Launching a Startup after the Google & Udacity Scholarship

1. Life is good.
2. Life is full of opportunities.
3. If they are not served you on a plate…
   Create them yourself!

This is a story about launching a Workaline, the most complete remote job finder, in just less than a year after I got into coding thank to Google and Udacity’s Android Basics Nanodegree Scholarship.

One year ago I hadn’t written a single line of code. Today I am building Workaline, the remote job startup of the future with someone I have never met in person.

I just finished the Android Basics Nanodegree at the end of July this year, I was already working at CodeYard, the coolest mobile agency of Hungary, but I was thinking about creating something special as a pet project to learn and grow, but I also wanted to do something that is definitely useful.
The Android Basics Nanodegree teaches you all kind of stuff, but as the title says, it’s the basics. After getting the certificate, one is able to develop lot of features, and there are a million APIs and SDKs that you can use to build awesome apps. But this was not enough for me. I wanted to do something unique.

Then it just happened.
I saw this post in one of the FB remote jobs groups I am a member of.

I checked the site, at that time it had a list of like 1000 remote jobs. The UI was pretty similar to what we have been working on in our Nanodegree, so I decided to write the guy:

The moment of decision

This is how it all began

Creating the Android App

So, we agreed that Dominik exposes me an API and I create a simple listing app. It took me like a few days to come up with a prototype of which the only feature was to list the 100 latest jobs aggregated by the website’s backend and the user could open them in the browser by clicking on the list item. (You can download the latest version of the app here). So I showed Dominik the app, he loved it, so we kept chatting and I created some creatives just for fun, like this one:

At this point, the project’s name was Alfred

At this point we only had discussions via messenger

Let’s talk Face to Face

We continued chatting whenever we had some free time. Both Dominik and I have a full time job, so we hadn’t had much time to chat, but we kept texting each other regularly.
I’ll be honest, I loved this guy. He was a highly skilled, humble genius in my sight. But what even more important for me is: He is a good person. I cant explain it exactly, but his reactions gave him away.
When you are building a business with someone, reliability is of utmost importance.
I think this sympathy was mutual, so we arranged a video call to discuss the future of Alfred (now Workaline).

The next steps

We discussed Dominik’s and my thoughts about Alfred’s future, and fortunately we agreed easily on most points. We mainly talked about possible upcoming features and how to get traction.
Our alliance was fixed.

Where are we now?

I love that while Dominik considers himself a technical guy, still he has great growth/marketing ideas as well. We were looking for a nice domain for Alfred but found out that all possibly good options are already taken, so we decided to change names. We spent like almost 2 weeks brainstorming and listing ideas, than we picked the one we both liked the most.
Choosing a good sounding name might be more important than you think, so we took this task pretty seriously. We were only looking at names that allowed us to take the .com domain. At the end, we picked Workaline from more than 100 competitors.

We set up a 3 month initial marketing strategy, and put together a development plan with the upcoming features. We chose Trello as our main platform to manage all tasks.

What can Workaline do for you?

Workaline currently lists around 3000 remote jobs from more than 10 job boards and you can use searching blocks to tailor the hits to your own liking.
But we’re far from being done yet.
Workaline.com will be the most complete and most used remote job finder in 2018, with a lot of features that will help people easily find their dream remote jobs. New job board sources and features like job alerts & saving listings (and many many more) are coming soon.
So stay tuned, if you are thinking about getting a remote job in the future.
We will serve it to you in bed. ;)

So this is it. You really just need to walk around with eyes wide open. If life was not generous to you with respect to opportunities, go and be the blacksmith of your own fortune. (Hungarian proverb)