Showcase - gathering content

[noire-munich]

Here's the list I've gathered, not always sure who's working on what. Tick to let us know who's been reached out.

Known projects

• BuildPass - Aaron
• Everfund - Christopher, Will
• Tape.sh - Danny
• Snaplet - Peter, Jian
• CadHub - Kurt
• Nous - Lee, Christian
• Pullflow - Zak
• UsersVitals - Tharshan
• SportOffice - Thomas
• 2 projects - Tobbe
• Raccoon Trade
• Marla Map - Tilmann Böhme
• Mento - Jamie Highsmith
• Fixed ID - Kyle Corbitt
• Algostake - Rob 😐
• Nifty Chess - Patrick @pi0neerpat
• Swordy Bot - Patrick @pi0neerpat

Unknown projects

• Aldo
• Alec
• Barak
• Hamish
• Jordan
• Kris
• Kyle
• Orta
• Ryan Chenkie
• Ryan Lockard
• Syeda Zainab
• Johann Ellison

Message sent:

Hi!
We're preparing the Showcase page for the upcoming v1 launch - it's going to be on the redesigned, new [redwoodjs.com](http://redwoodjs.com/).
We'd like to gather some startup projects and let them introduce themselves on the showcase page. We are looking at least at 5 projects for launch day, but the more the merrier and of course, content should be updated from then on.
Would you like to join? We've got a discussion for that here: https://github.com/redwoodjs/sprout/discussions/2
with a questionnaire that could help if necessary.
[@amanda](https://redwoodjs.slack.com/team/U02K5QVHUEP) and I are working to get in touch with people and try to help if a review is needed. Format would be text + video or podcast, depending on what suits you.
If you are interested and can make time for it, please get in touch with either of us in the coming weeks.

[cannikin]

I've got a couple of apps running Redwood, but they're crypto-related. Don't know if how we feel about associating the project with those. 😬

One is sort of a personal project that only has like a dozen users, but the other has ~7,000 users and moves around millions of crypto assets a day: https://app.algostake.org/ Running old school baremetal style on a single AWS server (using yarn rw serve), and I'm probably the only one among the people above that can say that!

Most GraphQL calls complete in <50ms and so it doesn't even really need loading screens for most things. There's rarely less than 100 active users simultaneously at any given time (and everyone's polling every 5 minutes to keep the interface numbers up-to-date). We've got sometimes 4x the active users at night when our processing stuff runs. When we're processing these nightly transactions we're doing hundreds a minute.

Now that I think about it, this could be the highest traffic site currently running on Redwood. Hmm...

[noire-munich]

Now that I think about it, this could be the highest traffic site currently running on Redwood. Hmm...

Definitely worth considering 👍 , plus crypto is a hot topic among tech people afaik. Could be a bit exotic for a showcase but worthy of interest either way. I'd vote for 💯 . Eager to see your presentation vid :D

[realStandal]

Yeah, please do feel free to fill out the questionnaire and put y'all's app forward, @cannikin! I think picking the apps we're going to showcase is still something we need to talk about, if we happen to get more than 4 or 5. And if we don't end up in that position, then it'll be great to have yours available.

[realStandal]

@noire-munich @agiannelli Thoughts on having startups share their showcase here so it can be commented on, and that way it's available for other startups to use as a reference?

[agiannelli]

I think that is a great idea. It helps us start information gathering sooner than later!

[noire-munich]

Got my upvote!
shall we still personally get in touch with each projects? I've had little success with that :p

[realStandal]

@noire-munich I've been reaching out to startups and sending an invitation/nudge; I've been checking them off of your list as I go. Right now we have 3 definitive "yes"'s (not counting @cannikin , @zakmandhro, or @KrisCoulson) and one which is pending schedule alignment. If the startups are interested, I've been directing them to post their response to the questionnaire + anything else they wish to add here, as a comment. Then I figure it's easy to turn those into static pages, or enter them into a backend form.

