Dream See Do is a coach and teacher-led group learning platform that helps people practice skills like emotional intelligence, mindfulness and leadership. Built for individuals, coaches and companies. We think it's more fun to learn together :)
I co-founded nReduce, which is an online startup incubator. It became a global community of 3000+ founders who posted weekly video updates, gave each other feedback, tips, and support on their businesses. I woud describe it as an 'experiential learning platform', where insights are spread quickly from startup to startup over weekly video updates.
My co-founder Joe Mellin (Stanford d.school graduate and UX/product designer) and I traveled to learn the challenges founders face - in NYC, Boston, Seattle, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, Singapore, and Berlin. We spent time interviewing them to learn about their businesses, showed them prototypes of features that we were working on that week, and ran usability tests to hone features that were live. I found that most founders face the same challenges: building the right product that customers need, finding those customers cheaply enough, working with co-founders, and figuring out ways to handle the emotional stress.
We also organized 15 local meetings around the world, and personally ran a SF meeting with guest entrepreneurs and mentors. Each week we prototyped new ideas of what to run through - from customer development to fundraising. After seeing if it was successful we would share our learnings with the other local leaders around the world, and get feedback from them.
We ran online demo days, where 5k people came each month to ask selected founders questions about their startup in real time over video.
I built the site (in a garage - see pic :) using Rails with various video platform integrations. Joe focused primarily on UX and design, customer need-finding, customer service, and anything else non-technical! We equally shared the process of user testing and creatively coming up with features to solve our user's needs.
More:
Our AngelList profile
VentureBeat article
PandoDaily article
[ iew Site ]
I was part of team Plinq that competed on the tartupBus 72-hour hackathon from Copenhagen to Paris in December 2012. Our concept: learn to play a song in less than a minute, and share your performance with your friends. We won 2nd place in the competition of 22 startups!
We had a hunch that a lot of people aspire to play an instrument. They may have have when they were a kid, or they just want to feel more creative and competent. We tested that hypothesis by using rough prototypes in Keynote, and found that people responded happily with a smile on their faces - we were on to something!
We also wanted it to be simple and familier - so we decided to use the computer keyboard. We wanted anyone to be able to play a recognizable tune within a minute, so we continued to iterate on the design, simplifying the interface to only display the keys you needed to play (not worrying about note names, timing or chords).
Our app was completely functional y the time we arrived in Paris. We had over 1000 "performances" within the first 24 hours of launching, which demonstrated the clear demand for an easy and fun way to play music.
Our team of Joe Mellin (USA), Patrick Cohen (Netherlands), Thomas Van Orshaegen (Belgium) and myself had a ton of fun - besides working hard, we literally laughed and danced the whole way to Paris. The team can make the whole experience magical!
I built the site in Backbone JS with a Rails/Mongo JSON API, and was the co-leader of the bus dance party from Cologne to Paris :)
[ View Site ]
EBT is an innovative method of emotional therapy that helps people better deal with stress. It uses proven methodologies of improving brain plasticity, to help people with obesity, alcohol and drug addictions, and the rest of us bring more joy to our lives and kick our bad habits. We could all use more of that, right? :D
I was the primary developer, and my friend Max Masnick also worked with me remotely; we used Pivotal Tracker for project management.
EBT is a Rails-based website that features Stripe payments integration, a Twilio-backed custom phone system, provider profiles, group management, and an e-learning platform.
[ View Site ]
The Stanford d.school was launching their design thinking crash course to coincide with David Kelley speaking at TED, and wanted a fun way to show engagement around it.
I worked with my friend Max Masnick to ideate with creative consultant Janetti Chon and d.school prof Jeremy Utley. We wanted to create a live map that visually showed where people were participating in the course.
After drawing inspiration from other full-screen map app experiences, we decided to keep it simple, and represent interactions with a circle. The circle varied in size depending on how many people took the course in that location. We used vibrant, warm colors to highlight the most recent interactions. At the bottom we displayed a rotating banner of tweets with the #dschool hashtag to encourage Twitter discussion.
Max and I built the site in Backbone JS, Raphael JS & Rails.
The Stanford d.school held a hackathon and invited participants to help them bring design thinking to the world. After the usual hackathon teammate mingle, I joined forces with Dianna Kane, Katie Johnson and Poyi Chen. To cut to the chase, we demonstrated a fully functional app in 48 hours and won the hackathon.
We started talking about how to communicate design thinking, and realized that it's difficult and messy to document the process, but that's the important part.
