The focus of the past month was in structuring a pair of staggered monthly events that should hopefully create a flywheel of increasing interest and participation locally here in Lisbon drawing new people into the Stone Soup universe. I held the first Nocode Lisboa “live cooking” session of the year where I built an app on-the-fly in front of an audience:
This Saturday, I’m running the monthly companion event to this where we get a small group together in person and do an OpenStartup jam session to attempt to move forward the projects in the current library. All of these events and projects are managed via the Stone Soup platform.
Other Wins
- 351 Startups (the group that runs the Startup Weekend events in Portugal) now has their own Stone Soup portal and has agreed to pilot the platform at the next Startup Weekend as a way for teams to continue their projects after the event. I’m on the volunteer team coordinating mentors for the next 3 Startup Weekends in Portugal.
- I solved a perplexing bug that crept in somehow on the last release of the n8n platform which was breaking our AI smart intros feature. It ultimately came down to a change in how text search worked but tracing it down to that culprit was a… journey.
- As a part of my ongoing effort to prune a bunch of the SaaS we’re paying for and consolidate to open source equivalent apps running on our own infrastructure I was able to get the open source self-hosted version of Supabase running on GCP. I’m still fighting a glitch with the realtime docker container but I actually don’t think we need it given the features we’re currently using so punting for now on this.
- We have Message Everywhere on the 1yrd line. It’s currently deployed and running in production for Creighton and we are in final phases of packaging it for distribution in the Bubble Template Marketplace hoping to submit tomorrow pending the answer to a key question on how we can syndicate updates to users going forward. This will come down to the wire as we have a deadline at the end of this month for the Bridge the Gap bounty.
What I’m Thinking
- I go back and forth on what emphasis I should be putting on trying to sell Stone Soup as a B2B platform for corporates. I think there is a product there and revenue to be had but that is a significant divergence from the path of just being our own customer, growing the community via events and trying to get to a portfolio of passive income-generating apps for our members. We just had our quarterly advisory call and my takeaway is a focus on signing key partners like TechStars, Hult Prize & Xprize is likely the right path.
Open Questions
Copy/pasting my agenda from our quarterly advisory call below:
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Balancing the B2C emphasis of building these movements and getting results without trying to sell software vs. doing what i know how to do here and go B2B selling this fabric into enterprises for internal hackathons, cross-departmental collab, engaging external stakeholders, etc. Pro’s / Con’s to each path so evaluating proper emphasis - less effective to try and do both simultaneously
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Optimal approach for reliably finding bounty funders: partnerships with orgs vs. hunting philanthropic HNWI’s and conveying the vision (how I landed the first one)
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How to best leverage the technical help I currently have here in PT and at our events. Sanity-check my prioritization of our roadmap
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Validity of the revenue model Jeff and I have envisioned for taking a % of successfully-awarded bounties and any improvements or potential snags
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Time to spinoff Stone Soup from Grid7, LLC? If so what structure - non-profit vs. DAO vs. for-profit entity types…
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
- Cutover our RAG app from the commercial SaaS version of Supabase to our self-hosted instance and eliminate that cost.
- Implement the necessary logic to accommodate the bounty award (or rejection depending on how it goes).
Project Success
- Help Message Everywhere improve their odds as much as possible.
- Get Lunch Mixer deployed in Lisbon.
Events
- Ongoing cadence of Nocode Lisboa and OpenStartup
Content
- No pods planned.
- I got a boom mic and clip-on webcam to be able to do livestreaming and depending on how proficient I become with the AI builder tools I may tinker with making a Twitch stream to see if there’s any demand for this.
Traffic Snapshot
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.