Part 1

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts about my journey building cleavable, I will be adding to this series as I go.

I want this series to be a walkthrough for other people if they decide to start building their own product. More importantly, this is a way to go about building a product, in my own opinion as a junior front-end developer finding his way through the world of entrepreneurship.

The idea

What if I could go to a website and find people who are willing to help me buy the product I want and have it shipped wherever I am in the world?

I often find myself trying to get ahold of a product that I know would be very expensive to get at a local store, if I could even find it. Sometimes, the only option is to buy it from a website abroad, usually the US where the best deals are.

Having used Shipito and MyUS in the past, I know the price can get very ugly and some stores won't ship to those warehouses for some reason. So I thought why can't this be done by a community of people, a person who lives, say, in the US can make extra cash just by receiving my product and forwarding it back to me.

Existing solutions

Those are a few websites that popped up after a simple search on Google:

• Parcl.com: a website connecting shoppers with people capable of delivering their purchases
• Shippn.com: Shippn is a trusted community that enables people to shop from anywhere in the world
• grabr.io: Grabr connects shoppers and travelers who help each other access the world
• shopandship.com: Buy from websites that don't offer shipping to your country

Most of the remaining solutions target travelers.

The implementation

I started by defining a "skateboard" version of the product
(If you don't know what a "skateboard" version means, check out this great article by Henrik Kniberg) then I made a basic wireframe using Excalidraw

figure 1: Drawing of the MVP version of cleavable

I decided to use Gatsby for prototyping. I chose to write my app in React simply because that's what I spent a big chunk of time coding in. It feels pretty comfortable to me and I can focus on the product more than the technical aspects. Remember the goal here is to find product-market fit by shipping small incremental functionalities

Besides, React.js is a great library. It encourages writing maintainable code through reusability and composition. You can always add TypeScript, ReasonML and whatnot later when you have a product that people actually want.

We will keep this as simple as possible. I know I have to account for two user experiences:

• The shopper experience: As a shopper I want to find people who live in the country where the product ships and be able to talk to them to arrange shipping.
• The forwarder (host) experience: As a forwarder, I can go to the website and find some packages of other people and decide if I can forward them to make extra cash (for instance).

We'll have a few forwarders that are willing to include their home address in our small database, and also we'll list a few packages from shoppers. No manipulation of the data from our interface for the first MVP. Just display the data.

For this, I'll pitch this small MVP to a few people who may be able to use it as a way to get extra cash forwarding packages for the community and then look up people who want goods shipped.

Getting feedback wherever I can

I started by pitching the idea to my friends & family and get them to use the app to gather their feedback.

I then made this tweet to gather even more feedback:

Marouane Rassili

@marouanerassili

Hello twitter
I am trying to validate a little idea here for a website I'm building, would anyone be so kind to try it out and leave their feedback? DM me if you have a few minutes and want to help a folk out

@kytwb @smakosh I'd love if you could retweet for reach 🙏🏻💖

02:53 AM - 09 May 2020

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Here's a screenshot of what the website looks like at the time of writing:

figure 2: Screenshot of cleavable.com homepage

What's next

Now that I have some feedback that I could work on, this is the way to go, but the most challenging part now is figuring out the logistics. How to enable users to shop and make cash forwarding packages without risk of getting ripped off, and without legal issues doing that.

You can follow on the progress via Twitter from (@cleavableapp) or (@marouanerassili)

During the next few weeks I will be gathering more feedback and working on it and see if this is something people would like to use.

Have some feedback about cleavable? Email me at mrassili@aol.com or
reach out via Twitter