After successfully establishing the design function at Gem.com, I took a step back from my career to evaluate where I was, what I had achieved, and what might be next.
Then I had an unfortunate life event that led to heart surgery, and I recognized life's fragility. It was finally time for me to take a chance at starting my own company before life got away from me. With the support of my wife, I quit my day job and set out to create Shape, an online learning platform built to help designers and design hiring managers learn how to interview effectively.
I spent the first month of my venture in research and exploration modes. I talked to many founders, investors, and designers worldwide. I learned that designers often needed help understanding the ins and outs of recruiting and interviewing. My experience working at a recruiting software company gave me an added advantage that would enable me to contribute to a designer's education. After many conversations, I landed on building a digital website that offered two sides of online learning: the first was expertly crafted and curated content, or "guides," to help designers understand the various elements of interviewing. The second side was a community where Shape members could go to evaluate guide content, get answers to questions, and connect with others.
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It had been a long time since I had built any web-based products, so my first order of business was to design the product and brand while also studying how to make a modern web product.
I landed on teaching myself React and Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Cognito, DynamoDB, Lambda, S3, and CloudWatch. Despite not knowing much about any of the technologies I was investing in, I spent many hours learning the ins and outs and eventually was able to build a members-based digital forum and database-driven content architecture.
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As a solo founder, I knew the most critical feedback I could get as I was building would be from designers and users of the platform. I connected with many people across LinkedIn and Twitter to conduct early conversations. I also thought of simple ways to garner user feedback directly on the platform, such as a prompt on guide pages asking users, "How helpful was this content?" and a dedicated forum channel for user feedback.
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In many of my early conversations, users repeated the importance of being able to ask questions and participate in discussions anonymously. I designed an architecture for Shape that would enable anyone to participate anonymously without losing track of conversations. I also incorporated custom spam filtering into the product to ensure user content remained on-topic and user-friendly. This, in turn, meant I had to build an admin console within the product so I could easily manage pending content, posts flagged by members, and user profiles. I also created ways for users to engage directly with me from various parts of the product, such as a feature that enabled users to highlight part of a guide and report an issue or concern with it, which would message the necessary details to me for evaluation.
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I designed everything on the platform with responsiveness in mind. This way, members could participate from any device, and I could manage content and members whenever I was on the go.
After a few months of researching and building, I was ready to launch Shape. I wanted to control the experience for users because there were still many bugs and in-progress functions in the platform, so I shared Shape as an invite-only platform and posted on social media so that people could message me for an invite. Almost immediately, hundreds of people requested invites, and I grew the platform to 400 paying members.
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Feedback from early members was encouraging. Early messaging was that designers sorely needed the platform in the space. With a few additional features (already planned for development), it would surely be a central place for designers everywhere to aggregate, connect with others, and learn how to interview better. I was excited to continue the platform's development with support and feedback from many dedicated designers and a strong pool of experienced design leaders.
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One of the more challenging aspects of building the Shape platform was figuring out a framework for sending notifications to users both in-app and via email. I wanted to ensure users didn't get redundant notifications, so I had to map notifications and assign them priority against user settings. For example: a user could "follow" a discussion thread, which meant they would get a notification any time there was a new reply. However, if the new reply also mentioned that user, they might get two separate notifications: one about the new activity on the discussion they were following and a second to say they were mentioned in a comment. Instead, I designed an optimal path for notifications so users never received more than one for similar activity sources.
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After six full months of running the business, it became apparent that my time as a designer and builder was overshadowed by bug fixes, customer support requests, planning for business finances and taxes, and conversations with venture capitalists (VC). In other words, I spent an enormous amount of time doing the business work for my business and less time doing the design and building work I had enjoyed during the earlier months.
After much reflection and several rejected VC calls, I decided to shut down the platform and look for a full-time job that would enable me to do what I loved: design and build products alongside a team. The decision was not easy, and I explored many options before deciding, but in the end, I'm happy about what I created with Shape, the connections I made through the process, and the lessons I learned as a result.
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Additionally, I was able to take all of the work I had put into Shape and transform it into a book: A Designer's Guide to Interviewing.