We thought if we could create a simple interface to capture the information gathering and creative processes, it would help individuals and teams learn from each other no matter what they were working on around the world.
We decided to use sticky notes as the primary unit of information to keep a rough prototype feel. We wanted people to be able to post text, images or videos, and re-arrange them in a virtual canvas.
We also wanted people to be able to collaborate remotely - so I built in real-time updating so that someone in the field on an iPad could easily collaborate with someone in the office on their computer and see updates immediately.
To keep up to date on interesting projects or people, you can "follow" them. Additionally, you can clone other canvases so that you can quickly build on their process or ideas.
I was responsible for building the Rails backend & HTML5/Coffeescript frontend.
[ Private demo available - ask me ]
I pitched this on the 2011 StartupBus, which is a 72-hour hackathon from San Francisco to Austin. The idea: easily find where you can go on your airline miles, across all of your accounts.
Seven other people joined me after hearing the pitch. After some customer development, we worked 48 sleepless hours, and competed in the semi-finals. We made it into the final pitch competition, where I presented a live demo to Dave McClure, Naval Ravikant and Joshua Baer.
After the competition I continued to develop the idea: I did customer development, built a fully functional MVP in Rails, and amassed multiple advisors in the travel industry.
The travel industry is really quite small and close knit. Data is king. Since I couldn't pay for any, I scraped as much as I could. I had to manually copy route pricing tables from the airlines, and ended up building a quick data collection interface to make the process easier.
The airlines weren't willing to give me access to real-time award ticket availability (well some at a very high price, some not at all), which was crucial to compelling value proposition. After talking to my advisors in the travel industry I knew this was highly unlikely, and not available at any price from some airlines.
I decided to shut down the business because I didn't feel like I wanted to endure fighting the airlines and didn't see a business model that would support the data costs. I decided it wasn't worth raising the venture capital if there wasn't a compelling business potential.
It was a shame because I was passionate about the idea and I could tell there was very strong consumer demand for a simple and effective product like this.
The original prototype built on the bus was a collaboration of four back and front-end developers, a designer, two business-minded teammates and myself. After the competition I refactored some of the hackathon-era code, and drastically simplified the interface. The site is built in Rails with Google Maps integration and lots of custom JavaScript.
[ View Site ]
I co-founded this site along with Stephen Gotlieb (Berkeley Haas MBA graduate) and three travel industry veterans (Expedia, Everbread) as advisors. We wanted to help travelers easily compare and find the right flight for them. I built a browser extension that would allow you to quickly search across all travel sites and pin any flights you liked to a trip board. It made it easy to compare them, get updated prices, and share the trip board to help people traveling with others to quickly communicate the flight options and make a decision. The end goal was to create a personalized travel search engine that understood a traveler's decision process and trip persona (ex: business, friends, family), to narrow down the millions of options out there.
I built the site using a Rails/Mongo DB backend and Spine/Coffeescript frontend that ran as a Chrome Extension. To add pin buttons to every travel site I had to write a custom Javascript parser framework. Unfortunately the travel sites often changed, and broke the parsers, so I implemented Capybara/Selenium integration tests that simulated searching for flights in-browser to ensure I would know as soon as a site changed.
I decided to leave after completing a functional private beta - Stephen is still running the business today.
The goal was to make news interesting to young people. Newzwag was a startup fully funded by the french news wire Agence France-Presse (AFP). I joined Jon Dillon and David Millikin as the lead developer. I hired a small, nimble team of one developer, one designer, and dev contractors when needed. We also had an in-house team of editors that wrote questions daily.
We built a current events quiz game, and decided to test it out by launching it as a Facebook app (back when it was easy to get news feed distribution). It quickly gained a dedicated (addicted!) group of followers.
Each day you could compete against others and test your news knowledge with witty text and photo-based questions. The quicker you answered, the more points you got, and you could unlock various 'cheats' that you could use in times of need.
After building a custom analytics suite to optimize activation and retention rates, we looked for other opportunities to market the product. We licensed the quiz for the Olympics to various news sites like Yahoo! and ESPN - this required considerable work in scaling the app to handle the 100k people who played it. We did lots of DB tuning, custom in-memory caching (that still enabled real-time gameplay), and tested it under simulated load.
We also built a "Question Factory" CMS which was a complete question-writing and quiz authoring Rails site for our editors.
When starting the job I hadn't practiced agile process, but after reading about it and talking to a few mentors, we began doing development based on user stories, with week-long sprints, and weekly standups. It vastly improved our accountability to create value for our users each week, and it is a process I continue to this day, with some modifications.
