Showing posts with label 2015. Show all posts

Nerdability: A retrospective

In 2011, I came up with the idea to build a web based platform that lets developers and technologists build better CVs.  The idea was that as a technologist, we have a prety big online footprint that represents our skills/interests/experiences much more than a traditional CV that just rattles off academic achievements and work experience.



As a technologist applying for jobs, I wanted to make my CV stand out, and figured I have a StackOverflow profile that could demonstrate my knowledge & communication skills, I had Google-Code/GitHub/BitBucket projects which showed examples of my code, OSS contributions, technologies I have used plus then LinkedIn, blogs, Coursera courses, Geeklist.. the list goes on - and more importantly, these were things that were all changing much faster than my traditional CV was.



On the flipside of that, as an employer trying to recruit technologists is really hard - CV screening doesn't rule out many candidates, and beyond that you are left to navigate technical tests & interviews which are fraught with difficulties in trying to really assess whether someone is actually fir for a job.


Nerdability started life as an idea that was entered in a cloud competition to build a webapp (some details here originally called NerdStar) - which it won.  I then recruited two co-founders and we re-wrote a bunch of it (originally all data persistence was mongo, but switched that to relational) and launched it to the public!


In January this year (2015) we retired the application, we had somewhere in the region of 800 users signed up (with no active/paid marketing).  We have currently parked the page and a basic user profile tour on nerdability.zz.vc and are in the process of moving this holding page back to nerdability.com.



Things that went well

There was a lot of great things we learnt/that came out of the project, here are some highlights:

We contributed to OSS - During development I created a Spring-Social implementation for Khan Academy API and for the GeekList API - both of which are now listed on the Spring site as community projects.

The content driven marketing - As mentioned, we didn't do any marketing, just a few tweets, etc - but the big win was the blog. We setup a basic blog over at blog.nerdability.com (still up and running!) using blogger for hosting and just posted tech articles - tutorial type stuff plus more link-bait-y type stuff like new years resolutions for developers, or getting hackathon projects into production - and the blog drove lots of our traffic.  The beauty was the people who visited/discovered our blog were a perfect match for our target demographic, so we just had plenty of placements for nerdability and the users just trickled in!  The link-bait stuff would give us spikes of traffic, but the tutorial/how-to stuff still drives a few thousand unique views a week.

User response - The user response was good, we had a fair few early adopters who liked what we were doing and blogged/tweeted positively about the project.



Things that were hard

Competition - The weekend we were due to launch, I got an early beta-invite to StackCareers - with an almost identical value proposition, but they already have money and a massive developer community.

 Two-sided marketplace problem - so we started getting users signed up, but there was little engagement as users couldn't really do much with their profiles - we had not companies/jobs listed, so beyond just sharing their profile links there was not much they could do.  We were working on the company integration when we finished, but didn't get into it.



Conclusion

In the end, the three of us weren't at the right place/point in time to go into the project full time (family stuff, wrong career stage etc). However, I still believe there is a good business model in the idea, and still think that even if it was setup today it could be successful.  Despite the community and backing of StackCareers, I don't think they have really nailed it, and seem to have stagnated at a slightly improved jobs board - but not really using the intelligence/information to really improve the recruitment process and take any burden of employers/interviewers (which is where I think one of the big wins is for the model)
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2015. Plans & resolutions

As it is a new year again, I have been toying with the idea of some sort of resolutions, but it's hard to come up with anything really meaningful and achievable.

I thought about (and am still thinking about) creating something every month - which has the nice fallback that even during a hectic month, I should have a chance to at least cook something, so even if it ends up being 12 months of just creating some meals, at least its something to aim for.  There are lots of projects that I have either started or keep meaning to get underway which would be good contenders for the monthly fun.

One of the stretch-goals, kind of in hand with the monthly objectives is towards the end of the year it would be nice to setup another company - doing what is still undecided!  Hopefully I suppose the plan is that this will be the result of one of the monthly projects, but let's see.


Possible things on the list..
  • Made of these - a family/private photo app to capture, annotate and privately share photos of your family
  • My lego Pi robot - a year later, I still haven't had a chance to sit down and concentrate on getting even my lego dc motor working with my Pi
  • CREAM - personal finance management app - previously mentioned before
  • a whole bunch of food ideas
  • unknown ideas - still interested in the enterprise, education or public services space


More generally, the aim is to be more pro-active and productive.. I have signed up for the Stanford Machine Learning course on Coursera, that has just started last week - but I'm not sure I will have the time to complete that on schedule (a good start to the year, right?!) so will maybe complete that over a longer time period - I completed the Stanford Algorithms course last year in my own time, and that was pretty good.


