Fixle

One year ago, I was working on an idea, a marketplace for home-cooked food. I am not great with designs, and after building the barebones of the functionality of the app using Flutter, I wanted a designer cum developer to come in to improve the look and feel of the app. I found someone a freelancer to help me out. The flow was, they implement a design, release a version for me to look at, I provide feedback on it, we talked about it and they apply that feedback or we reject that feedback.

We used to have conversations over discord, where I would send screenshots/video capture to them, and we will talk about those screenshots in threads, often using annotating tools to point to something on those screenshots. Some threads were being missed, and with upcoming updates to the app design, it was hard to keep up which feedback thread was for the latest version. It wasn't working perfectly.

We would often jump on a call with screenshare to pinpoint to review the app, and come up with all the feedback during that time. Obviously those calls still needed note taking (by me or them) to capture what changes were needed. It got frustrating because sometimes those things were missed, and we had to sync again to get it addressed.

If you code, you are acquainted with gitlab. Imagine doing code reviews over video call or through slack messages.

When this was over, I launched the app, tried out in Vancouver markets, gave it couple of months, saw very less traction and a few transactions, and some concerns around food law issues, pivoted a bit for few more weeks, and decided to quit that.

The next problem to fix was obvious to me. I checked the market and there were no products in this market. So I started Fixle.