[noire-munich]

@realStandal form should be easy, I meant to add Christopher's editor component, hope to do that soon! Could help.

I confirm SportOffice would want to participate as well 😉

[dac09]

I'd be keen to have the nous (https://www.nous.co/) team on the show case too!

[realStandal]

I've sent them (Lee) the same invitation. If I don't hear back in a day or so, I'll reach out to Christian too!

[dac09]

Happy to showcase for https://www.tape.sh/.

Started building on RW 0.6, got involved with RW and look where we are now!

Tech stack:

• RW for main app
• NextJS for when you share your tapes (i.e. recorded links) - that speaks to the RW graphql api
• Electron app with native elements for desktop, that speaks to the RW API

Deployment

• Vercel for hosting
• Supabase for DB

There's a few thousand sign ups, a handful of full subscribers and a few hundred (500ish) active users through Setapp a month.

Do you guys want me to do a PR to sprout to add it in or would you prefer that I just provide the content on this thread?

[realStandal]

The content on this thread is fine, that way when/if sprout changes your post can be a source-of-truth.

[realStandal]

I've just finished turning the code from the main branch into a figma design. Feel free to give feedback there. This is what your content would get turned into/populate.

[noire-munich]

@realStandal are you still going for that admission form idea, or is it being kept for later on?

[realStandal]

Kept for later on

[zakmandhro]

👍 We are working on the content for Pullflow.

[realStandal]

CC - @burnsy, @dac09, @noire-munich, @viperfx, @zakmandhro

Hello; apologies for any delay - should you have been waiting on me,

I've put together a more concrete list of things expected from startups as y'all fill out your showcase responses. It combines some of the ideas, mocks, and designs that have been thrown around by the community the past week or so; it's always open to change, so feel free to make suggestions if they pop into your head.

It's an all-inclusive list, please feel free to cherry-pick the items and topics which help to showcase your startup. That said, please also feel free to provide as much as you can about your startup, you, if you're working in a team, how you've found the experience using Redwood to be, etc. The hope is: we can have a smaller number of very rich showcases and add more of them and to them as time goes on.

• Answer whatever questions from the questionnaire that you think are relevant. Feel free to add your own if you feel so inclined and think something is missing that conveys the project/you/your use of Redwood; if you do add a question, please let me know so I can add it for the other startups to use too 🙂
• A 500x220 thumbnail for your startup.
• A showcase of your project. I think ideally, it's a video of you demoing it but screenshots can work just as well.
• If you're hiring or looking for a co-founder, we can incorporate the job board postings with your startup's showcase.
• Achievements, the technology your application is using (in addition to RW's), links to your socials, i.e. things that can be listed as quick bullet points about your project. Each of the things listed will be their own sections, and we can add more if you need them.
• Write about you, your project, your experience with Redwood. My idea is something more essay/blog-like, if that helps you to explain everything above. Some people like writing, some like reading, let's get them together.
• Custom call-to-action. Take whoever maybe reading the page somewhere specific should you like.

See this preview of what the showcase page will look like, which I hope helps to paint a picture for how your responses will be used.

[dac09]

Tape
Super charge your collaboration with video messages. 2 clicks to screen share - talk through what you mean, highlight parts to draw attention to, and instantly get a link back to your recording.

No more battling timezones, scheduling nightmares or misunderstood emails! Remote working can be simple - Work smarter, together.

Who are you and what's your background?

I’m Danny, from London in the UK - I started building Tape with Redwood way back with version 0.6 (for reference, at the time of writing, Redwood is shipping v0.50!)

I’ve been working with JavaScript for about 10+ years now, in its various guises - from web, to mobile, and even on smart TVs and gaming consoles. I now form part of the Core team at Redwood, as one of the lead maintainers, alongside building Tape. Prior to this, I was a senior engineering manager at a FinTech in London - but I thought I needed a change, to do something creative, interesting and build something of my own.

