10 tweets · September 2021 · 135 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
Announcing the first virtual barn-raising! Want to help get a business off the ground? 🚀 October 9th all day (9am-midnight pacific) Featuring a bookings platform by @Prigoose & @__drewface. I'm excited to have them be the first barn-raising, for a few reasons shared below 👇🧵
Reason 1: main difference between barn-raisings & hackathons is that usually nothing ongoing happens after a hackathon. Sometimes a project gets legs anyway, but it's not the default. But Priya & Andrew have been working on this for months, and they're not about to quit!
Reason 2: They're exactly at one kind of get-over-the-launch-hurdle stage where a barn-raising is pivotal. Too early = not enough surface area for people to plug in = won't get anywhere satisfying in a day Too late = too much complexity to bring people up to speed
Specifically, the stage they're at is that they've got 2 beta customers, and they've got a prototype version of their product that one of the beta customers is using in a production application. Good signs of viability.
Reason 3: I feel this will do something really good for the momentum of the barn-raisings as well. We'll definitely do barn-raisings for projects less far along or smaller, but it feels important to make it clear that these one day events are for realizing something long-term.
Reason 4 that I'm stoked to have them go first is that there's a ton of different stuff to do: • clever sales & marketing strategy • redesign logo, website elements, name • open-sourcing some of their work • & more!
Reason 5: Their product is a platform/API, so we can also have people hacking *using* the platform, in parallel! What Stripe is for payments, they're that for bookings. Got an idea of something you wanna make bookable? Help by working on your own thing!
Reason 6—which wasn't in the first draft of this thread—is that they've been really engaged & creative around designing how the barn-raisings will work! So I'm feeling like this 👇 is already coming true a bit 🥰
On which note, there's tons of meta-work to do—the first barn-raisings will also involve working on the format itself. So if you want to help build, iterate, or document systems for self-energizing teamwork, that could be another great reason to come!
So what now? Here's a sign-up form for the Oct 9 event with @__drewface & @Prigoose! It just takes a minute! (go ahead & fill it out even if you're busy that day but want to stay in the loop—you can mark that on the form) ajroberts0417.typeform.com/to/xyEW680E