Just launched a project collaboration website. What's next?
I just launched a project-based social networking website called LooseLeaf. The idea is that you can go on LooseLeaf to find interesting projects to work on and people to collaborate on projects together so you can learn skills, build a portfolio to demonstrate your abilities, and network with others like you. I envision this website to benefit people who are making a career change and those who need an affordable way to get their projects done with the help of others (for example, non-profits, entrepreneurs).
I would really appreciate some feedback on the idea, the website UX and features, and general advice about what I should do for LooseLeaf as a next step. I spent the last 5 years bootstrapping LooseLeaf. This is the third iteration of the idea/website I've built thus far.
Hey Xiaoyun - congrats on launching! Now the fun part begins...you need to consistently go out and to talk to your users.
I saw on your profile you originally got inspired by Sam Altman. That means you've probably come across his quote: “At YC, we tell our founders to work on their product, talk to users, exercise, eat, and sleep, and very little else.”
You've built the product. Now do the second part and talk to current users, prospective users, and really anyone and everyone who you can pitch.
Get feedback from them about what they like, what's missing, what they are confused about, etc!
If you feel like you need a little external accountability to get started talking to users, I encourage you to check out my project (www.tribefive.me) and the "30 day talk to users challenge" (inspired by Sam Altman of course). The code to join is "sus-users". If you do join, you'll get paired up with a group of like-minded founders who will help hold you accountable to follow through and take action on this goal =)
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan - Thank you so much! Awesome advice. TribeFive looks like a good resource for entrepreneurs.
Look's nice and interesting but when I tried to save my Profile changes got a lot of 503 errors and now i get only white page everywhere.
Hi Stefan, I looked into the issue. It appears you have successfully created an account with github. Are you able to see the page after you refresh the browser?
yup, but as soon I try to change something in profile, eg Email address, i get some "XML Parsing Error: no root element found
Location: https://looseleafapp.com/api/user?_id=5bc6a8f78a37980030770887
Line Number 1, Column 1:"
and after that page is white until refreshing.
Cheers
about me update is working, general part not
In the console, are you seeing the error "Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 (Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity)"?
yup
Ok I see what the problem is. The server is at high CPU utilization. I need to upgrade the type of machine I'm using on AWS.
imho, if update on bottom section of profile works and on top section not, this has probably nothing to do with CPU load. (just in case that there is some memory leak in top section API call)
Stefan - your intuition was spot on! This has to come from years of experience. I'm humbled. I chased down the issue and it was a problem with something in the api call. I updated the production app so it supports changing username without problem! I tested it out and it was great I didn't have to do a lot of DevOps magic to fix this. It was a simple fix in the app. Please feel free to use the settings page to change your username in LooseLeaf app. It will change the username properly without problem.
https://looseleafapp.com/@stefanwuthrich
tks :-)
Yea perhaps. The server operations to change username/email is a bit more memory intensive than changing your bio or location. In a development version, I used a higher capacity instance type to change the username and it was able to handle it. I'll look into the potential of memory leaks.