The big news this month is we successfully closed our first fully-funded bounty Bridge the Gap for attacking the problems of Digital Inequity and Food Scarcity.
Shoutout to Chris, an anonymous donor in Phoenix for his generosity and leap of faith in our effort here. Message Everywhere is an entirely community-built messaging platform developed by the students of ASU’s EPICS program extending the initial prototype developed by Tonya of ProNocoders. It is a community engagement platform that allows nonprofit community support organizations like Creighton to use SMS at scale as the lowest common denominator for supporting marginalized communities with SNAP and foodbox deliveries. We are in final stages of squashing bugs and performing the heart transplant to swap this system out for the current 3CX-based system Creighton is using. Once that migration is complete ASU students will spend some time polishing the app for distribution then it will be made available for free in the Bubble marketplace along with supporting open-sourced libraries.
October was the month of AI builder tools deep-dive for me. I went all the way down the rabbit hole getting my hands dirty with tools like Bolt/Cursor/Replit/v0 and am close to completion on a Slack app that should serve as a nice funnel for the Stone Soup universe giving us yet another feeder of talent that rolls up into this larger ecosystem. Stay tuned for that app. I just posted this workshop that I’ll be giving later this month in Lisbon where we do a “live cooking” session and build an app from scratch in an hour (and ideally doing 3 different versions with 3 different tools to show how it works). Join that meetup event virtually to get the recording of that talk or if you happen to be in Lisbon come join us live. These tools are absolute game-changers and I’m fairly confident I can save others a lot of trial & error by packaging up my learnings and teaching the basics for how to get proficient with this stuff for developing apps without any formal coding experience.
Other Wins
- Our system now supports truly real-time messages instead of time-delayed async send on everything.
- The Signup link now takes you to a chatbot-based onboarding flow that builds a dossier which is indexed in a vector database and feeds our AI to make sensible introductions. This all occurs within 1min of submission so you get immediately matched now with your counterparts. These onboarding flows and automated matches are a premium feature for paying Stone Soup customers and can be white-labeled to work on
a custom domain like OpenStartup.community. - Speaking of, we now have OpenStartup.community, a new initiative built on the Stone Soup protocol that proposes to make it possible to build commercial startups with complete strangers. It leverages all the underlying apparatus powering Problemattic with the tokenized project management, needs tracking and matching, pubsub model for getting notifications on only the things you care about on your terms. We’re testing this concept out in Lisbon at our first meeting on Nov 18th.
- We now can do custom domains for white-labeled usage of the Stone Soup protocol with any domain or sub domain.
- Users can subscribe to receive notifications of new connections as they occur and as with every message it honors the comms preferences of the user and communicates only at the frequency they request.
Current Challenges
The conversion to supporting white-labeled sites has taken its toll in that we now have very sophisticated queries running on pretty much every page governing things like multiple layers of privacy rules at the tribe and individual level as well as granular control for the tribe owner on what content displays. This is super powerful but is crushing the server right now so we are in process of refactoring some things and implementing query-level caching to try and eek some better performance out of this thing. This Bubble app was originally intended to be just the MVP but years later we’re still running it and it’s evolved to become our production platform. We will at some point likely need to migrate this entire application to a platform like NextJS/Node.js and when we do will take the opportunity to re-envision the whole UI. I am admittedly a terrible designer and there’s a reason this website has the vibe of a mid-90’s website 
The good news is the AI Builder tools have advanced sufficiently to the point where I’m fairly confident even without a technical co-founder I can (worst case) make this transition happen on my own and then we will be in a very good place having had the agility of Bubble for prototyping all this time but now getting the newfound even better agility of prompt-based AI for rapidly developing and deploying features but with no vendor lockin, better performance, extensibility, source control that better supports external contractors and a lower monthly hosting bill (Sean’s wallet looks forward to this day).
Open Questions
At this point my main questions lie around:
- How to as quickly as possible put a bandaid on the current app that’s bleeding WU’s and killing our server.
- How to best capitalize on Web Summit which is next week here in Lisbon. Ideally we’ll have solved the performance issues in time for me to make some noise and throw some real traffic at the site.
- How to partner with orgs like Startup Weekend and Taikai for integrating with their platforms and solving the “project continuance after the event” issues for them. My ask to you: if you could quickly check if you know anyone at Techstars Startup Weekend or Taikai Hackathon Platform any intros would be hugely valuable.
- How to get 28 hours in a day. If anyone figures that one out please lmk.
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
Fix the page load speeds and stop the bleeding with our Work Units getting decimated from sophisticated queries.
Project Success
Get Message Everywhere live for Creighton and get the Slack app working in Lisbon and ideally live in the Slack marketplace.
Events
- Our first OpenStartup Community event ← what do you think of this concept? Would you do this to build an app that you’ve had an idea for that 2yrs later is still languishing? Work with strangers and get it done in a week or two…
- This Nocode Lisboa workshop demonstrating the AI Builder tools for building functional prototypes and production applications without knowing how to code.
Content
If that ^^ goes well I’ll share a recording of the live cooking session.
Traffic Snapshot
^^ hopefully we’ll look back one day and laugh. This is an embarrassing traffic for what this platform does at this point. That’s on me to fix the marketing stuff and I will soon.
As always the technical roadmap as always can be found here.