How I failed to stop the Pandemic
At the beginning of the Pandemic, I recognized something. During a national crisis if you don’t have access to technology it is extremely difficult to get help even though there are organizations that are being provided with donations to help. It’s a Global problem. The problem of getting the right resources to the right people at the right time. So I developed an idea to connect an automated SMS and voice call service to a mobile app (created with no-code) that allowed people at the highest risk to access services with little technology and allowed organizations to easily manage requests for resources (food, water etc.).
The concept: Vulnerable people text what they need and organizations can manage requests and fulfillment processes with an app.
It turns out that changing the world isn’t as easy as writing a line of code. Here’s what I learned in my failed project:
We didn’t build enough hype
When developing products marketing is everything. You have to get people excited about your product and vision. There was little to no effort to market the product on my end from contacting media outlets, podcasts, and blogs to simply social media marketing. Even though we had volunteers open to assist, I didn’t develop the structure to give them a foundation to build on. Your project isn’t just a project if 1) it has a real-world impact and 2) people are to contribute to it. You have to provide some structure that others can build upon. Spend a little time thinking about how you can develop products and businesses in a way that it’s easy for others to contribute.
Spend a little time thinking about how you can develop products and businesses in a way that it’s easy for others to contribute.
The team grew too quickly
I initially kicked the project off which was cool but couldn’t really get inertia by myself. I reached out to others because I thought the more hands the better. Wrong! Within a month we had 25 volunteers outside the core team of about 5/6 people. We had a business team and tech team, multiple WhatsApp channels, a slack channel, a Trello board, and more. We would have weekly meetings and outside the fact I’m not a big fan of meetings. It was moving faster than I could control.
Bringing people on your team without specific ways for them to continuously contribute and feel like they’re having an impact is a bad idea.
I wasn’t aggressive enough with my vision
The team wanted clear direction whereas I wanted to co-create the vision. Even though I had a clear idea of what I wanted, I’m personally invested in redefining what team collaboration looks like. I didn’t want to be authoritative and to tell the team what to do and how to do it. This created confusion. The team we’re unsure of responsibilities and where we were going. I’m anti-business plan and written strategy in the early stages of projects because everything is changing so fast but it would have provided a clear indication of the journey we were on together. I think it’s important to remember that as a creator your style of working might be absurd and comfortable for others. When working in teams it’s important to find a middle ground that everybody is comfortable with.
It’s important to remember that as a creator your style of working might be absurd and comfortable for others. When working in teams it’s important to find a middle ground that everybody is comfortable with.
I didn’t communicate enough
Anytime you’re working in a team, the sign that things are going badly is that the members are quiet. Even though I founded the project, I allocated responsibility for the “business unit” and I placed myself in a position akin to CTO and I frequently missed meetings with the business members. I placed an overemphasize on the tech and didn’t focus enough on making sure everybody in the entire team was comfortable, felt valued,
The product wasn’t intuitive to deploy
The advantage with a SaaS platform is that once you sign up you generally can hit the ground running. We developed a platform that was quickly put together (a couple of weeks) but because it was “hacked” together we thought about the simple function of the product but not the user experience as a whole. Here I specifically mean how we onboard charities and emergency response organizations? How easy it is to set up without our team? We used. Twilio Autopilot to handle the sms and voice automation which required manual setup. We used some code hosted on AWS to appended the JSON answers from a Google Spreadsheet. The Google Spreadsheet served as the backend for a Glide App but this app has to be manually configured. This whole process is unrealistic to expect charitable organizations to do. A one-click deploy service was needed.
I believed that I could save the world
Bad things are going to happen. The greatest mistake I made as a creator is thinking my technology could change everything for the entire world. I cannot stop bad things from happening. I can inspire others to fight the good fight and I can be a part of a collective solution. To understand that is what it means to be a leader. My intention was good, my execution was immature.
Hopefully, you learn from some of my lessons in building The Hero Helper Project with a team. I could continue to list the mistakes I made and lessons I learned but is save it for another post.