presenting nReduce at the beijing open party
Today's Open Party had a low turnout due to strong rain. Nonetheless it still had 11 talks in 4 tracks. Topics were Firefox OS, Geek Park, backbone.js conference report among others.
My presentation about nReduce gathered about half a dozend people. Given 3 competing talks and not more than 20-30 visitors overall this is actually quite a high turnout. They were also quite engaged and asked many questions. Maybe we'll get some more beijing teams when nReduce opens a new batch. One person was also interested in the email-task-manager.
nReduce is an online incubator. That is, the key benefits of joining an incubator: meeting other teams and sharing your experience, as well as talking to mentors, are brought online. Every team makes weekly goals and reports with short (less than 1 minute) videos. Teams group with other teams to work with and then discuss each others weekly progress. Our experience with nReduce was great from the start. Every week we received valuable feedback. A few times our check-in had the most discussion activity from all the teams we grouped with. Our progress is slow because we work on this only part-time for now, but we managed to come up with suitable goals that invited discussion.
We have now reached the halfway point and also reached a significant milestone for the email-task-manager. Until last week we were not clear whether we should start with a webinterface or focus on mobile clients first. The opinions were divided with me siding for the web. But one short comment by Hugh Mason clarified what we should do:
the folk who started with mobile first were forced to focus on the ONE really important feature of their product because of the small screen and the demand for instant gratification that mobile users show. That was really valuable. I'd always generally going for mobile first now if you plan on it being mobile everAfter reading that the goal was as clear as day. We absolutely have to start with mobile. There is no doubt about it now. We need to focus on the features that we can fit onto a mobile screen first, before expanding onto larger devices where we can use the space to add more features. It is also interesting to note that while we found related and competing products, none of those seem to focus on mobile.