Indeed.com is one example, but in recent weeks and months I am finding myself faced more and more often with user and customer experience issues that do not appear to have been considered or addressed by purveyors of services we pretend are useful.
This very service, Revue, is on the list. Indeed.com does not use their own platform tools to interact with potential candidates who apply to their own posted jobs, so I cannot be surprised that the features that do not work on their platform are the way they are. I have grown less and less patient with entities (companies or otherwise) who do not appear to care about their products and/or services, and I do not wish to fall into that trap with any of the things I am working on.
To that end, then, the first project or two to get out of the crystal palace should be one I like myself, and which would have some curb appeal to draw in some users and, I would hope, feedback. The upside to a solo startup, from the customer point of view, is that there are few barriers between the issue at hand and the person who can address it.
From personal preference perspective, I like these to kick off with:
- The FTYP collection. This is my Food Truck platform, which has long since morphed into a Mobile Vendor Business Development and Customer Engagement platform. Now, more than ever, it has a place in re-shaping mobile vending on the ground, at a time when the ground is itself moving (figuratively).
- CantHave. This is straightforward (on the surface, anyway). Keep track of things someone can’t have (dairy, gluten, etc) and enable usable distribution of that set to event planners, caterers, etc. More to it than that, but the base idea is sound.
I have also been shoving the notion of publishing a simple site like one for ReallyCool.com (my company) or DanHugo.com (my personal web presence) or even a podcast website for QuogglingSand, and others, down the road for too long. This has been a matter of priority inversion, and I am always reminded of a quote from Detlef Jenet, an (East) German colleague from my months at SCM Microsystems back in the day:
We work 24 hours in the day, and then we work at night.
I am also particularly interested in self-publishing (I may have mentioned this) and while I have signed up with Dev.to and Hashnode for yet more blogging opportunities on someone else’s platform (yes, Hashnode makes it easy to attach my content on their platform to my own (sub) domain, but still) focused more on the tech side, but I really do think these two are interesting but also need substantial story to make sense of the ideas and how they fit together:
- FriendVenn is, well, think shared syndication feed reader. More than that, but it sounds like another attempt at Facebook without some additional detail. Not another facebook.
- MuniBits is either Municipal Bits or Community Bits, and is what I have called a weekly free paper platform (your city has one, less and less often in printed form but they are out there) meets structured data. Here again, a story is needed, and a working demo.
Both of these projects fit together in that the former is for people and the latter for, well, not-people. These will be the subject of much more discussion and effort in coming weeks and months, likely in the QuogglingSand context until each or both get their own podcasts or video streams or whatever, but for now, ponder.
So finally pushing the FTYP family out the door is in one of the first two positions, CantHave seems like a practical second, the other low-hanging fruit (still needed, no doubt about that) for my business, continued effort to self-publish over giving my content to others, and supporting podcast efforts, are next, then the rest of the various projects can leverage the headaches I overcome with those first two.
Piece of cake? If only.