Pino

After several months of work, we launched our MVP of Pino!

The landing page at https://pinomembers.com/ is now finalized and ready for viewing.

Currently we are waiting for the traffic to come in, so we can analyze it and see what the community's reaction will be.

I am a big believer in written down specs and requirements. I sat down, and painstakingly wrote all the different requirements I had in mind for the MVP of Pino. Then I converted them to issue on our Git repo and started working on them.

Granted, the requirements did change a bit during development. But I believe this is normal, before you have written any code you cannot be 100% certain on what the end product will look like. Specs change, and that is fine. Just keep working on the smaller tasks, while still keeping the big picture of the project in mind.

I am (and have been) personally involved in several associations, and during that time I have seen several different member management products. Most common of them all, is just Excel.

Don't get me wrong, Excel is just fine for maintaining a small list of content, but at some point, it's limitations will have to be faced. Big example is emailing: pretty much all of my associations just copied the emails from an Excel sheet and sent email notifications using their personal email addresses. Better tools for this are available, and I wanted to build something like that, in open source matter.

I think dogfooding is the only way to make a meaningful SaaS product in this day and age. That way the specs and requirements are more meaningful, I stop occasionally while developing a feature and ask myself: "Would I use this feature? How I would use it? How would I make it faster/easier to use?"