Collabanize

Collabanize has been changed to be an Airtable database with an organized database filled by me. Once I start marketing and get some traction I'll most likely get a VA to help fill the database monthly.

I decided to go with a simpler solution to what I was trying to achieve after my UI being crap. Hotjar + Analytics + Facebook Ads (Landing Page Views) showed interest but overall confusion.

So I wanted to keep the end product to be the same but I know I needed to change everything else in the discovery phase. So I went through the website looking for landing pages and UIs... then I saw a marketing product delivering everything via Airtable. I think it was Get Scrapbook Marketing, I was 100% inspired by their website. I'll probably change it later so I'm not being a total copycat.

Anyway... switched to an Airtable database that I can easily maintain for quality instead of it being a platform that had a register/sign in system.

The issue I was having with the previous plan is that it was definitely going to get filled with spam.

It took a few weeks, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for Collabanize. I worked mostly on nights and weekends. I decided to keep it as simple as possible and go with a no-code approach. There are so many solid plugins available that I could tweak for an MVP.

WordPress is a nice platform and I don't expect to ever have thousands of users online at once so a CDN, some compress, and I shouldn't have too many issues getting started.

After a few failed attempts at planning a local project with coworkers, I decided to figure out a way to work with others that's simple and doesn't piss off any search engines.

I spent a few weeks talking to developers on Upwork to figure out a method for automatically crawling blogs to add to a website directory. The idea confused a few developers and I went back to the drawing board to simplify the project.