Building a community for mini-code guides
Hi y'all!
For the last two weeks, I've been hacking on a project called Morsel. It's a community platform that makes it easy to create and find mini-guides for learning new code.
Link: https://www.morsel.dev/
Morsel has been inspired by how helpful cheatsheets were while I taught myself how to code over the past three years. Apart from obvious sources like StackOverflow & official docs, it was always random little snippets/cheatsheets scattered across the internet where I would learn crucial usage tips about the languages/libraries I was working with.
Morsel is an experiment to see if we can formalise this process and provide devs one place to look when they need help getting started with whatever they're working on :)
For Morsel I used a stack I've been really obsessed with in the Node.js world: Nuxt.js for frontend, and an MVC backend framework called Adonis.js that I think is highly underrated!
Let me know if you find any bugs, I'm sure there'll be plenty, and feel free to contribute to the community with your own bite-sized guide :D
Have a look at askalmanac.com I live the idea. Depending on how niche the userbase is, this space is very in need of a good product.
Wow! Very cool to see that site, had no idea about it but very similar in product. Cool. Their sheets actually look quite similar to our new design tweaks we rolled out this morning. Validating to see.
Yeah..love morsel as well. Going after a smaller denser niche like programmers is a great start. Keep up the good work 👍
This is pretty cool!
It feels like it's taking Question/Answer combos from stack overflow and turning them into bite-sized explainers that might be easier to understand than deciphering what someone meant by a question and figuring out how to apply the answer to your situation.
I think the most powerful thing you could do is make it extremely easy for someone to find an answer to their problem when they need it. Making the search very smart and making each "morsel" SEO optimized so it shows up as answers on search engines will be important IMO.
The other thing, as someone else said, is content. You're going to need a ton of content and it needs to be accurate in order to solve people's problems. To solve the accuracy problem you could do upvotes/downvotes like Stack Overflow or allow people to comment on them. Just some ideas!
Good luck!
Agreed mate, appreciate that. It's been a bit of a journey figuring out how to position this in the most useful way. Initially this was specifically designed for cheatsheets, but I then realised that cheatsheets are a very limiting way to structure content. I think make it a bit more flexible as it is now, but focusing messaging on encouraging concise and specific mini-guides (rather than big blog posts) is the way to go.
Comparing it to SO questions, expanded is a really great way to describe it :D
Nice idea!
Cheers!
The concept is good, but I'd work on UI more.
Yup, UI is a big work in progress. We've built this in 13 days, so lots of things to be ironed out in iterations :) Fixed the pagination thing - cheers.
Looks good!
Very nice concept!
Think the content add-on might help a lot, just more content.
Yup, going to be very tough to push that side of the "market" while this remains our side project. Will see if we can do it! Not particulaly sure how to incentivse more content, other than to just keep writing it myself.
That's a very cool idea @danp ! The website looks great and the only advice I have for you is to update the syntax code highlighting colors. They are kind of boring 😐. Once you finish that and add more content, I'm sure you'll be going great places!
Ya know what, that's a great shout. One of those things that for some reason I never considered until now. Thanks mate!
Very interesting product. I'm a big fan of the bite-size format. Taking existing info and making it more concise, more actionable, more discoverable is always a compelling idea.
In terms of user acquisition there are lots of things you can explore, I've created a list of 100 ideas here https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1254008940909772800
But I would consider prioritising the following:
Acquisition
Usage / retention
Also, consider the language. Is a page a Morsel? Is Morsel your entity? Or a sheet? Or a doc? Or a guide? Be consistent for clarity. You seem to be referring to the same thing in multiple ways.