IdeasPlatter

The moment I launched the product I got a staggering 30 users on the portal :P. (just kidding). It however feels atleast there are 30 users who took a moment to see what IdeasPlatter is. Some of them were kind enough to leave feedback and let me know what all issues the faced. A few got it from inspectlet.com plugin.
Time to fix! I started prioritizing issues based on how bad they hurt a user from progressing on the portal. I started to pick them one by one and fixed most of it. You might hit a few more in the path. Why don't you login once and try! You might find a few bugs and help me out :)

I am happy to announce that after doing some quick level of testing, I am launching IdeasPlatter.

IdeasPlatter is a product aimed at helping people like you and me to ideate, collaborate and startup! You can select categories you want to ideate in, select your skills, post ideas and even collaborate on others ideas. It just doesn't end there. You can like, share, comment and discuss on an idea you are working on! This is a hackathon, but open for everyone and every field of your choice!
Guess the gist is conveyed ;) - Signup now at https://ideasplatter.com

P.S : I am also interested in your valuable feedback as the product is transitioning from beta to full fledged version. Please do send them across in the feedback section in the footer of IdeasPlatter.

The company which I previously worked for called me one fine day this January and told me they had an interesting opportunity for me. I liked the profile but I was working on IdeasPlatter (and also my book). Aah! hate those tough calls. But I did make it and talked to the hiring authority about my passion towards IdeasPlatter. They understood and with no conflict of interest, I could work on IdeasPlatter in my free time. As the platform had already taken a shape and it is more of fine tuning and feature addition now, I took the job.

Now I am back again working as a full time engineer and also founder of IdeasPlatter. It's tiring but it's worth all the efforts! I am learning so much, I am getting in touch with some helpful people.

I don't really have any co founders and having a job is kinda like having a co founder. Ask me how? Once after a day's work, I am left with a lot of time that can be used productively. A co founder pushes you to limits as they too work tirelessly for the product. You get motivated. Now having a job has motivated me to not waste any extra time and I spend it on IdeasPlatter! It looks like it is working for me. Hope for the best!

After the POC, I got a job at a startup. IdeasPlatter was still not I wanted to work full time. The job was paying me well and I thought I will work part time on IdeasPlatter. However, that went for a toss! I lost focus, could not do much here. I logged in every now and then but never got motivated to work full time.

Two years went by and now it was time for me to call it a day. I quit my full time startup job and started learning Reactjs. The initial POC of IdeasPlatter had a poor UI. I initially listed out what all to learn and starting acquiring those skills one after another. I removed the entire backend platform that existed previously and used django with REST capabilities. I developed the UI using reactjs and material UI for react. I also narrowed down what all capabilities to include in the product and ironed out on the features that I am going to work on for the first release.

I developed the platform entirely from ground up in about 3 months and started testing it to find loads of bugs. In this time away from a full time job, I was also working on a book of my own which is a collection of poems in my mother tongue, Kannada. I released the book (thanks to my wife and family for all their help) and it was received quite well. Back again on IdeasPlatter and I started fixing all the bugs and issues in design. In the meantime I also got a lot of good advice from my friends and they helped by beta testing it. Thanks to them too!

I initially was searching for a few platforms where I could post ideas and connect with like minded people to form a team and work together sometime in 2015. There are a few but none of them really provided me that feel of ownership and responsibility for my idea. I thought, I should write a platform of my own and started improving my skills on Django. I developed a quick POC in about 3 weeks.
I did not know much about hosting and browsed a bit to learn about webfaction. Most of it was "learn on the go" and I was able to deploy the platform. I bought the domain www.ideasplatter.com and launched it for a few friends and acquaintances to let me know how they felt about the product. The POC was received quite well and people gave me genuine and a lot of good feedback to improve on.