Solo founding, then launching in 3 months

I’m an experienced designer and front-end developer, but my work usually stops when the front-end connects to the back-end. I’d tried learning back-end development years ago, but for many reasons (one being my own impatience), it didn’t take.

I would like to take credit for learning production-ready back-end code within 3 months, but honestly, the platforms have improved so much that a monkey could do it at this point. Bolstr uses:

• Firebase for database, storage, authentication, and back-end functions
• ZEIT Now for hosting
• React and Material-UI for UI
• Next.js for server-side rendering
• Sanity as a custom CMS
• Sendgrid for transactional emails

Of these, I’d only used React and Material-UI before. The rest I had to learn from scratch. I made a lot of mistakes. I refactored my code a lot. But the end result works! And that’s all I needed.

On February 6th, less than 3 months after starting work, I soft-launched Bolstr to the early-access teachers. The platform was surprisingly rock-solid, and I publicly launched a few days later.

Throughout February, more and more teachers signed up. Most teachers spent around 15 minutes in one sitting carefully crafting their profiles. I was really blown away by this—I didn’t expect so much trust in such a new platform.

Unfortunately, many teachers simply skipped the profile video step in the onboarding process. I went back and redesigned this step, to allow teachers to record their videos directly on that step, instead of recording elsewhere and uploading.

This still didn’t have the impact I was after. I realised that there was no real incentive yet—there were no jobs on the platform. My bet proved right, when just 2 weeks later, as jobs began to be posted on the platform, teachers began to record and upload their own videos to stand out.

By the start of March, exponential growth meant Bolstr already had over 150 users on the platform. Unfortunately, something else was also growing exponentially…

COVID-19 hit Australia later than other countries, but the air changed in early March. Hiring began to slow down, and then stop altogether. Students began to drop off from classes, and schedules were reduced.

The environment had changed and what had seemed like a useful solution to an important problem became irrelevant, overnight. This was a harsh lesson for such an early-stage and seemingly-successful product.

However, it was also a useful lesson in antifragility. How could we adapt to changing circumstances, using them to our benefit, rather than cracking like glass?

The world of health and fitness quickly moved online, and it made sense for Bolstr to follow. Many teachers started to create their own websites on Squarespace and Wix to account for their online offerings. I realised that the teachers had already put so much effort into their profiles, and with just a little more, they could easily turn their profile into a standalone website.

In just 3 weeks, we had allowed teachers to:

• Create a standalone website
• Using their own domain name
• Linking off to their schedules and online bookings software

I’m excited to see where Bolstr goes next. The world has changed, and no-one knows what the future of the health and fitness industry will be, but Bolstr has proven itself both well-positioned and capable to adapt to whatever that future is.