Forage Notes: The Crumble Beginnings
If you’re within the creative industry you are most likely surrounded by people who have a side project on the go. Whether they’re building the next groundbreaking app or designing a new challenger product, it seems that anyone and everyone has one, and if you don’t then why not?!
I can talk for both of us, that we have never been the designer or developer who likes to take on extracurricular activities. We either struggle for time to do additional work and if we have it has been freelance opportunities rather than a passion project.
However things suddenly changed late last year, and we’ve discovered that a side project isn’t something that is forced, but a project that can come naturally.
September 2017 Luke Charles and I planned to spend the morning out in the fresh autumn air, picking blackberries and walking off some of the pints we had the night before.
We got up raring to go, already planning the wonderful blackberry crumble we intended to make then suddenly while at the front door I had a complete mind blank — where on earth were we going to find blackberries.
The perfect problem
While roaming around the hedgerows I tried my hardest to remember where I had previously seen blackberry bushes earlier in the year, but it was no use as I simply couldn’t remember.
And this is where the lightbulb moment came, I turned to Luke and said:
Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app for this!
From this moment on the conversation flowed with ideas, features and functionality from the both of us — if only client projects were this easy!
The simple problem of not remembering previous locations was the issue we wanted to solve for ourselves. That evening the conversation continued into what the app could be called*, what the core purpose was, how it could grow and how it could be profitable.
* It was Found but as you can imagine there are hundreds of apps already called this and trying to find a single word domain is almost near impossible.
After lengthy discussions, we finally narrowed down a sentence that we felt captured the entire product.
Forage Notes is a simple tool that allows you to easily record your favourite foraging spots.
This description allowed us to focus on the functionality rather than the technical aspects such as it being an app, a website, a web app and the like.
After a busy beginning of 2018 involving renovating a house, Luke moving in, both of us changing jobs, has ultimately meant that Forage Notes has taken a back seat, and progress has come to a holt.
Though we had planned a minimal viable product roadmap in January 2018, we have since revisited our own career development goals, such as what technology and processes do we want to embrace. Also, we have taken the time to look at our original MVP and challenged it; how can we strip this project back into more manageable chunks? How can we create an MVP that doesn’t require us to learn app development?
What’s next for Forage Notes
As blackberry season is back upon us we have found a restored interest in getting this project off the ground—mainly because we’d forgotten the most rewarding blackberry bushes from the year before!
We’re planning on getting a simple holding page live to collect email addresses of those interested in our project. We’ve also begun looking at Craft CMS as our platform to test out creating an MVP web application. Finally, we have got our sh*t together and created a Trello board to keep on track so that we’re making progress each month regardless of how slow we go.
Hopefully, this is the first of many posts documenting our progress and discoveries. As well as a platform for others to give advice and suggestions, whether it be technical or just how you fit a side project into your day to day life.
Keep up to date with Forage Notes and our journey via
📷 Instagram — @foragenotes
🖥 Facebook— facebook/foragenotes
