As a startup ourselves, we understand the challenges facing entrepreneurs. That’s why the Codebots crew is always on the lookout for opportunities to do our part and share in the mission to advance Queensland’s startup community.
In this quest, we are in good company. We recently partnered with Creative Enterprise Australia’s Collider-Accelerator program where we teamed up with two early-stage creative tech Queensland startups participating in the program.
In a day, we helped accelerate both startups towards building a unique and awesome MVP with a product roadmap, a UX flow, a mountain of code, and much more.
Collider is a 5-month accelerator tailored for creative tech startups. CEA empowers these startups with $20,000 of investment and quality coaching by experienced mentors and startup experts, such as Shoes of Prey Co-Founder Mike Knapp and Angel Shelli Trung.
So it was in good company that we volunteered to host a 1-day workshop powered by Codebots.
Codebots joins forces with Clinton & Jay
The Codebots crew consisted of ‘Head Dude’ Eban, Community Lead Indi, and two project groups. Each project group included a designer, a developer, and a team of codebot sidekicks. We even brought along a Growth Hacker to take notes, write this blog and listen intently.
Teaming up with Codebots was Clinton Burchat (Founder, BLKTATU) and Jay Van Deurse (Founder, Trnding, now known as Let’s-Colabb).
BLKTATU is a drone delivery company that builds hardware, giving drones the ability to deliver to high-rise buildings and other hard to reach locations.
BLKTATU has solved the high-rise problem with collection nets and auxiliary navigation support.
Trnding is a marketplace connecting social media influencers and brands & outlets. In a nutshell, smaller influencers, brands and outlets are missing out on the rich potential of social media advertising. Trnding allows small to medium brands and outlets to reward micro-influencers who post pictures of themselves showcasing one or more of their products. The app facilitates this by cataloging available products, tracking posts and distributing rewards.
From product roadmap to code: a Codebots case study
The workshop was designed to deliver a scoping document, complete with a product roadmap, a requirements backlog and UX & schematic diagrams, and in doing so accelerate two early stage creative tech startups.
The Codebots vision is a world where technology empowers creative and entrepreneurial individuals, rather than blocking them. This is what Codebots does. It takes ideas and turns them into code. So unless you’re out of ideas, you’re a coder!
The most important step towards creating an MVP and harnessing Codebots, is proper product roadmapping.
It’s important to have a high-level vision of where the project is, where it’s been and where it’s going. The goal is to plan your journey in such a way that you can begin making learnings as soon as possible, to start lean and stay agile.
“The process was really cool and helped me take what was in my head and lay it out on paper. New ideas took shape and existing ones were tested.” - Clinton Burchat
As you roadmap your product’s development, it’s a good idea to also create a requirements backlog. This backlog is a high-level vision of the pieces that make up your product (Epics, User Groups and User Stories).
Epics are the big picture ideas that make-up your product. For example: Web Portal. User Groups are types of people using your product. For example: Admins and Customers. User Stories are how a User Group interacts with an Epic. For example: Customers can log in and do X, Y and Z.
What Codebots does is take the models that all app development projects start with, such as the requirements backlog, and turns these into code. The requirements backlog tells the bots what needs to happen and the UX Flow shows how it should be experienced. Which is why we were excited to whip out our UX cards and begin mapping the apps right there on the table!
“I thought UX mapping was pointless until I saw the value in getting my ideas down and highlighting gaps and opportunities.” “ Jay Van Deurse
This step also gave the developers important insights into the relationships between entities and variables.
For Trnding, the UX model of the Branding Portal could look something like this.
With the main page including a dashboard and updates to that dashboard triggering email notifications.
It might look simple, but each model represents a critical step towards developing an MVP. Which is why it was cool to see Codebots, with these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place, get to work and write 20,768 lines of code for Jay and 39,887 for Clinton.
Between the product roadmap, the input models and the code, this workshop represented a massive timesaver for our partners towards developing their app and MVP.
To Jay, a non-techie founder of a creative tech startup, this also represents independence: “to have 92% of of my code ready to go” as soon as the input models are complete, “to be able to generate that code using Codebots, makes me less reliant on my developers.”
Clinton also commented on how the drone industry is saturated with unproven ideas and “a lot of BS”, which is why it’s important to build an MVP as soon as possible.
When the Codebots beta goes live, our workshop participants will have the opportunity to get online and pick up what we started. Which in Clinton and Jay’s case, is a big step towards having a prototype.
Power your software with Codebots
The world is increasingly one where digital maturity is less an edge and more a necessity. Businesses need to innovate more to get and stay ahead.
BLKTATU and Trnding are awesome ideas, but they are also ideas that require digital maturity. For BLKTATU that might include a lightweight software package that tracks drones and seamlessly integrates with a drone delivery company’s existing products and services. And for Trnding that might include a web and mobile product that integrates with a wide range of social media and e-commerce platforms (some of which might not have even been created yet!).
It was an amazing learning experience teaming up with Clinton and Jay and seeing how Codebots could empower awesome early stage creative tech startups, especially ones with non-techie founders who would rather spend less time coding and more time creating. As most entrepreneurs do!
The Codebots crew is amped to do more of these workshops and help entrepreneurs #GetSh!tDone! Hope to see you soon.
Collider case study results
What we did was partner with Creative Enterprise Australia’s Collider Accelerator program, teaming up with two early stage creative tech Queensland startups.
Some cool stats:
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6 hours of personalised advice
60,655 lines of code
Product roadmaps
Requirements backlogs
UX flows
Schematic diagrams
7 serves of hot chips
Read more on our partnerships with BLKTATU and Trnding.
Written by Eban Escott
Founder of Codebots
Dr Eban Escott received his Doctorate from UQ (2013) in Model-Driven Engineering and his Masters from QUT (2004) in Artificial Intelligence. He is an advocate of using models as first class artefacts in software engineering and creating not just technologies, but methodologies that enhance the quality of life for software engineers.
