ScratchBox Project Announcement

Introduction

It's been a while since I created some open-source software. But I am going to again create proprietary software because I have taken interest in product development and, like, launching stuff to see how people react to using it. I have been reading the Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And also been working with some cool people to create a B2B SaaS. 

These experiences have contributed to the thinking that I can earn actual money from my misery, which seems cool. That is when users find my product cool enough to pay for it. For this new product development, I have chosen to play by the books except for the initial stage of MVP development. I did not ask people about my idea not because I already know it was the best (I don't), but because I did not want any scope creep while building an MVP.

 

 

Startups

Creating a startup out of this will be my last goal, we are here to learn. I should do or at least pretend to do serious things at an early stage of my career which prepare me for the harsh world out there. With that being said, I have learnt the hard way about scope creep while building our previous B2B SaaS. Requirements kept on changing, technical debt kept on increasing, and at the end the most valuable resource was almost empty: time. We took around a year to deliver software which could have taken only 3 months to make. We went by the books of this one. This felt more like a client project rather than a startup. Not cool.

So, this time by learning from the mistakes, I am finally creating another B2B product. Will this time it would be better? I don't know. The problem we are trying to solve is kind of related to my previous article. We are trying to create an Ed Tech product. We have the MVP down, it has a lot of bugs and a lot of feature improvements. But people kind of like it, and our vision.

 

The Product

The product currently a coding playground, where educators can assign problems to their students. That's it. It is a HackerRank clone. But it's better in terms of our execution engine. We perform more in-depth tests, semantic analysis, custom invocations, custom testcases which are capable of testing things more than DSA problems.

 

 Actual people using our platform

  

But the real sauce isn't the features, as we can pivot anytime based on further feedback. We are testing this product in our college right now, and if they like it and find it useful, we will think about scaling it up, raise funding and do what startup people do.

I will be writing another blog on product development and what steps I am taking while we develop this. And I named it ScratchBox. Scratch: creating something from scratch; Box: Represents the coding sandbox involved at the heart of our product.