Creating Lockdown Language Exchange — From Crisis, to Concept, to Creation | Part 2: From Idea to Action
Great ideas are all around us. Some of the best, most creative ideas come from some of the least “likely” people and places. Often what stops people from taking their ideas and putting them into action is fear of embarrassment or putting themselves out there, but other times it’s the intimidation of not knowing where to start.
How does one make the leap from this being in their head, to putting it into the world? Hopefully with a bit of a roadmap below, people who have ideas on how to help during the crisis can get the courage to start acting on those ideas, either by building what they think needs building, or linking up with someone else who already has done it.
In Part 1 of this article, I explored how I came to the idea for Lockdown Language Exchange and refined it to be more focused and fill a gap in the market. In this next installment, I’m going to go step by step into how I went from idea to production in less than 10 days.
It’s worth noting that given the financial impact of the Coronavirus restrictions (BBC reported today that 80% of the global workforce has had their place of work fully or partially closed), I prioritized speed as the most important driver in decision-making along with “how best to help” those out of work. If one were creating a for-profit business under different circumstances that were less time-bound, there might be good reason to slow down in certain areas (e.g. interviewing potential users), where I felt that would be losing time I didn’t have if I wanted the service to help people in their time of need (aka now).
Product — Getting to an MVP
As Marc Andreessen is famous for saying, “product-market fit is the only thing that matters.” And thus when starting out, you should be trying to test a hypothesis around consumer behaviour with the least possible investment (Minimum Viable Product).
My vision was to build a “two-sided” marketplace for people out of work to post on the site with their personal story and their native language. And for people still working but stuck at home to book sessions with them to practice speaking in an informal-conversational setting.
The two main questions to answer are
- “would people out of work want to post on the site?”
- “would people stuck at home with an income want to book?” (secondarily but importantly, would they enjoy the experience enough to come back?)
If time were not an issue, it might be a good use of time to do some user-interviews of people out of work (target sellers) and people who were target buyers. But often asking people about behavior is not nearly as effective as getting up a prototype and testing it. And given the need for speed, I decided to see how quickly I could get an MVP out the door, and whether that might yield more credible results to test hypotheses faster.
Build or Buy: The Beauty of Freemium and Free Trials
I had an inclination that with the proliferation of “marketplace” giants like EBay, Etsy, Airbnb, and Uber over the last couple decades, that you might now be able to buy “off-the-shelf” marketplace software without having to write any, or much, code.
I was pleasantly surprised to find I was right, looking into a few options, I settled on Sharetribe. It was easy to sign up for a free trial (they even have a COVID-19 promotion for related marketplaces!) and I could start tinkering around to see if the platform would suit my purposes. They do a nice job of guiding you to many other useful resources. And while it has a number of constraints, like any off-the-shelf software, it came with a number of powerful features including Facebook & Google Login, managing payments via PayPal and Stripe, Google Analytics, and inter-user messaging.
I decided the expense of upgrading to their pro-platform and customizing a landing page was worth the added expense of $250. Again, with speed in mind the question in my mind was “what’s enough” to test the hypotheses properly. And having enough digital real-estate to convey the value proposition was a key piece of that.
Sharetribe’s CMS (Content Management System) required a few days of tinkering and trial and error to wrangle it how I needed. However, they have strong support documentation and reply to support requests in a couple hours which helped. Not everything works as I want, but ultimately I was able to get things up for a MVP. Along the way, I asked my wife and trusted friends to give things a fresh set of eyes, and kept notes on things I wanted to improve about the User-Experience but that weren’t worth the time now.
Photography and Images Matter
A picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to websites where you are trying to convey an idea and emotion quickly. To make just about any website look professional you need to have high quality photography that speaks to your concept. For an untested idea this can be expensive on site like Getty Images, iStock, or Shutterstock, so I confined myself to free sites like Unsplash.
The main challenge with all stock photo sites is the searchability and tagging of photos to find what you are looking for, so it can take a lot of hunting and pecking. Fortunately, I was able to find a few photos via searches like “laptop smiling” or “laptop woman” or “screen laughing” that yielded some images that looked like normal people having a fun 1:1 video conference from home.
Of course, you also need to make sure these images fit the sizes you need. So you will likely have to crop some Portrait-oriented down to Landscape-oriented or darken the images to make overlaid text readable. You can do most of this with Preview on mac pretty easily without having to pay for software.
Sidebar: Payment Processing — Match Concept to Customer
Sharetribe supports Stripe and PayPal to process orders. Other sites will similarly have multiple options. We decided to integrate PayPal to begin with because of a) ubiquity: the number of countries supported was much greater and we were receiving interest from all over the globe to post on the site b) it has a bigger brand name outside of tech c) I already had an account I could use for testing purposes (again, speed over perfection / obsessing every decision). We will continue to evaluate as we go.