What problem are you addressing?

Back when the COVID lockdowns first started and we started working remotely, we found that we were sharing screenshots and recordings very regularly over chat when building apps together. It quickly became clear that collaborating was hard - video calls were difficult to coordinate, and often a massive time drain.

Along came Tape -

Tape is a communication tool - Tape's goal is to be the most convenient and friction-free way to collaborate with your team, clients or customers.

~~~~ INSERT VIDEO DEMO ~~~~~

Where does Tape fit in?

Tape is to Video calls, what Slack is to email.

When you want to say something, but chat isn't enough and video calls feel overkill. Think about scheduling/blocking off calendars, or those long emails that nobody reads properly!

Few things that’s uniquely Tape:

• its very simple, so you can focus on communicating -> select the window, finish recording and you have a link

Tape tries to do 1 thing, and 1 thing well.

• You can choose to add a webcam overlay to make it more personal, a voice over to talk through what your recording, or just a silent video
• Alfred-like keyboard support, find it easier and more intuitive to use the keyboard to pick what to record
• Tape lets you draw on your screen as you record to add more context to what you're talking about during the recording
• All your uploads are neatly organised on the Tape Dashboard, where you can filter & search, and control access to who gets to see your recordings.

Redwood

I started using Redwood for Tape, because I didn’t want to waste 2 weeks setting up the project for a proof of concept. Redwood came with Jest, Babel, Workspaces configured and was super easy to deploy and run (remember back in 0.6, Redwood didn’t have that many features!).

Over time, I started contributing fixes and features that I found missing in Redwood while building Tape, I got to know the core team and we clicked. I loved Tom’s vision, and his commitment to keeping things simple. Some of the features you see in Redwood today was “incubated” in the Tape codebase, and when there was support behind it, we built it in to the framework itself!

In its 1.0 state, Redwood offers way more - it still maintains the foundational concept of letting you focus on your product, but gives you the tools - scenario testing, storybook, API function and webhook testing - and very importantly the patterns for growing your MVP to a full blown startup.

Why Redwood?

I’m a big fan of KISS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle) - and Redwood was the embodiment of this. Even in its early form, the focus was on letting the user build the product, instead of spinning wheels configuring your project.

Redwood has a powerful Graphql API, and is easy to integrate with across all our sides - CLI, MacOS App and a Next.js app.

Tech stack:

• Redwood for main app - your dashboard, API and account management
• NextJS for when you share your tapes (i.e. recorded links) - that speaks to the RW Graphql API
• Electron app with native elements for desktop, that speaks to the Redwood API

Deployment

• Vercel for hosting
• Cloudflare for caching and CDN
• Supabase for DB

Team

Tape is a very small team - just myself and Aditya Pandey (who has also become a Redwood Core team member).

At this time, we are not currently recruiting.

~~~ INSERT CALL TO ACTION ~~~~~

[dac09]

1x:

2x:

Another version for you to try

[realStandal]

Getting real fancy - I love it

[noire-munich]

I'm waiting to get admin on my account for the site so I can "seed" content and let you see how this information will be used to build the page.

@realStandal Access granted!

[realStandal]

@noire-munich Thank you, much appreciated!

@dac09 You can view my current iteration of the showcase design using a portion of your response. Still ironing out a few bugs, and I need to add the ability to full-screen the demo images. Time permitting, I'd like to make it so you can enter this yourself. It's also pending a redesign using the updated vision for the site.

I've also got a more fleshed out example you can use for reference.

Once you're happy with Tape's response, let me know and we can agree on a "final" version :)

Oh, and here is the page with the thumbnail, in case you hate how it turned out lol

[dac09]

Looking good @realStandal - I'll let you get one with it for now, but

I've updated the tagline, adding achievements now, and will add the videos and CTAs mid-week.

