Dear reader,
This past week was filled with multiple ups and downs.
Since early September, I had been working on a project. I was so invested that I had been building and shipping day and night. It was at a level where everything else had taken a back seat.
The project is called AlmaBond.
It was a project for my university because, so far, we have been using different platforms for different things, and I figured, “What if everything could live on one central platform?”
The vision and this product would not only save our university a lot of money but it would also make things a lot more streamlined for everyone (students, staff, faculty, alumni).
So I went at it, and with over a month of development, it was complete. I had built the web platform, and apps for both iOS and Android had been submitted for review. But then came the actual decision-makers.
I had meetings with multiple people, including the office heads, Deans, the CFO, the Provost, and many students.
But long story short, our university will not be adopting it anytime soon. Lessons learned include that there is a lot more to adopting a clearly better product than the product itself.
I was disappointed.
“Why would we, as a university, not adopt something that is clearly a better product, would save us money, and would help our university retain alumni connections which will likely turn into donations and more and better opportunities for students?” I kept thinking to myself.
But that was all I could do. I tried. The project failed.
But thanks to some emails from other people who were excited with me about this vision and a video from Casey Neistat, I took a step back, and I realized that I had just built the most sophisticated full-stack application on my portfolio so far.
There are so many things that I learned from this, not only about engineering, databases, architecture, systems, and security, but also about people: from how to pitch a product to what is important to whom, to how to navigate through a hierarchical chain of command.
These learnings are not just going to die out, and neither is this project.
I think this is a case for a lot of us: when we fail, we end up feeling that all the time and energy we spent on trying to make it work went to waste, but when we take a step back, we might realize that all of it was not wasted.
We will often realize that we learned something, or made some wonderful connections along the way. Those are not nothing. Slightly different than what we were hoping for, but good results nonetheless.
I am working on another project that I’m excited about, and this one doesn’t depend on a system for it to be useful.
I’ll share more about it in a week or two.
I’ll see you next week.
Warmly,
Suraj