Reflection on Buildspace Nights & Weekends - Season 5

What is Buildspace?

buildspace is the largest collection of builders on the internet for builders, makers, and creators to find and be found by the right group of people. any idea goes, whether it’s a hip-hop album, short film, novel, indie software, or a youtube channel. source

Only 7.4% of the people that started, finished. 70,000+ started. Only 5,194 finished.

All you had to do was show up. 6 weeks in a row. Only 42 days. To work on a dream.

The numbers shared above are a bit crazy to wrap my head around. Only a small group of makers actually finished the program. The vibes were high the first few weeks, but perhaps the weekly update(s), creation of videos, etc made a lot of people fall off? Each week, there was a lecture and a lab - taking about ~90 minutes each. Already, thats 3 hours of time dedicated to showing up and watching the lecture / lab. To me, the lecture and labs could have been tightened up into 30 minutes of core concepts and then further examples, anecdotes, etc in the subsequent 60 minutes. I did appreciate the “work with us” sessions that continued on after the lecture/labs were done - zoning out to LoFi music for hours after was a nice touch. Outside of lecture and lab, I had to spend some time to reacclimatize with video editing tools. In the past, when I was a Part 107 Certified Drone Pilot, I had used Adobe After Effects - but, I don’t have a license any more and wanted to get the “homework” done as simply as possible. If you’re interested in all my Buildspace updates, you can view the playlist here.

The outline of Buildspace’s Nights and Weekends Season 5 program is as follows -

• Week 1 - Idea Slide One-Liner
• Week 2 - Build a Toy
• Week 3 - Get Others to Care
• Week 4 - Iterate With Others
• Week 5 - Growing Your Work
• Week 6 - The Perfect Demo

As I had briefly talked about on the What’s Next? post from awhile ago, I had applied to and was accepted into Buildspace Nights & Weekends Season 5. The one-liner (above) shifted a little bit to become -

Create a Hyper-Personalized Daily Podcast

Buildspace was a set of guardrails to help me focus, deliver, and iterate on this idea. In the past, I would just build for building sake and not actually show off what I had done or solicit any feedback with how to improve. Case in point my Website CO2 Emissions Tracker and several other projects…

Giving feedback became an integral part of me helping out other creators in the program - fortunately, Joe Cowles built out a site to find projects that could use feedback. This allowed me to build some ‘cred’ to ask other folks to review In Short Pod.

During Week 2, you’re tasked to “create a toy version” of your idea. Which allowed people browsing In Short Pod to enter their own details in a form and receive a quick sample (~60s) of audio about their weather and the news from a specific category. Sadly, not many people went to the site and even few entered in their details. I kept thinking that there’s got to be a better way to drive engagement with these prototypes. Either thru personally creating the demo audio for users and sharing the URL on Twitter / LinkedIn - or some other method…

Building out the toy was invaluable to learning more about how to deploy an application to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with SST Ion - a way to quickly build modern full-stack applications on AWS. This was also my first true experience deploying a production-ready app with NextJS to AWS (instead of my go-to, Astro). For learning SST Ion, it was a relatively straightforward task since I am familiar with AWS - however, there were a few hiccups along the way. For some reason or another, there was an intermittent issue that I’ve been unable to solve with regards to sst deploy’ing using Node v20-ish. Randomly, Socket Connection Timeouts would occur - initially, I had thought this was due to my VPN, another process running in the background, or just the new version of SST being flaky. However, switching to Node v18.17 with the sst cli version at 0.1.62 seemed to do the trick.

Feedback is certainly easier to give than it is to ask for. I put my first ever post out on LinkedIn to share more about taking time off from “regular work” to focus on this idea. Asking my network for help. That first post had people reacting, comments, and even sending various messages to learn more. But, the conversion to users was zero.

Being a bit stubborn, I decided to not let the zero number dissuade me from continuing to work.

After getting the initial app deployed, I found myself having to fix various bugs, update layouts / flows, and trying to market the app in a couple different ways. Notably, I added a daily Hacker News Roundup Podcast. This podcast only gives the Top 5 posts from the previous day and a summary of what they’re about. As simple as this sounds, behind the scenes, there was a lot that needed to occur to allow AWS Lambda to use puppeteer as a layer + other functionality to get the “right” information from the Top 5 post(s). There was a lot of learning while building this piece out.

While I found a lot of bugs on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to find as many without the help from the first set of about 3 true users (friends / family). There were several race conditions in the code that generated incorrect audio (i.e. welcoming the wrong person to the wrong podcast). Some of this oversight was due to quickly clobbering together an app and only having it build the personalized podcast out for 1 user (me).

Buildspace gave guidance on how to ask better questions of people interacting with the thing we’ve built. I’ve used that guidance during user research sessions to help better understand what would make In Short Pod more valuable. This has helped better define what features + functionality to work on moving forward. Including how much would people pay for this service.

Without Buildspace, I definitely would not have pursued this idea as heavily. The short time duration of 6-weeks is enough to help create good-enough habits for how to properly launch, learn, & iterate.

Over the forthcoming months, I’ll continue to build out In Short to become the only hyper-personalized source of content. Soon, I’ll start to try to get more users to see how users interact with and listen to the content created for them.

Since Season 5 of Buildspace’s Nights & Weekends has wrapped up a few weeks ago, I’ve shipped a few updates.

• Add Your Calendar to Your Podcast
• Sign In With Google
• Change Your Podcast Title / Description / Cover Image
• Post Onboarding Email w/ Links to Subscribe to Podcast
• Better Metrics on Podcast Creation & Consumption
• Chapters for Each Podcast
• And Fixed TONS of bugs

What’s Coming Up -

• More Fine-Tuned Interests & News Sources
• Support for Different Languages
• Feedback on Episode(s) to Inform Future Content

If you’ve made it this far on this post and want to help craft the future of In Short, please reach out to me.