Hello,
Welcome to an entirely unplanned blog post where I just sat down on a Saturday, started writing, and the following spilled out:
I (Gabriel) am without a doubt, a product focused founder. Before starting Tutti I spent years imagining what amazing products/solutions I would build (from both a high level, as well as down to the nitty gritty details) once I managed to get Tutti off the ground and start building a team around me. And today, with our limited budget, I am acting product manager, designer, and limited QA tester, putting those dreams I had into reality, one bit at a time.
Here's a little history of the product so far: In 2019 we launched our first MVP on a white-label platform: Sharetribe Go. It enabled us to validate the idea without coding anything ourselves, and we reached just over 1000 registered users on that. (I threw it together by myself, in just under 4 hours - including payment integrations. That's the power of Sharetribe!)
In 2020, when COVID brought the world to a standstill, we decided to move forward by focusing on tech development, building our own platform from the ground up. There are of course many booking platform APIs out there you can build upon, but we knew that we wanted total control over our infrastructure, so we made the decision to build the core structure ourselves, while relying on APIs to support important add-on features like payments, data, and notifications.
Initially we designed it to look very similar to Sharetribe, partly because the initial plan (had COVID not happened) was to switch seamlessly from Sharetribe to ours sometime in late 2020. But of course those plans changed in March, and we decided to launch what we had (despite it not being at all ready) in April, when no one was looking, and fix it quickly before the world returned to normal (not realising how long that would take). It has evolved massively in the last 14 months, and we've gotten into a good pattern of releasing major updates every 2-3 weeks.
Our tech team may be small but they're extremely talented and my favourite part of being a founder is working with them every single day. Our team consists of Maddy & Dharmil (full time developers), supported by JD (CTO) & Mihir (QA) until last week, now Vidhi (QA), part time. What is especially fantastic about our setup is that there are other members of SixBerries who can jump in and help us solve problems as and when needed. It is the ideal agile setup for a product focused startup. We also rely heavily on Jules, our in-house SEO expert, to make sure our site is friendly to the Google bot, and to keep us informed about all the new and frustrating changes in the world of SEO.
We are pro-actively finding new and exciting ways to push Tutti forward, not just in the ways I define in the product sprints each couple of weeks, but with endless structural tweaks and improvements too. I'm so proud of what we have accomplished so far and I can't wait to see the site evolve over the next few years.
If you'd like to follow along with our progress, we do try to share different details in a number of places.
We have:
- Our public roadmap that shows what we've achieved with quick feature titles: https://trello.com/b/X87DG7V7/tutti-product-roadmap
- Our patch notes, where I dive into a lot more detail of what the features are and why they exist, as well as list any bugs or tweaks we've fixed/made: https://www.tutti.space/patch-notes
- Our haptic page, where I share occasional questions and source ideas/suggestions from a 'build in public' community: https://www.haptic.so/p/tutti
One thing we are actively working on is making sure we integrate user suggestions into our roadmap. Often user requested features will already be in our grand plan, but if a few users request them, we'll shift them forward in the timeline. So if you have a request, let us know!
Hope this has been illuminating or at the very least, interesting,
Gabriel
