Past Ventures

Conceived in 2015, built in 2016, this app was the most well thought out rating system of its time. Unlike generic criteria used by sites like Yelp, this platform was industry-specific.

Built on an confined budget of 5k (while sleeping in a broken-down van), the first version  of the app was focused on leveling the stakes, i.e., If Agents had the power to make people homeless, we'd have power to wreck their reputation. The ability to rate & review previously lived in/ inspected properties, and upload true-to-life pics, was also one of the many important and well thought out features on here.

Although the app was 99% complete, we could not find that elusive balance between functionality and ethos (anonymity). We'd hoped the landscape of services we required for this balance would change by the time we got to the finish line, but it didn't happen. We had to make the decision to put the platform into cryo-sleep.

There's a possibility now with decentralized infrastructure to no longer compromise the ethos, but we're unlikely to resuscitate it. That said, if anyone is passionate about taking this challenge on, hit us up.

What began as a simple classifieds website idea in 2015 for unconventional entrepreneurial needs (that we actually had), evolved into something deeper, as we discovered numerous aspects of the startup world were fragmented and a sense of human expression absent.
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The solution thus became 3 dimensional:
1) To place the Entrepreneur (not the investor) rightfully in the center of the ecosystem — the one with true skin in the game.
2) To consolidate key components of Startup assistance (People, Services & Knowledge) spread across many poorly thought out platforms in one spot for coherence and accessibility.
3) To deconstruct the system of sterile transactions (run by LinkedIn, Angelist, etc), and rebuild this for meaningful connections.

We truly sweat the details on this one.

But an abrupt halt in the product's development in 2017 eventually turned into a extended break, which led us to explore Twitter for the 1st time in our lives. Following real time shifts in the global landscape over the next year, it became clear there were more pressing problems emerging across society. Our concerns (from Startup land) had now shifted to a more integrated view of the scenery, and the app was permanently laid to rest.

There is sadly no video of the functionality of this app, despite us having put the most amount of time into it (of our 3 projects). Fixing a 4-yr old codebase to facilitate a video is no longer a priority. You gotta love 'npm update' and that graveyard of unmaintained dependencies.