How to turn your developer community into a startup hub
Where it All Started
The beauty of GDSCs lies in the freedom to shape your chapter in any way that you, the lead, want. You can focus on events, workshops, speaker talks or anything else in the development realm.
The way that the best programmers I know learned how to code is through collaborating on a project. Following this insight, we decided to make our chapter project-focused.
Project Focus: Intuition
When it comes to building projects at university, students are encouraged to think small due to limitations of the environment (e.g. no access to certain university APIs, lack of funding, and absence of clear channels where to distribute information about the project). When programmes such as GDSC exist on campus, students can leverage the GDSC platform and resources to build projects without barriers. Want to find people to contribute to your project? Want to get funding to host your website? Want to gain access to university library API? All these questions now have one answer: ‘reach out to the GDSC community on campus’.
Projects usually follow a pattern. When filtering ideas it’s important to understand what stage an idea is at:
- Rough idea
- Refinement of the idea, figuring out the details
- Initial commitment (Minimum Viable Product)
- Collection of Feedback
- Refinement of Product
- Back to Step 4
First Big Idea: Enter Noodle
Soon after we established the club, a community member, Ahmed, shared his idea of building an open-source productivity platform for students called Noodle.
“The world is moving towards taking notes on devices: typing speeds are increasing, making it easier to type up notes rather than to write them down. This is especially true for subjects like Computer Science. As things stand, you will notice that there are several options for note-taking, yet none of them provide student-specific widgets (e.g. grade calculator, pdf viewer & analyser, document templates etc.)”.
At the early stages of the project creation process, you must respond to initiatives in a timely manner. After receiving the message, I forwarded the Noodle story to all DSC channels. There was a lot of excitement about the project from members of the community, many have even offered to help out. Most of these promises, however, have not been converted into action. After some initial efforts, the work on the Noodle idea plateaued due to a lack of support and the increasing complexity of the university course. It seemed like the project was not going to make its return any time soon. Times can get rough, that is where you, as a core team, have to make sure that the founders of projects maintain their motivations to work on the project further. With the help of subtle check-ins, Ahmed kept on working on his idea.
There are two lessons here:
- Don’t build your expectations of what people tell you
- To be completed, projects need tenacious leaders
Moving to the Next Level
In the summer term, when the workload from university significantly decreased, people had more time to spend on developing their skills. The interest in the Noodle project grew once again. Ahmed refined his MVP design, and after posting it on GitHub, the excitement for the project expanded to the open-source community. In a week, the Noodle repository gained 10k GitHub Stars while 2,000 people signed up for the waiting list. The Noodle team have scheduled the launch of their full MVP for the end of September 2023.
Final Thought
Your role as a lead is not to guide projects by holding their hand but to create the optimal environment for the generation and complete execution of ideas.
Make it hard for them to fail.
