How Sober Social came to life
About two years ago I had the idea for neatly and needed to recruit in order to build the platform, recruiting developers isn’t hard, recruiting good ones is!
Cutting past all the recruitment talk I met Martin, went through the project and he started to work with us on a freelance basis.
After a couple of months and a basic MVP it was clear we needed all of Martins time in order to build the platform I envisoned
So I made him a job offer, he took his time to think about it and came back with an unusual counter offer. He had been working on an idea called Sober Social, he had built most of the back end but struggled with design and marketing and needed some help. If he accepted the role, would I be able to provide resources to help him launch the product, I really liked the idea and said yeah, why not!
We had our new Head of Development!
Things didn’t quite go to plan (how unusual for an development project) and while lots of ideas were bounced around the team, agency work and neatly development took over and 12 months quickly passed and we were no further forward.
As a bit of a break we allocated time to create a brand and build the front end of the platform, however as 12 months had passed Martin wanted to rebuild the entire framework, so he did with a little help from the team. Most of the work was done in our spare time, which when running an agency and launching an analytics product wasn’t much but little by little it started to take shape.
2016 has been a very busy year and a bit of a blur, when looking over the commit logs in November I realised Sober hadn’t been touched since April, it had been placed on the shelf and forgotten about as we had all been so busy with general life.
We had a few beta users who were using it but the mobile experience wasn’t as good as it should have been and needed work.
At the end of every year we try and run a hackathon/team building exercise, this year rather than present the team with a new problem and run with that I asked everyone if they thought we could get Sober up and running in a day if everyone joined in.
They all said it was ‘doable’ and we created a scrum board to start creating stories for new features and outstanding front end elements.
So we booked the day and everyone got in for 8:30 so Martin could provide the background on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ and what he proposed we could do about it. At 9:05 we were ready to get started. Splitting into 3 teams; development, UX and marketing we got started.
We stopped for lunch and to prevent any after lunch lag we held a stand up where we all shared progress and any potential impediments.
The day started to go a bit too quickly, Phillip was panicking as he still needed to do his Christmas shopping and still had a lot to do.
Next stand up was 4pm, this was bringing everything to a close, looking at what had been done and starting to build and deploy onto the production server.
But this wasn’t the end, we had to let people know about it, in the background Sarah had been preparing lots of emails to people, some of which we had relationships with, other pure cold emails.
A few little snags and some hurried deployments but by 5 we were done, Phillip was off to buy Christmas presents and everyone else was ready to go home.
So anyway, https://sobersocial.org is now live, a secure online peer support for those struggling with alcohol addiction and looking to change their relationship with alcohol.
The future?
Not sure at the minute, we have setup a community interest company and if it the platform starts to get used/popular we will transfer the ownership to the CIC as a social enterprise but at the minute it doesn’t cost much to run and we can look at that further down the line.
As for the day, it was great fun and I am incredible proud of the team and what they achieved in so little time.
