Journey So Far
Initial Idea
Before Cottage even had a name, we had an initial idea to create a low/no-code editor to enable developers and businesses to build UIs quickly. However, it wasn't just going to be a standalone application. We thought that if we built a popular framework that enabled developers to build quickly that we could crank out tons of features for businesses and eventually offload that to other developers working for us.
The Hurdles
We soon came to realize that this concept was going to limit who we could
attract to our platform. Anyone who already had a web app was eliminated right off the bat as they would have to rewrite their app on our framework if they wanted to use it. Additionally, we would have to convince developers why they should build using our framework instead of other popular technologies.
The First Pivot
The goal: don't eliminate existing businesses / applications from being customers
We dropped the idea of the no-code editor and decided that we should instead build a platform to let developers pick up small chunks of work when they had free time and wanted to earn some quick cash.
Enter Cottage
When we were discussing how this idea would work, we equated it to the
Cottage industries where people would produce goods in their homes. This landed us with the perfect name for our business: Cottage.
Attracting Users
Early on, we sparked a lot of developer interest with the appeal of just picking up small features to work on for a couple hours at a time and getting paid for it. However, we were still left with a big question: how were we going to get businesses to buy in to this model?
Protecting Business IP
In an effort to gain trust, we decided that we needed a way for developers
to work on the software for a business without running the code on their
local machine. We knew GitHub Codespaces was in the works, but it still did not quite solve the permission restrictions we hoped to impose. After some research for other alternative solutions we came across Gitpod, which looked like the solution to our problem.
Following Along
This is a very high level summary of our journey to this point. Check out our other post, Looking for Lightning in a Bottle, if you would like to read more about how we are validating this approach.