[noire-munich]

Who are you and what's your background

I'm Thomas, SportOffice Tech lead, an early bird very enthusiast of RedwoodJS. I've never had formal training and for years I've worked mostly with PHP and various frameworks, at various jobs, until eventually I got really bored of tech and community. It was time for a fresh adventurous start and I was willing to learn some React, which eventually led me to RedwoodJS & its burgeoning community.

What problem are you addressing?

My co-founders were into the Outdoor activities business since 2019, they own a network of ski schools in the French Alps and were not satisfied with the tools the industry was using. Coming from a very digital background ( online insurance & AWS reselling business ), Florent (CEO) & Benoit (Sales Manager) set themselves to build the best school management & online selling tool for those schools, to eventually offer a solution to an industry that has nothing satisfying enough when it comes to digitalization. Most school managers at the time preferred to rely on pen and paper, others were stuck with specific tools a bit too old and not agile enough. Almost all of them have close to zero knowledge of the modern digital world and how to put your own mark in the landscape - Florent & Benoit had a strong feeling they knew how to solve that problem.

What solution are you bringing?

SportOffice, our product, let's you manage online your entire school's activity, from lesson scheduling to online booking. It's in real-time, field tested thanks to our network of schools and we're building for the future: today we sell ski lessons, tomorrow you'll book your curling, poney or extreme ironing lessons thanks to us. Not only do you have the tool to make it all happen but you also get the digital environment and expertise, we know how to promote your content online and we know how to connect your data to the marketplaces that matter. People used to come to you out of habit or lack of choice, but the market has been shifting and we are here to help you reach out.

Ultimately you had to choose Redwood over something else: what was the ultimate contender and how did you make your choice?

Actually, the choice was made a full year before we founded SportOffice!
I switched to RedwoodJS in march 2020 and decided I would focus my efforts on it - entirely, which was something I had never done. Finding a business project is a different story, but I was sure I was going to use RedwoodJS. Florent and Benoit had been very positive about RedwoodJS, so we made a deal and the project could begin.
I chose RedwoodJS over MeteorJS, ExpressJS, NextJS and Strapi: of all of them RedwoodJS made it easy to transition from a non JS experience to a full JS experience. It helped me growing more with React, of which I had little knowledge of before, and finally let me have the capacity to fully test my applications without the sort of friction I used to face in other contexts. It was shipping with GraphQL and Storybook too, which were two importants things to me to feel like I was finally getting current with my industry. Bothering setting up anything I wanted/needed? Never, RedwoodJS was handling it.
Last but not least, when it was first advertised, RedwoodJS came off to me as demanding: from the founders to themselves, from the users to themselves, from the community to the industry. It built itself as the environment I had been looking for, technically and on a social level as well. Brought by RW, value is not just a matter of great code and DX, it's also a matter of people. That was the mental space I wanted to be in, after two years with it both framework and community have delivered more than I hoped for.

Are you using a vanilla setup or custom? Feel free to elaborate

Vanilla setup! We are using some libraries as everyone.
We are hosted on AWS, using AWS Beanstalk but are considering a move to Fargate. Also from AWS we are using SNS & SQS for some synchronization tasks - but it's possible that RedwoodJS helps us in the near future to remove those two last.
We've got a broadcast system for exceptions but also for business events, so we're using Honeybadger ( logging ), Slack & Mailjet for business events. Mailjet lets us connect with our customers, Slack makes us super fast to detect anomalies and handle Customer support.
Payment is handled with Stripe and we use Papaparse to create some spreadsheet exports to handle precise payments and data extracts.
On a very tech oriented side, we've been using Faker while yearning for Snaplet ( someday!! ). We've also been using the following: Dayjs, Redux Toolkit, Material-ui and some Dexie.js. Our workflow includes Pullflow, and since we're very remote we have a strong need for Tape.sh - but not the environment as our fleet is Linux/Windows/Chromebooks.

Do you have a team and are you recruiting?

