The Making of WhereIs.co

I want to become a better product maker. This ‘Making of’ blog post is a vehicle for that learning.

Idea

On April 7th, 2015 Casey John Ellis (the founder of Bugcrowd, where I work) pinged me about an idea:

The idea required a limited number of features, and a simple design; it sounded like the perfect weekend project! After Chris Azar agreed to help as a Designer and Front-End Developer, we were ready to begin.

Scope

When pitched an idea, I scope out how to built it, with my focus on the minimal viable product functionality:

• A user should be able to tweet a location (via text) to @whereisco.
• When a user tweets to @whereisco, their location will be displayed at whereis.co/{{twitter_user_name}}.
• After that user’s page is updated with their location, we’ll tweet a reply with the link.

Once we understood the user flow, we determined goals of each page:

Home Page

• Walk-through (“Tweet @whereisco with location and receive a page to share!”) via screenshots.

User Page

• Show the latest location.
• Show last updated time (from the tweet) since this allows one to determine the decay of the data.
• Link to latest tweet for transparency of where the data is sourced.

Execution

Due to each other’s availability, we developed the product by use of the waterfall model. Building the functionality, then implementing design, we were able to operate within our free-time and work regardless if the other wasn’t available. Once we finished our assigned tasks, we released an Alpha among ourselves to work out any kinks, such as below:

• Not having Twitter Meta Tags, which we added to enhance the links on Twitter.
• We didn’t update one’s page when we were unable to identify a location within the tweet text. We removed this to allow anyone to update their location, regardless if we could identify it or not.

After we made final adjustments, we released it by posting on ProductHunt, Twitter, HackerNews and other social media. This led to a few notable users such as Dennis Crowley and Ryan Hoover, along with some great feedback via ProductHunt. While we never anticipated for the product to gain any major number of users (just scoped as a side-project), it’s great to see people continuing to use it.

The enjoyment of lifting the veil to show one’s work to the world is why I learned to code. While my day job at Bugcrowd helps me grow as a developer, leader and many other things, it’s side-projects like whereis.co where I mature the most as a product creator.

Say Hi, I’m on Twitter.

Thanks Kimberly Chacra, Christopher Azar, Eric Filkins, Chris Raethke, Casey John Ellis and Harry Klane for reading drafts of this.