Build in Public; Month 1 Product 1 - Introducing MoneyStack

We’re a small team of 5 full-time who’ve been working on Memberstack for the past 5 years. Looking back, I wish we’d have documented our journey from day 1 up until now. There would have been a heck of a lot of lessons, insights, failures, successes, processes and everything in between to share with others and to look back on ourselves. I’m pretty confident in saying our processes and communication are top notch right now and not because we were natural born communicators from the off but because of 5 years of hard work. We’d love to take what we’ve learnt so far into building new products over the next quarter and hopefully shedding some knowledge along the way.

I’m not entirely sure how BIP is going to look for us, I don’t know where or how we’ll share it yet (I’m thinking blog style or tweet roundups?!) Right now i’m drafting up a prototype for post number 1. I’m imagining everyone on the team will get a chance to edit and leave suggestions and me (Molly👋🏼) will have a good go at turning a whole bunch of slack messages and loom videos into lessons learned.

I work on content+marketing at Memberstack and i’m the non-technical member of the team so this is already doubling up as a good lesson for me) reading, watching and trying to understand all the technical elements of the builds and the team) communicating, documenting and explaining what, why and how things are working. It’s a good opportunity for each of us to get stuck into something new and get a little out of our comfort zones!

Mid June

In 2/3 weeks Q2 will be finished. We try and get an end of quarter celebration call in our calendar during the last week of the quarter. Each team member submits slides containing bullet points and images of things they’re proud of working on that quarter. Duncan and Tyler also share numbers and team updates. It’s so easy to get lost in planning new goals and diving straight in that it’s easy to not take a moment and celebrate everything the team has achieved so this is a great way to do it.

This quarter we did our end of Q celebration plus an extra call. Duncan asked each team member to prep a 60 second pitch -

• The goal here is to sell your idea to the rest of the team. Think; WHY should we choose your idea to work on for the next 3 months?

We each pitched and shared our ideas in a notion doc. At the end of the call we had 3 votes each to vote for which idea we liked the most. Duncan and Tyler then counted the votes and shared the three products we’d be working on.

1. A Financial Planning Tool
2. Job Board for Webflow
3. Social Proof Widget for Webflow

Product 1 - Financial Planning Tool

• Duncan kicked off the project by listing out all the team and individual tasks then dividing them up for each person.

• After a 31 message slack thread we settled on the name - Moneystack.

• Dylan (our wonderful part-time designer) kicked off the first of the designs.

• The first build conversation started; at this point it’s probably helpful to share the different skillsets of each team member.
  • Duncan - Design and Webflow Developer
  • Julian - Marketing and Webflow Developer
  • Tyler - Fullstack Developer
  • Josh - Customer Support and Webflow and Fullstack Developer
  • Molly - Content+Marketing

• We spent around 2 days and a couple of calls trying to figure out how each person would be excited and could get involved with the build - trying to play to each different strength and skillset.
  • That call resulted in 3 versions of the product: essentially we were going to build out three versions and document the processes and the outcomes.

• 24 hours later and a call between Duncan and Tyler we decided to cut version 3. We only had 3 working days to finish multiple versions of the same product so it no longer made sense to work on version 3.
  • We ultimately decided to drop version three because it would double (or close to double) the work for Josh and Tyler. The biggest blocker was that they would need to learn a new set of tools, help us to push through blockers, and do a bunch more research in general to figure out how to create a performance, scalable, reactive, and maintainable web app using Webflow. It’s possible (See version 2) but all of that plus building the Svelte version was too much for them to do in just 3 days.

• 1 week later we also cut version 2 so we are now purely focused on building in Svelte which means Duncan and Julian will be supporting the design plus building the marketing site and the templates.
  • Note: Julian did get a version 2 with Webflow up and running - perhaps i’ll dive into the lessons learned in a separate post.
    • Josh and Tyler have a combined 25 years of dev experience. Julian has 1-2.
    • Julian is more excited to learn how to help with the Svelte app than Josh/Tyler are to learn about Supabase and Wized.
    • Julian wrote the code using ChatGPT, so it will be harder to maintain than the code which Josh and Tyler wrote themselves

• We're going to see if it's possible to build the template directory in Webflow. If not, we'll do it with Svelte and something like digital ocean.

• 1 week later; we have a functioning product! We've added support for multiple models, editing, and deleting models, styling updates and a new date selector. The code is optimised for faster calculations, and a profile feature is now functional. The marketing site has been built, the templates are working for drag and drop along with the ability to download and share the template and user interviews are underway!

Our Goals to achieve by the end of the month -

1. Launch by July 14th
2. Document everything for each other and our customers
3. Get 50 people to successfully use the product
4. Bonus: Get an influencer to recommend it
5. Create 50 organic back links
6. Release 10 pieces of evergreen content