Daring Archeology

Greetings Spheroids,

This weekend we'll hit Cardsphere's first anniversary, and so I thought it would be fun to look through some very old artifacts. It's a nice way to reflect on how far we've come, with your help.

We knew early on that we wanted to be as accountable to our community as possible, and so one of our first actions was to create a survey. Looking back at it now, I can see where we failed to ask many important questions, or asked the right questions badly. But live and learn.

I've developed some renown for my terrible typing. I hear about it on a Montly basis.

Our call to action was for people to join us in our shiny new subreddit. As of this writing, we have almost a thousand subscribers, and some very active discussions. Some of our best friendships have been made in that sub.

Michael and I used to work together at our day jobs. Which meant that every single lunch hour was a Cardsphere meeting. We'd catch Tom up at the end of the day when we hopped onto Reddit and our Slack (later replaced by Discord.) Michael kept a notebook with him and would often run sketches by me.

As you can see, mobile first has always been top priority.

I'm not sure if it was Michael or Tom who updated these ideas to proper wireframes. Note the snazzy first effort at a Cardsphere logo.

I'm not a developer, but I've worked in the software industry for a long time in various roles like Technical Writer (even with the horrible typing), Training, Technical Support, and Operations. So, my designs sometimes fall a bit flat.

Loads of under the hood planning documents are still sitting on github or our shared Google drive, I pored through them looking for some good examples, but many contained information not appropriate for sharing. Even with you.

But I did find this spreadsheet used to figure out the various states used for the trades workflow:

One thing some of you may not know is that we had originally envisioned a crowdsourced disputes system where users would be randomly selected to do the equivalent of jury duty. We kept this idea until we did an episode of Brainstorm Brewery. These are smart dudes, and their objections were enough to make us walk away from it permanently.

Look at that hard sell for Premium! How things have changed! The community basically had to force us to roll out Premium so they could give us more money. We appreciate it, and are going to focus more heavily on Premium in Year Two.

And lastly, here's Tom's invite to people selected to get into the staging system first. This isn't all of it, but you get the point.

I'll see you all on the weekend for the anniversary article. There will be staaa-aaa-aats.

/ted