We will continue to evaluate as we go.
Sidebar: Logins — Reducing Friction
Sharetribe supports Email, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn logins. You have to set up the 3 social media options via detailed instructions on their support page. To reduce friction from 5 fields to a couple clicks is a huge boost, so we decided this was important both to testing the solution itself and spending the time to get done. This may not be needed for your concept, but just keep in mind that friction can take a great idea and kill the execution if people aren’t very motivated to complete actions.
In our case we are confident that the people out of work who want to post on our site will be more motivated to accept friction than those browsing the site to book listings. We decided to integrate Facebook and Google given the wide adoption, but did not integrate LinkedIn as we did not want to clutter the login page.
Avoid Feature-Creep: Keeping Focused, Staying Disciplined, Saying No
The biggest danger of putting a vision into action is that it’s easy to think you need all aspects of your grand vision to make an idea viable. This is the opposite of true in most cases. That’s why there is a whole canon devoted to the lean startup methodology.
In our case, we decided that there were certain things we wanted to take on and certain things we would leave up to the user. Some of this was dictated by what was technically feasible out of the box.
Payments = In Scope. We wanted to process payments for users to alleviate concerns over P2P payments, identity theft, etc. I was prepared to let users work this out on their own if we couldn’t deliver this easily, but since it was well supported by Sharetribe we decided to launch with it.
Scheduling = Out of Scope. On the other hand, scheduling the specific time to have a lesson we decided to leave to the buyers and sellers. While there is a scheduling tool in Sharetribe, it was not-intuitive for our specific use-case, and rather than risking confusion, we decided that simple messaging was just as easy. We will see whether user feedback supports this and will reevaluate.
Video = Out of Scope. Similarly, integrating video directly into the platform was not something we wanted to take on. Most people are comfortable using Skype, Hangouts, and/or Zoom. We are just linking to these as recommended resources along with other recommendations about how to have a successful language practicing session.
The benefit of saying no to these things and others is huge amounts of speed. Had we tried to integrate video that could have delayed a launch for weeks and cost loads of time and/or $, not just to build it but for me to find someone to build it.
What’s in a Name (and Logo) — Don’t Sweat It
Company names matter, but the concepts matter more. So while some might have thought to start with a name, names often change down the line anyway (BackRub > Google, Relentless > Amazon, etc), so better to focus on the product first. With that said, I did need something.
While I tend to like abstract names for businesses, given the need to announce that we were helping people affected by the COVID-19 crisis, I thought COVID, Corona, or something similar should be in the name for now. A friend suggested Lockdown Learning, and we tweaked that to Lockdown Language Exchange when we homed in on the concept, to evoke the community and transaction aspects of our marketplace as well.
I specifically did not want to make logo creation a big deal in this case. While one should generally hire an experienced logo designer to get a quality logo, the back-and-forth of iterations can take time. We needed something as a placeholder to test, so I used Canva’s logo-design tool to mix and match some concepts. After playing around with houses, lightbulbs, and all sorts of other things, we settled on a couple speech bubbles, simple colors. And boom. Ready to go.
Staying Organized
As all of this was going on, I needed a central place to keep track of my notes, ideas, plans, etc. While there is specialized software for everything from notes to To Dos, Google’s basic tools via Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail, are perfect for your basic needs.
As tasks started to pile up, I started to keep track of To-Dos on a spreadsheet, with each getting its own line, a due-date, and a conditionally formatted status (no need for Asana or a Kanban board yet). Tracking my expenses went on another tab, with vendor, amounts, date, etc. No need yet for Quickbooks. Keep it simple.
And as I had to create other helpful resources for my marketplace (e.g. A Guide on Creating an Effective Listing), I just used Google Docs and then put a link up on our website. It was easy to put up, easy to edit, and accessible to all.
Domains
Sharetribe, like many website services (e.g. Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix) can host your site or on upgraded plans you can move them over to your own pretty easily. Since I had already upgraded for other reasons, it made sense to port over the URL. Though I could easily have gotten the site live on their hosting first for the purpose of testing.
When starting my last company, I had had experience with GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and Gandi for domains, and I briefly looked at them. Ultimately I went with Google Domains to simplify the number of providers and integrations I was relying on. Google is easy to set up and given I knew I’d be leveraging Google’s other products in G-Suite, it made everything simpler. They also play nicely with website builders like Squarespace, so it’s pretty turnkey. Smaller providers may provide more high touch service for getting help.
