Past

1. Rating App

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1. Rating App

Conceived in 2015, built in 2016, this app was the most well thought out rating system of its time. Unlike generic criteria used by sites like Yelp, this platform was industry-specific.

Built on an confined budget of 5k (while sleeping in a broken-down van), the first version of the app was focused on leveling the stakes, i.e., If Agents had the power to make people homeless, we'd have power to wreck their reputation. The ability to rate & review previously lived in/ inspected properties, and upload true-to-life pics, was also one of the many important and well thought out features on here.

Although the app was 99% complete, we could not find that elusive balance between functionality and ethos (anonymity). We'd hoped the landscape of services we required for this balance would change by the time we got to the finish line, but it didn't happen. We had to make the decision to put the platform into cryo-sleep.

There's a possibility now with decentralized infrastructure to no longer compromise the ethos, but we're unlikely to resuscitate it. That said, if anyone is passionate about taking this challenge on, hit us up.

2. FOOD APP

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2. food app

Getting food delivered from your local restaurant is convenient, but there's no relationship between the food you’re eating and the person who’s cooked it for you. It’s a transaction without a connection.

The seeds of this app were sown when we briefly lived with a Chinese family (where only one of the sisters spoke English). Yet we bonded with the extended family over an evening of communicating via a translation app, and an important link — home cooked food. The recipes that were shared with us by them, one would never find in a restaurant.

This app was about connecting cooks from different cultures (living in your city) with people that love home cooked food.

The front-end UI of this app was fully coded up, but the hard decision had to be made to not develop it further. The reason were not cut and dry, but in short, it was a combination of unreliable funding from our backer, while not being able to bypass a technical hurdle of implementing slowly evolving crypto payment solutions (vital for protecting our cooks from archaic food laws).
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Despite that fact that everybody associated with the build was excited by the quality and utility of the platform, it wasn't meant to be.

3. STARTUP CONNECT

Startup Connect Questions & Feedback Page Design

3. Startup Connect

What began as a simple classifieds website idea in 2015 for unconventional entrepreneurial needs (that we actually had), evolved into something deeper, as we discovered numerous aspects of the startup world were fragmented and a sense of human expression absent.
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The solution thus became 3 dimensional:
1) To place the Entrepreneur (not the investor) rightfully in the center of the ecosystem — the one with true skin in the game.
2) To consolidate key components of Startup assistance (People, Services & Knowledge) spread across many poorly thought out platforms in one spot for coherence and accessibility.
3) To deconstruct the system of sterile transactions (run by LinkedIn, Angelist, etc), and rebuild this for meaningful connections.

We truly sweat the details on this one.

But an abrupt halt in the product's development in 2017 eventually turned into a extended break, which led us to explore Twitter for the 1st time in our lives. Following real time shifts in the global landscape over the next year, it became clear there were more pressing problems emerging across society. Our concerns (from Startup land) had now shifted to a more integrated view of the scenery, and the app was permanently laid to rest.

There is sadly no video of the functionality of this app, despite us having put the most amount of time into it (of our 3 projects). Fixing a 4-yr old codebase to facilitate a video is no longer a priority. You gotta love 'npm update' and that graveyard of unmaintained dependencies.