We have a small dev team based in Paris, France, I have built around 90% of the codebase, for the past 6 months we've got a part-time intern and for 2 months we've had freelance help based in Russia. Right now we are raising funds, we have plans to recruit in summer 2022 and we don't plan to have frontiers on our hires.
Onboarding has been very easy with interns, because the docs are very helpful, but we are yet to try it with conventional resources. Now, our product is rather complex and a lot of that complexity comes from the business itself, not from RedwoodJS. It'll be great to welcome new people to the project, and hopefully to the community.
Another team is based in Annecy, in the French Alps, where most of our industry meets and thrives. They handle the operational business.

Are you or one of your team collaborating to Redwood in any way?

Yep! I did a couple of PRs and I've engaged in the community on the Discourse forums mostly. Always happy to do so, the community is great. For the launch week I helped on some pages of the new website, this meant gathering content, coding some sections of the website, working on its localization. I've also helped with translation - both in terms of code as in terms of translating the docs.
Contributing is important to me, so I hope to plant that seed in the team we will build at SportOffice.

Achievements
4000 lessons booked
1400 customers
6 ski schools using our solution
50K unique users on ski-family.fr on season 21-22
Hosted by the following incubators: Tremplin Paris & Co, Outdoor Sports Valley, Alpes Tourisme Lab

Call to action is undecided as of yet.
Video & pictures are being gathered as well.
Feedback is always welcome.

[realStandal]

🎉 @noire-munich 🎉

Just some feedback reading through it my first time:

Who are you and what's your background

Absolutely no pressure, but where are you (and your team) from?! My two cents: The fact most of us are from all over the world is amazing - so I'm all for pushing that to be a part of your startup's story.

... Stripe, Firebase, AWS, Material-UI, Redux Toolkit and Faker ... AWS Beanstalk ... AWS SNS and SQS

If you have the time, or I can just pick a few out myself, feel free to list out your technologies so I can add them to the dedicated space. Right now, I have it maxed at 10 - just let me know if that restricts you in anyway. If I had to pick, I'd try to highlight some which are a little more unique (i.e. Beanstalk), which I think is a nice way to show Redwood's ambiguity.

Feedback is always welcome.

The only thing "missing" from your list would be the thumbnail, just to make sure it didn't slip your mind :)

[noire-munich]

Absolutely no pressure, but where are you (and your team) from?! My two cents: The fact most of us are from all over the world is amazing - so I'm all for pushing that to be a part of your startup's story.

Erh, I'm a bit reluctant to say it up front as I don't want our team to be tagged "french". It's about recruiting, we've worked with people from 3 continents already and I intend to keep this strong in the future, location should not matter, skills and professional culture do.
However I do get how it could be helpful to the community, so I mentioned several times in some edits our locations. Would it work this way, or do we need something more obvious?

If you have the time, or I can just pick a few out myself, feel free to list out your technologies so I can add them to the dedicated space.

Actually I've edited that part to describe a bit more how we're working with our tools. I'm not sure I have enough perspective to be able to single out what would make our environment stand out, I don't know enough about other projects. I don't think we are many projects hosted on AWS and afaik we're the only one using Beanstalk, so yep, would be worth mentioning, but for the rest of our stack... kinda clueless I'd admit -o-. Our dependencies are still very task oriented, we are not yet using things like Segment.io for instance.
What do you think would be worth mentioning, aside of Beanstalk?

The only thing "missing" from your list would be the thumbnail, just to make sure it didn't slip your mind :)

That sparked a conversation on our side x), we need a rebrand... I'll come up with all these as soon as I can.

Thanks for the help @realStandal !

[realStandal]

...location should not matter, skills and professional culture do.

Do whatever suits you - I think what you have is perfectly fine, it was just a light-hearted thought. I think you maybe overthinking/making up the location and professionalism correlation; I'm not sure where it's coming from :)

Let's not bike-shed it, though lol - it doesn't really matter where you're from.

Actually I've edited that part to describe a bit more how we're working with our tools...

