Update for July
The main thing I’ve been working on this past month is developing a proof of concept for a site that I can take to various sponsors in the nomad travel space to secure prize bounties to incentivize participation from nomad volunteers. So far I’ve developed this:
It’s fairly jhankey, doesn’t work on mobile yet and none of those sponsors (besides Pagely & Le Wagon) have committed yet but the idea is to run a global “fixathon” where we open it up for anyone to either bring a team or join a team to work on these issues. Sponsors provide prizes to the teams who generate the most promising work product during the competition.
Think "(Startup Weekend + X Prize) x (Upwork + Startup Weekend)
Not entirely sure where this is headed but it’s some amalgamation of ideas from the above endeavors. By focusing on recruiting volunteers from the Nomad, location-independent knowledge worker realm it should be easier to market. And that community is particularly well-suited for this for it to be the beach head.
Other Wins
I got Discord setup and integrated with the site. I created a sponsorship directory. I made an embedded widget for the homepage that allows anyone to quickly see the problems currently tracked, the projects proposed and where in the world volunteers are.
Challenges
It’s a fairly lone-wolf existence right now. I’m doing YCombinator’s Startup School with the intent of keeping accountable for making progress, reaffirming many of the things I already learned from my first startup and ideally finding a Bubble.io whiz co-founder to take over some of the development work and free me up for the bizdev/evangelism work.
August Focus
Platform
This month I plan to launch the new version of the site in relatively short order then do some outreach to the various target sponsors and try to secure minimal commitments for our first “global fixathon” challenge. I need to build the minimal amount of functionality necessary to support all that that entails.
Project Success
I’m looking into applying for the Filecoin Green Grants Program to get one of our projects funded. We’ve had essentially no participation outside of the physical hackathon events and my thesis is that if we get some funds allocated and treat this as a formal paid project then that is what’s needed to advance things and take it seriously. We need to focus on making one of these projects successful and then use that success to fuel interest and recruitment for others. Worrying about building out the platform anything beyond the barebones minimum necessary to support the global fixathon MVP is premature.
Events
I’m in contact with Nova Business School in Carcavelos, PT to coordinate our next hackathon to coincide with the start of their school year. That should be a fountain of the MBA types we need to formulate things from the business side and I’m planning to draw from the different coding academies and tech groups here for volunteers on the technical dev side.
Content
At this point I’m deferring publishing any new podcast episodes because we are not bottlenecked by lack of problems to work on but rather these other issues I’ve listed above. I do have some good leads on various potential experts to interview on the issue of Urban Sustainability which seems to be the issue that the Lisbon group is most interested in next. I’ll resume podcast episode publishing once we get once through the cycle successfully of launching a project successfully completed by a team.
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.