How David Met His Dream Designer
A Volley Member’s Story
We decided to change directions and we wanted to get there as quickly as possible. The product we had started building was nearing completion, but there was a need that we thought we could address quickly and effectively as a team. This wasn’t easy, as it involved putting something on the backburner that had been our primary focus for months now.
When we turned to Volley, a product that started off as an idea, turned into a mailing list and has now become a weekly reminder of two things, people are always willing to help, and being helpful is always rewarding.
We wanted to rapidly prototype a product and develop the marketing/business collateral we needed to go from nothing to something real quick. I put out two requests to Volley’s community “Looking for a designer who wants to help rapidly prototype a product over the weekend”
From that request I received replies from some tremendously qualified people. One was a young woman who previously worked for Youtube and was named one of Canada’s Next 36, another was Arthur who I ended up having coffee with.
After meeting with Arthur we decided to work together and have been ever since. Arthur is not only a talented designer, he took on our project as if it was his own and invested his time and energy like few contractors I’ve ever worked with. I recently passed on his contact info to someone who had emailed me directly looking for a designer.
Sharing the same status on Facebook resulted in a few interesting introductions, the difference with Volley is that the person who passed on the card to Arthur wasn’t taking a big social risk. If Arthur never replied I would have never known, and if I didn’t hire Arthur it wouldn’t feel as personal.
In the last 3 weeks Arthur has branded our new platform, designed a beautiful user interface, provided us with a template for our eventual full length landing page, and designed several decks for business development initiatives.
This is the magic of Volley, authentically curious people who are makers and entrepreneurs willing to help build things. In the past month we’ve progressed to a point that is similar to what took me 6 months previously. For three reasons, I learnt a lot in those 6 months, my technical co-founder is a gangster, and Arthur who joined our team because of Volley.
I do want to say that this report on how Volley has helped me is definitely biased. So hopefully instead of solely being persuaded by my bias you will log in, look around and see for yourself. My bias is a pretty deep one. Mike, one of the founders is a long time friend, and frankly has been one of the most helpful people in Toronto for me on my early and meandering startup story. I think David, the other founder, is one of the most detail oriented builders I’ve met in Toronto. In other words the source of my bias is that their team are legitimately curious people who embody the spirit of what they are doing, and I like teams like that, and so do high quality users.