From what you have listed, I'd vote: AWS: Beanstalk, SNS, and SQS; Honeybadger; Mailjet; Papaparse; and Slack.

By no means do they have to standout, was more a way of sparking anything out of you that wasn't mentioned 😆

In the end, it'll be a space for you to quickly list information about how and with what SportOffice was built; should you want to.

I'll come up with all these as soon as I can.

Awesome!! Truthfully looking forward to getting to see it!

[noire-munich]

Do whatever suits you - I think what you have is perfectly fine, it was just a light-hearted thought. I think you maybe overthinking/making up the location and professionalism correlation; I'm not sure where it's coming from :)

No problem!

There's a heated debate in France these days because of what's happening in Ukraine and because of the upcoming presidential elections. The question is whether or not companies should join a boycott effort against Russia, a boycott against its people. It's not about location/professionalism, a correlation I didn't see nor mean, it's about living up to our pledge.

Anyway, agreed on the non-bike-shedding :p, opened for MPs if it's of any interest though.

By no means do they have to standout, was more a way of sparking anything out of you that wasn't mentioned laughing

Ah! good point. Well your selection is fine by me 👍 , not sure how the rest is worth mentioning: today we've got one RedwoodJS app but in a near future we may as well end up with multiple apps and a much more complex architecture. But yeah, for the time being, that is fair enough.

[viperfx]

Who are you and what's your background?
Hi my name is Tharshan, from Vancouver Canada. I started developing UserVitals with RedwoodJS at v0.20. I have 10+ years of experience as a software engineer, from leading software teams at larger companies, contracting as a software consultant, and developing my own products.

Previous SaaS applications I have built were using Python and Django - so RedwoodJS was my first bet on a full stack JS framework. Developing SaaS applications as a small team is challenging so building around a framework that is both opinionated and comes with batteries included is a huge benefit - both RedwoodJS and Django are similar in this respect.

What problem are you addressing?
I started UserVitals because when working on product for my previous SaaS product, ScrumGenius, I got to understand how important customer feedback is to finding product-market fit and building a successful product in the market. I had feedback from all over the place - sales calls, demos, customer tickets and emails. I initially maintained a mental list of the feedback when the product was in its early stages but very quickly the requests grew and the complexity grew as the product matured. I had tried to keep track of the feedback to our task tracking app and our company wiki software, Notion at the time. However, these tools did not fit into the workflow I had and had no real way to organize and categorize this feedback - or any way to close the feedback loop with the customers as we developed solutions for them. Eventually I started prototyping UserVitals to solve these problems to build a central system to be the customer feedback management platform for startups.

What solution are you bringing?
UserVitals helps product owners make sense of the chaos of customer feedback. Feedback coming from different sources - support tickets, e-mails, calls, etc. The tool helps them collect, organize, and prioritize that feedback. While also keeping the customers in the loop with updates and future roadmap.
We have developed UserVitals as a product with multiple components and integrations that allow our customers to add feedback from anywhere and even use our developer API to create their own internal integrations or tools.
Our Chrome extension allows our customers to capture feedback, source and customer information from any web page. We have developed official partner integrations with popular chat and support tools like Slack, Discord, Intercom, Helpscout and more. We have also started developing integrations with project management tools such as Linear. For custom workflows we have a public GraphQL API and a Zapier integration to connect to 1000+ applications.

Why redwood?
I had been reading about redwood and other similar frameworks for some time before I pulled the trigger on using it for my next SaaS product. Initially I was drawn to redwood because of their vision to bring together key industry standard technologies such as GraphQL, Auth Providers, and React but tying them together in a cohesive framework that both abstracted and simplified the complexity behind these individual tools. I was also impressed with the framework’s decision to also empower the developer to make choices with the framework such as pluggable auth providers.
I knew prior to building UserVitals, the API will be an important part of the application as I knew we would be connecting to third party tools and different components that we internally made such as our Chrome extension or CLI import tool. The flexibility of the GraphQL layer powered by Envelop allowed us to put in error tracking with Sentry, logging, custom authentication layers and more.
I also enjoyed the simple concepts that Redwood promoted such as services, cells and functions that greatly improved the developer experience when building production ready applications.
Ultimately, Redwood allowed us to focus on building the product while giving us a solid foundation to build on top of and being flexible enough to plug things in when we needed it.

