From Swift to React — 12 Projects in 12 Months

Its been a crazy start to 2018! From finishing off developing a new investment trading app for one of Australia’s largest banks, to the resignation of our jobs to work for a startup, and now wrapping up the month by shipping Shooting Unicorns’ first passion project — Hustle Club.

(You can find out about our 12 passion projects in 12 months here).

The Initial Idea

Hustle Club was initially a platform for finding the perfect co-working space in Australia. Since 2012, we’ve noticed an influx of co-working spaces open across cities in Australia with demands rising from freelancers and startups.

Whilst there are platforms like Coworker that provide listings and information like pricing and amenities, we wanted to focus on the people working inside these spaces instead. The idea was to create transparency and build up a community that allowed people to reach out, network and share things like industry knowledge and skills. We wanted to provide users with insight to the culture and community rather than whether the place had beer on tap or not (well okay, that’s pretty important too).

Our Learnings

First and foremost, we’re both iOS Engineers trying to write a React app for the very first time.

The learning curve was so steep that we had to squeeze in extra hours in the morning just to smash out tutorials. This meant meeting up at a local cafe at 7am which then allowed us to actually code during the night after work.

The first thing we started learning was how to even do CSS properly so that we could avoid wasting as much time pushing pixels as possible. We then completed designs based on what we thought was achievable for our skill level and came up with the initial designs below.

Home pagePop up modal when you select a co-working space

Unlike other projects we’ve done where we make API calls to retrieve data, we now had to collect our own data as well as provide a method to retrieve it. Based on research, we decided the best way to approach this was to build an isomorphic/universal app using the MERN stack (Mongo, Express, React, Node). For those who don’t know, an isomorphic app is one that renders on both the client and server side. The advantage of this is that it provides better SEO and also faster loading time.

Learning ReactJS was hard enough, learning how to develop an isomorphic app was twice as hard. However, we managed to quickly build the skeleton for Hustle Club thanks to the high quality tutorials on Medium and an easy to use component library called ant design

Everything looked good and seemed promising until the hard part came… data collection. Boy oh boy was the data incomplete, inconsistent and outdated. Only a select few of co-working spaces had put in thought, money and was considered done properly. The worst part was, we couldn’t determine exactly who was actually working at the co-working space as websites liked to include alumni as well for marketing purposes.

The Pivot

By the time we finished collecting what we could find, it was looking exactly like coworker. We couldn’t offer the point of differentiation we had originally envisioned.

It was towards the end of January and we were running out of time… fast. We started thinking about other things we could help people find that could reuse what we’ve created. Thankfully, we didn’t have to think for long because helping people find the perfect accelerator fit the bill perfectly. Suddenly, we reduced the number of offerings we had to manually collect data for and was actually able to provide useful information.

The Outcome

What’s Next

The app is far from perfect and needs a lot of polishing and testing since we pivoted in the last week. We’ll continue to improve the quality of data and add more value including content such as past applications, questions and pitch decks.

It’s now February 2018 and we’re already hacking away on our next project.

Check out whats in store for next month at Shooting-Unicorns!

Success is 10% idea, 90% execution.

From Swift to React — 12 Projects in 12 Months 🔥 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.