Groundwork1

My church has sent out the training to 80+ volunteers, and so far the system seems like it is working pretty well. I'm hoping that the training coordinator will be really happy with the results of this test if it saves them a bunch of work.

I have approached another client who has a sales team of 20ish people. They have said that they would love to give the system a trial run as well.

Right now I would love to continue getting feedback about the system and see if there are major things I am missing before launching too publically.

Earlier this month I sent out a trial run to 10 friends. They each received a series of (fake) training emails that I made up. A few of them just ignored it, but some of them also followed through by completing the training just for demonstration purposes.

In addition, at my coworking space I did some user testing with some other peers. I gave them access to the web app and watched as they used the system. At times it was painful watching them blunder their way through the tool, but I came out of it with 2-3 pages of bullet points of feedback, fixes, and things to think about.

I think the product will be better in the long run with this helpful feedback.

My church is ready to start using the Groundwork1 system and so I've made a big push lately to get it production ready and more reliable.

The trick will be deciding how many features are necessary for this thing to launch. Right now I feel like I am so close, but there are still some things that I feel like are important. I think its enough for my church to test with, but what will make it good enough to launch? That is the question.

I mentioned before that my churches Fall volunteer training was painful, so I approached them and mentioned that I was working on a technology solution that could help with their Fall training. I offered it for free as long as they were willing to be flexible with me and possibly provide a testimonial for the home page.

They were excited about the idea and we will start meeting soon. I have some more coding to do before the solution is ready, so I need to keep working!

My church recently had me finish a training course in order to be able to serve in the children's program. The training technology was difficult and frustrating as a volunteer to want to finish.

It got me thinking about my training app idea and how it could be a really good fit for nonprofits and other kinds of training. I started work on it in the Fall and hope to make some good progress in the coming months.

I had previously developed a small training app for my sister in law that allowed customers to pay for her fitness training course and then be sent a series of training emails. I was thinking about ways I could make this more generic or repurpose some of the code for anyone to be able to use.

Ultimately I decided that wasn't the market I wanted to be in, but thought that nothing quite like this existed for the corporate and nonprofit market. There are plenty of learning management systems, but many of them are pretty complex and feel like too much for a small to medium business to set up and get going. What if employee training was as simple as sending out an email?