The Wizdm Project
An attempt to fuel compassion in software development
I met with Ita one and a half year ago. As a young aspiring entrepreneur she was looking for advices to develop an app connecting foreigners and travellers to local volunteers willing to help.
The concept was well explained, the preliminary business plan pretty convincing, the name was sounding right and, most of all, the passion to pursue her dream to see her idea turning into reality was palpable.
I honestly felt blissed being there as a mentor.
I told her the few things everyone knows about bootstrapping, nowadays:
- Focus on the important features first.
- Launch as freemium to boost popularity.
- Listen to the users and improve accordingly.
As the majority of the startuppers to be, she didn’t have the money for a prototype, so, again, my best advice was nothing really original:
- Seek for a software developer as a co-founder.
Since I spent half of my career in software development I offered to help in finding a talented and motivated software engineer willing to join the initiative and, after several months of reconnecting with the software industry and leveraging on my network I got…
Nothing. Or I should better say: No one.
The thing is (and I hate generalizations) no one was interested ’cause they already had a paid job or (I sensed) they felt their expertise were invaluable and deserved to be paid up front. An attitude I later became used to call…
Lack of vision. Probably to justify my failure.
I wished there was a place to present Ita’s business plan to professionals willing to help, not with money like business angels, but rather with their time and expertise looking forward to share the results of the joint success.
That’s how I came along with the idea of Wizdm.io.
A community where aspiring startuppers and compassionate professionals could connect and help each other.
At the moment I’m writing the project has just been launched as an open source single page application boilerplate to help developers speeding up their side projects by getting all the basic features covered.
We’ll see how things will be going.
Meanwhile, I’ll be spending some time sharing how I managed to get to this point in a series of articles about programming.
I do not know a better way to get what I want if not by helping others in get what they want first.
Stay tuned on Wizdm Genesys, the best part of it is still to come.
