory but we now need to have one of the racecars actually win a race 
Events
April 15th and 22nd it’s on!
Content
I’m interviewing Jeff Boles of Creighton Commuinity Foundation next week to revive the podcast and get that flowing again. They have a really noble program in south-central Phoenix and need essentially a SMS-based extranet to have that as a lowest common denominator form of mass communication with their low-income constituents. We will open source whatever we develop for them and hopefully other orgs like his can use it as well.
There’s a bunch more stuff I didn’t cover but those are the high points. The technical roadmap as always can be found here. We can always use more remote feedback volunteers for our Apr 15th event. If you’re free that morning please apply here.