With no technical ability, I bought and set up a couple domains. As we are a non-profit, I wanted to put the site on lockdownlanguage.org but also bought lockdownlanguage.com so I can redirect it to our site in case someone searches the .com which is natural (it also prevents someone else from grabbing it for just $13 for the first year). The Sharetribe team helped me port the site over to the custom domain.
Legal
Forming a Company
Matching up strangers to have a 1:1 video conversation carries a fair amount of risk. So does anything that has profiles, personal information, payments, etc. The risk of harassment and other abuses are pretty easy to see.
As much as I wanted to launch this as quickly as possible, forming a business entity to reduce my own personal liability was a step I could not afford to skip. It is the difference between someone being able to sue you personally for your assets should something unforeseen go awry or suing the company you have formed.
With that said, speed was of the essence, so I looked at a couple online registrars who could help me get this done quickly. In the past I had used Incorporate.com, but this time I went with RocketLawyer. I got slightly better pricing and much better service (Customer Service rep Kelly called me to double check all the details before submitting to the state as amending would cost $). Included in the price was early access to their mains services for legal consultations, which I can cancel at any time (including within the first 30-day window).
I decided to register as a non-profit Delaware C-corp given the work we’re doing, but could also have done a C-corp (with intent to file as a B-corp since we are doing work to benefit people), or an LLC which might have had personal financial benefits given our expected losses. I paid an extra $100–200 to use the expediting options they have to reduce the turnaround time from 25 days to 1–2 business days, and received our articles of incorporation with a slight delay in about 3–4 business days after a few follow-up calls.
I decided to file for the EIN (employer identification number) on my own to save $60, since all of this is currently out of pocket. It was easy to do on the IRS website in 10–15 minutes. I needed the EIN to set up a Business PayPal account, and would also need it for a company bank account and/or hiring employees if we decide to do either down the line.
Legal Docs for The Site
There’s a lot of regulation these days around websites, users’ rights, etc, especially with GDPR, COPPA, and additional regulations in the EU and California. So in addition to forming a company, you need to make sure your site is equipped with the correct legal documentation to comply with law and protect you.
There are now sites that can auto-generate some basic and custom legal documentation to help protect you including Privacy Policies, Terms of Use, Refund Policies, Cookie Policies, and others. These are likely not a long-term solution for a company with a great deal of users and revenue (or investor $ to protect), but they can get you to an MVP stage where you can also go back and amend your docs once you can afford proper legal help. You just fill out a step-by-step questionnaire about your business and the documents are generated. You will want your company formed before you generate these.
I initially looked at TermsFeed, which came highly recommended (and whose customer service was impeccable), but decided to use WebsitePolicies, as they specifically had language designed for a two-sided marketplaces (aka third-party sellers selling on your platform) which TermsFeed did not, and they have a brilliant customizable Cookie Consent Banner Generator that you could easily tie into your Cookie Policy, once you created it. The nice thing is fees are one-time and they stay on top of new regulation and keep your docs up to speed if you continue to host the docs on their site.
Supply & Demand
Getting People to List on the Site
A two-sided marketplace isn’t really a product without suppliers listing on the site, so in order to get people to start booking language practice sessions, I needed people out of work to list on the site.
I decided to take a high-touch approach to this at the beginning for two reasons:
a) to ensure the listings were put up in such a way that they looked good to people browsing
b) to ensure I had lines of communication with early adopters who were listing so that I could easily ask them for feedback and/or testimonials after the initial sessions
I sent out a LinkedIn post before the site was live, asking people if they knew anyone out of work, to please have them email me. Given the urgency of the crisis, many people shared this out, and we heard from dozens of people interested. This allowed me to have email exchanges with the early folks to explain the concept, ask their situation, and give them directions.
I helped guide people through the process of listing on the site. Again linking out to Google Docs did the trick. This also exposed ways to improve the flow.
As the number of people inquiring via email got too much for me to keep up with, I moved this process to a Google Form for people to fill out, at which point I’d email them back a standard email approving them to post on the site or asking them for more information.
As this volume has also increased, I’ve looked for ways to automate this further, though the constraints of off-the-shelf software does limit what I can do in terms of guiding people through a user-flow.
Demand: Getting People to Buy
Now that we have an initial set of people listing on the site to help users understand how it works, the ‘last’ step of getting a successful marketplace off the ground is generating enough demand to create a virtuous cycle of word of mouth on both sides of the marketplace.
That’s what we’re working on now.
As there are so many people in need, and we’re hoping to help them through the crisis, if you are interested in practicing a language / testing our service, please book a session with someone on the site. You’ll be putting money in someone’s pocket who needs it.
If you are able to share this story more broadly, please do.
