We got fired because we were bad developers - but can we build an app that would help us improve?

A few months ago we started working for a US tech startup with a hard-core founder who raised exceptional seed capital. A man with so many visions, he had a Notion with hundreds of documents explaining the vision. He is a developer himself - hard-working, has startup experience, and is an exceptional sales guy.

tldr; after a few months of cracking up new features day-by-day and actually delivering on the vision we got let go - and the reason - our output was not good enough and he actually said that we are "not good enough developers"

With so many years of development experience under our belts, we got thinking - how could have we improved more while tackling the packed-up startup schedule? Is there anything that we could have done differently? And can we actually make a good app?

Idea

Not having much time during the day to learn and progress in the tech stack besides the aspects you are working on sounds like an exhausting job. Can we do something fairly low-effort that would generate results over time, and peak into technical aspects that are not part of our daily job?

What if we created a habit that would push you to spend 5-10 minutes a day learning, but not actually learning by enrolling in a course or spending hours on side projects learning new technology?

We came up with a concept that would trigger you to build up your knowledge over time by relying on the compound interest of learning something new every day. If you could peek into a new concept, area, or aspect of technology daily, is it possible that over time lead you into a state where the compound interest in short daily learning sessions would result in you excelling in your craft?

The product

We came up with Codaroo - a simple app that allows you to peak into a specific technology, and do daily challenges in form of quizzes where you would be able to answer a variety of questions from a specific technology. Obviously, you want to match the complexity of the question with the current level of knowledge that you have. In order to do so, we created an algorithm that would alter the weight of the questions based on collective knowledge from all the users that use the app, and in that way, as you would build up your rating you would be served with questions relevant to your knowledge level.

In order to enhance learning, we implemented a way for the user to actually get more insight about any question that they find gaps in the knowledge - so it’s not just a game of acing the challenges, but actually reflecting on your answers and reading about a specific question in more details.

At this point, we have put in place some gamification aspects that would create an additional initiative for users to compete while learning (competing with other users) - and the rating system is purely based on your knowledge and consistency (showing up every day)

Where we are at right now?

We have a prototype in the internal testing stage and polishing some bugs we discovered along the way. We plan on releasing to external testers soon - so if you want to be added to the beta testers and generally provide feedback, please shoot me an email at [email protected] with the connected email and platform you use (Android or iOS) and I will be happy to hook you up on the beta release.