Anyway, it's approaching the end of January 2015, so what have I done:

Cooked a bunch, and started a food blog



So yeah. I cooked a bit, made up some recipes, and finally setup a food blog. I am really enjoying that so far, as the blog is helping motivate me to be creative in cooking.


Created/Updated a friends site


An aspiring singer friend of mine recently appeared on the BBC's The Voice (TV show in the UK) and was keen for his site to be updated.  It's just a basic Twitter Bootstrap template, but it was fun playing with js settings and general layout to get the stuff online. Check it out here.
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Google kill off Google TV (in favour of Android TV)



Following on from expectations on the TV front, Google have just announced that they are end-of-life-ing Google TV as Android TV is fully operational as part of Android 5.0 - expect they are working with some OEMs right now to start getting some interesting devices launched..
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Technology, innovation and 2015

There has already been several people, much smarter than me, offering predictions for the next year (my favourite is Fred Wilson's look back at last year and look forward to the next) which you should probably read rather than mine, but here we are anyway, so lets go with a few thoughts on 2015 and onward..


Television

I have written about this for a while, and the battle for the living room will continue to rumble on. I'm not sure if we will start to see one or two winners fighting it out this year, but I can only see this area getting more interesting.  NetFlix, Amazon Instant, NowTV have established themselves as the more dominant on demand providers but that is only a part of the battle - there is still the problem of platform fragmentation (no common platform across devices/TVs/etc to run consistent experience apps - some devices not being able to support updating OD apps etc).  Android has a real opportunity to tackle this problem, given that pretty much all content providers already support the Android platform in smaller sizes, but let's see what they do. If they can become the defacto television/set-top box OS it would be a big win for them, but would also mean that device manufacturers & content providers don't need to worry about building & supporting their apps for a range of platforms and can focus on building the best experience on a single platform.

There is also the question as to the role of the actual TV device - will it be a smart device with a dedicated platform, or will it become dumber that just streams content from any other mobile device.


Enterprise

There has been some hype around Enterprise startups growing over the last 12 months, and this will also slowly increase - as has always been the way with enterprise, things have been very slow in terms of adoption and businesses and executive teams generally very wary about adopting new technologies until they are really widely adopted and proven - but this is starting to change. As more and more areas of business are starting to be disrupted by upcoming startups, more established businesses are starting to adopt technology more quickly to try and stay in the game, and more and more starting to spin off departments/teams from the business to operate as micro-startups to help drive innovation.  I think with this trend for bigger businesses becoming more willing to adopt new tech continuing, we will see some big noise in the enterprise/SaaS areas.


FinTech

Similar to wider enterprise trends, the banks and financial institutions are starting to become more aware of the risk and trends in their business with more and more people starting to expect better/different ways to do business.  From the larger tech of Bitcoin through to ApplePay, Square etc I think we will see continued innovation and surprises from the bigger players as well as a whole host of startups snapping at their heels.  With London currently the world FinTech capital it could be an interesting year here.


Education

This is an area I am interested in and have written about on a few occassions. I'm not sure this will really be a big area in 2015, there certainly aren'y any startups I am aware of that look like they might make really big waves in the year, but here's hoping.  Either way, there are still interesting things going on - there is the continued change in the UK curriculum with things like the "hour of code" and the continued drive to put more tech on the curriculum. Plus, I have recently spoken to two startups recently that are doing interesting things in the education mobile app space: Zzish and kahoot  - they are both working on mobile app/web platforms for the classroom with a bunch of tools to help teachers and children learn and work together.


The rest..

I agree with many of the other observations on Fred Wilson et al's writing - continued growth, acquisitions and big IPOs from the current crop of big startups will continue (AirBnB, Uber etc).

Companies like Xiaomi will continue to grow and hopefully come and start to be real contenders in the western markets (even if the Xiaomi laptops have been leaks, I'm still interested to see if they do come with a laptop anything like the leaked specs.. could get interesting!)

As Fred Wilson mentions, and as I have previously written, I don't think wearables are really ready to be a thing. Still more work needed on how these will fit into the market, and I don't think that will be happening in 2015.
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