How is your project setup? How is it hosted?
UserVitals is deployed as multiple components. Our customer portal and admin portal are deployed separately and distributed through a CDN and serve the redwood frontend.
We have a serverful deployment of the Redwood API which powers all our components such as the customer portal, admin portal, chrome extension etc.
We also run a background worker that executes important tasks such as sending emails, performing long running tasks and more. We integrated with an open source software called Faktory in combination with the redwood cli exec feature to run a background worker with RedwoodJS.
All our services are hosted with Render.

[realStandal]

Hey @viperfx thanks for filling this out! Lovely read, loved getting to know UserVitals and yourself, pleasure to meet y'all both lol

Great stuff! I only really have two things that I'm missing (feel free to push against me if you're completely against including these items):

• A 500x220 thumbnail for your startup.
• Custom call-to-action. Take whoever maybe reading the page somewhere specific should you like.
  • This can be a dedicated marketing page, or just to your home page. I really would just like a specific text and link to use.

And then feel free to include (should you want, this is just a friendly reminder):

• Your startup's social sites
• Achievements your proud of that your startup has met.

[viperfx]

Banner:

CTA: Build better products with customer feedback https://www.uservitalshq.com/

[realStandal]

Thank you, sir!

The showcase page will go live later on throughout the week, but you can still preview the listing and the full page using the above.

I took the liberty of adding the video from your homepage, I can easily remove that if you'd rather not include it.

[BurnedChris]

Introduction

• Who are you and what's your background?

  I’m Christopher Burns, Co-founder and CEO at Everfund, along with my Co-founder and COO, Will De Ath. We both live in the UK and met at University studying Computer Science.

  I have been programming since I was 15 and have always been interested in the solutions of web development, starting in PHP, then moving on to JavaScript. Starting a startup has always been an aspiration for me and when Will and I graduated in 2017, we took the leap to build our first startup. We’ve continually evolved ourselves and our skills over numerous ideas to make what we call Everfund today.

• What problem are you addressing?

  With Everfund, we found that the challenges of non-profits in the last decade were simpler. Gaining donations, supporter engagement, and managing operations were basically solved by a mixture of platforms like Blackbaud, GoFundMe and Classy and you did things manually like loose cash collection and human data entry to get by.
  In the few years since, non-profits have been put under stress from the change in donor patience and habits, Covid making their fundraising and engagement completely digital, and managing data tasks manually with staff they can’t afford. The leading platforms today are showing massive gaps here and has led non-profits to try and use their web developers to build custom solutions and integrations and often reinvent the wheel in an attempt to get needed functionality.

• What solution are you bringing?

  Think of us as the Stripe + Hubspot for non-profits. Today, we’re hyper focused non-profit payments with the upcoming V1 release of our platform’s high performing donation tools for modern non-profits and their web developers.

  We're building Everfund to give modern non-profits deeper control with all the technical nuances handled, and give their developers the tools to solve new challenges for them, simpler and faster.
  For those looking to run non-profits better (who were previously forced to choose between building from scratch, using one-fits-all platforms, or giving up on their dreams of having great tech to do the work for them), we’re building Everfund to allow them to get their fundraising, operations and supporter engagement set up quickly in any shape they want, keeping their data, money and operations all in one place, and gives their web developers a new ecosystem of tools to push the boundaries of what’s possible and help them grow and adapt faster.

Redwood

• Is redwood supporting the migration of an existing project/business or is it a brand new project?

  Everfund is and was a brown field app. We initially migrated away from GatsbyJS, a Happi Server, and a Prima 1 database.

