Over 9 months, I led product design and front-end development on a team of 5, on three projects. I hired our first engineering role, and branded the company.
Contracting
My last day at VChain, Inc. was in May of 2016, around the end of my first year at UC Santa Cruz. I was working out of a coworking space in Santa Cruz called NextSpace, while working with Formula Slug, an electric racing team at UCSC.
The location, timing of my departure, and involvement with an electric vehicle program made me a perfect contractor for two South African guys with an awesome idea. The CEO, an ex-Tesla employee, and serial entrepreneur, had a hunch around workplace electric vehicle charging that we would spend the next year testing. The belief was that, with smart management software, and timely notifications, we could improve charging efficiency by moving folks in and out of chargers as was necessary (and convenient), rather than the existing system, which was to just sit at the charger for a full workday.
Throughout 2016, we built a product landing page, created investor decks, and iterated on prototypes to fine-tune our feature offering. In hindsight, we probably should have spent far less time fine-tuning, and more time finding potential customers, getting letters of intent (LoI), and testing our assumptions with real users.
Regardless, in December of 2017, the company raised an F&F round, providing enough runway for me to join full-time. January 1st of 2017 marked my first day as Lead Designer at Evaline, Inc.
Funding, Full-time
Being the only technical team-member, I immediately set out to learn some technologies to help us get product built. My work at VChain had given me enough of a background in software development to have some ideas about how a good application behaved, but we used PHP, a language I wasn't willing to work with again.
For the next couple of weeks, I split my time between learning React full-time, and continuing to build UI prototypes, and fine-tune our UI and branding. The platform I used to learn would turn into the second version of Playbook, my D&D app side-project.
Towards the end of January, we partnered with a local Santa Cruz agency to provide development assistance. For the next month and a half, we worked with them to build out an MVP, collecting each week to plan out the next, then moving tickets in JIRA, and submitting code. The agency determined majority of our tech stack, which resulted in a tech stack that was all fairly new technologies at the time (React with SSR and GraphQL).
The nature of our tech stack presented us with a couple important challenges:
- Hiring talent was more difficult, due to the relative immaturity of GraphQL and other technologies.
- Scaphold would become a major issue, with some pretty serious downtime issues, thanks to a lack of an SLA.
More chapters coming soon!
Hiring
Running a beta
User research
Departure
VEXvolt
Resume
