WeDance

First code for WeDance was committed on 17 May 2020. First intention was to recreate and adapt dev.to platform for dancers. After few weeks, development was paused.

Community first! Don’t repeat mistakes!

Alex started testing hypothesis “will dancers want to install a new app to access dance calendar?”. Luckily at that point in Munich there were not many people using Telegram and that platform was chosen to publish weekly dance calendar. And local dance community started to join the group. At some point it became the biggest dance chat in Munich. There were several groups per each dance style and later everything was merged into one geo-located public group. The problem with that group was that random people and spammers started to join and molest the group members. New private group was created to resolve the issue.

Another hypothesis were if “dancers would like to find a partner” and this offer was posted in chat. After one-to-one interviews, set of questions was defined and gathered into Google Spreadsheet. It was difficult to reach a critical mass to be able to find a perfect match, so at this point was made a decision to continue development of the website, so that dancers can create their profile and write each other a message. The profile editing was inspired by Couchsurfing.

During Corona pandemic there were only one place in Munich where it was possible to meet and dance outdoors. Multiple organizers of dance events were inviting their groups to dance at the same time, and the one with loudest speaker was winning. There were a lot of fights for place. New initiative was born - book a place with teamup.com calendar. Hopefully one day it will be possible to book a place with WeDance. As for 2022 organizers keep using that calendar.