In one of the books on productivity I once read the following statement.
One person can never do as much as two people can do, regardless of how good that one person is.
This seems to be a universal rule. It is true in many areas, from sports to programming. This month I realized that it would be very difficult for me to move forward alone. I decided to find some colleagues for myself. In general, it is not a difficult task to complete, but there is one “but”. I am building the application without any outside investments. So I have no money for hiring.
In fact, the solution exists and is extremely simple. Money is a universal value that we can exchange for other benefits of the Universe, but money is not the only value. (And, by the way, absolutely all online communities are built around the idea that money is not the only value!)
What can one offer people besides money? Quite a lot! Here are a few examples:
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Interesting, practical tasks. Many people work in high-paying jobs that involve boring, monotonous, routine tasks. These people will be happy to help you if you can interest them in something truly interesting.
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Experience working on a real project. Finding your first job is always a chicken and egg problem. If you know how to work with beginners and are willing to help them, they will be happy to help you.
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Innovation, benefit to society, etc. There are a number of reasons why experienced developers will be happy to help you for a short period of time. (Who wouldn’t want to tell their friends that they helped launch the next “Google” before it even became one?)
This month I wrote two job postings for the project (UI programmer and data scientist), prepared test tasks and conducted about a dozen interviews. As a result, I started working with two guys on a non-commercial basis (and, I hope, a data scientist will soon join the team!)
In addition:
- Added new metrics - adaptation coefficient, average time to first response and a series of other metrics for analyzing topic starters
- Implemented the collection of customer community data and its subsequent analysis.
- Added the ability to forecast metric values.
- Wrote the first version of a reporting system for customer communities.
Posts of the month:
- How to measure if a community is healthy?
- How to measure how topic starters adopt your community?
- Why time to first response matters?
At the end of the month, we got our first set of reports:
- Community Grade
- Community Health
- Community Performance Overview
- Topic Starters’ Adaptation