• How did you come across Redwood?

  I listened to a podcast with Tom Preston-Werner speaking about a new framework he was building called RedwoodJS. I sat thinking about it for a month or so, but once we pushed our current tech stack to the limit, it was starting to so a lot of friction and it was becoming harder to move Everfund’s early MVP forward. It was obvious we needed to migrate to something like RW, and once we jumped, there was non turning back given the huge benefits for our early stage startup, with one of the best communities to support us.

• Are you using a vanilla setup or custom?

  Earlier on, we had a very customised RW approach, because we were adding in features that the framework did not yet support, such as pre-rendering. But as RW has moved closer to V1, more and more custom code has been removed in place of the official RW supported features.

  Everfund has always been a two client project. We host the back end dashboard using RW and our client payment checkouts using NextJS.

• How many minor versions did you have to jump until v1rc and how has that affected your project?

  Our first version was V0.8 (in May 2020) when authentication was added in and we’ve jumped across 42 main versions almost 2 years later. Incrementally, we have built alongside RW and there has never been a moment where we could not have updated to the latest version.

• Which tool or feature from vanilla Redwood proves to be the most helpful?

  One of the most useful tools in Redwood is the authentication that glues together the APIs and logging in the client, no matter what provider we chose.

• How is your project hosted?

  We tried multiple providers, all with their pros and cons, but we currently use the bear metal way to deploy RW to a serverfull Ubuntu droplet running nginx and PM2. We also host our front-end React client on Vercel at the moment but maintain the freedom to move.

• What gets you thrilled about its future?

  The future of JS is yet undecided, but with the sheer talent available within this community, I believe that no matter where it goes, RW will always be well support and will always stay a solid choice to build a startup with.

Team

• Do you have a team?

  Team Everfund is currently small with Chris as the CEO and tech lead, Will as the COO and business lead, and Hannah, our student marketing intern. We’re joined with a fantastic set of advisors and investors who help us navigate our early stage startup journey as first time founders!

• Are you recruiting?

  We’re not yet recruiting for full-time hires yet, but we’re always looking for great people to join our journey. If you feel your skills can benefit Everfund today, and you have experience with things like integrations, analytics, and Stripe knowledge, please send us an open application!

• How about onboarding with Redwood?

  The first steps to onboarding a developer onto Everfund with Redwood is understanding the RW tutorial, understanding our project structure and flows, along with how their knowledge of RW could be used as a base line to the expansive code-base.

• Is previous Redwood knowledge a requirement to work on your project?

  No, but understanding how RW works and its fundamentals will help developers understand Everfund’s own expanded features in a like for like comparison.

Community

• Are you or one of your team collaborating to Redwood in any way?

  Everfund has been part of the community since V0.8 and we’ve ensured we helped shape the way RW is helping other startups by providing Everfund as a deeper use case of its possibilities and potential.

  I have also collaborated with Anthony, one of the core RW contributors, in creating a growing podcast (FSJam.org) which explores the concepts of full stack JavaScript frameworks to help educate those new to these concepts and to speak to with influential guests from all over the JS industry.

• How has Redwood community added value to your project?

  The RW community has always been a vast source of knowledge on helping debug and fix issues, talk about ideas and finding the best use cases for solving said problems.

• How do you meet the community?

  I normally hang around the core contributor meetups, RW Startup Club and the RW Discord.

[realStandal]

Hey @burnsy, pleasure getting to know you, Everfund, and Will.

I only really have two things that I'm missing (feel free to push against me if you're completely against including these items):

• A 500x220 thumbnail for your startup.
• Custom call-to-action. Take whoever maybe reading the page somewhere specific should you like.
  • This can be a dedicated marketing page, or just to your home page. I really would just like a specific text and link to use.

And then feel free to include (should you want, this is just a friendly reminder):

• Your startup's social sites
• Achievements your proud of that your startup has met.