The Pakistan job 🇵🇰
Like some bad Bollywood action movie...
You can listen it, up here:
Here is the sequel to "Beginnings"!
We are slowly catching up.
The next step was none other than the much anticipated Flutter App:
5. App Version 2.0Â - The Pakistan Job
To refer back to the previous ones, the 1:10 ratio was there, but it could have been 1:20...
The point is, I got lucky and...
Okay, I'm not kidding you, I ran into a brutal bad one too! :D
His name was "Sheri". Sheri was very cool, the problem was that his company was growing too fast.
We have discussed all the details and started developing, from 0 of course, because it was a different code language.
With the first 2-3 rounds there were no problem, but after that I noticed that the Application was growing half as fast and causes 5 times as many headaches to fix all the bugs.
I felt like, 1 step forward but 2 steps back.
Why is it worth working with Pakistanis:
They are cheap
Why they're not worth working with:
Very difficult to communicate
They are incredibly slow
You have to explain everything 10 times
They don't do what you say
They make a lot of mistakes
side note: I know this is a complete generalization and I don't mean the whole nation, but just Sheri's.
In hindsight, it turns out that the quality of work deteriorated so much because Sheri's company went from 1 person to 25 in 3 months and he had no idea how to manage people. Our old app alone had 23 people working in shifts because people kept dropping out.
The reason why it was able to grow so fast is because we were only paying the average Pakistani 2 years salary and we paid that in 3 months. Also, Sheri's had a lot of American jobs coming in that were even more serious.
The point is, after 4 months of working together, I was getting really burnt out. I felt that this cannot be going on any longer!
I wanted to find a programmer who was part of the team and Hungarian, someone I could relate to and who has enough knowledge of programming.
I didn't know how to interview people because I didn't understand programming language, but luckily I have a friend Bence who worked as a programmer at Morgan Stanley and BlackRock (he's a great guy) and he offered to help me.
We posted it in Facebook groups, I posted it everywhere, but they just didn't want to apply, then 4-5 applicants dropped in, but they were all complete dumps, both professionally and humanly unfortunately...
But there was 1 last applicant who was our follower: Kokesz
Kokesz also said at the beginning that he had never studied Flutter, but if that's what it takes to get the job done, he'll learn. I could see that he really wanted to prove himself. But I also saw that he would be a perfect human member of the team, because he has the virtues I would like to see in OM: diligence, humility, perseverance, selflessness!
We have had a lot of discussions with Bence and we have finally decided...
Let's pick Kokesz, he will learn it the way we need it!
(Bence will teach him at the beginning and supervise him.)
side note: I would have blindly entrusted the App to a person who had never coded in that language in his life, just because he fitted into the company culture. (p.s.: I couldn't decide better.)
6. Kokesz and the Surprise Guest
A week went by and something went wrong on our Discord server.
A bot somehow got stuck and wasn't doing what it was supposed to. I saw that Kokesz was upstairs talking to another guy in the chat room, so I said I'd pop in quickly and ask him to do something about it.
I popped into the voice chat, told him my problem and the other guy, who I didn't know before, said he'd have a quick look at it, because he'd done something similar before.
I was like "okay, he can't f@ck it up anyway..."
1 minute later, the bot worked perfectly.
I said "What the ..., what's your name?"
The guy's name was Edu.
I asked him if he could program in Flutter.
He said he'd done one or two small projects, he knew the basics.
I immediately alerted Bence.
I said "Bence, there's a guy, he just fixed our bot, let me call him in for another interview, maybe we'll get something."
Bence agreed and the interview came 2 days later.
No kidding...
Edu beat all the other applicants... combined.
We told him we'd get back to him soon, as soon as the call was over, Bence and I looked at Zoom and couldn't believe our eyes!
We agreed to give him a chance and have him and Kokesz study together on a course and then see how they could work together.
During the course, they became as close as if they had known each other for 1,000 years, and their strengths and weaknesses came out.
Kokesz is brutally creative and his designs makes any American startups to shame, but he's not so interested in the back-end.
And Edu is the king of the back-end, but designs like a '97 Windows... even worse!
No joke, it is worse!
side note: afterwards it turned out that Edu had no projects before the interview, he was just faking to get in, and he was getting everything ready over the weekend.
The course ended and the learning was over.
The first real task was to add the Onboarding process to the existing Pakistani App.
Instead, here's what happened...
Application 3.0 - Goodbye Pakistan
They got so fed up with the Pakistan code that they recoded the whole thing from 0 in 5 days (without my approval).
EVERYTHING!
In 5 days, 2 of them built a complete App, which took the Pakistanis months and 23 people to build...
That was the point when I felt we were in the right place!
When I knew that we were going to shoot out now if we did things right!
That was April, now I'm writing this post in October, I've been working with these guys for 6 months and I can already tell you:
My pulse is much lower,
I sleep better,
And not to mention the App is improving exponentially!
I'll show you what they've added to the App in 6 months:
AI search engine
Reading and Listening
Offline Listening
Video Courses
Challenges
Support Chat
Share Quotes
Daily Motivation
Strikes
and many more...
In 6 months from ~310 users...
We went to 1.340 users!
We have been TOP 1 App in the Education Category several times!
So here we are!
It's mind blowing to read back what we've been through to get here. What steep pulls we've made that could have gone very wrong, and how we've always stuck to the basic concept of:
"We want to accelerate the development of young people and create a system where people can enjoy learning."
p.s.: we made a lot of mistakes as it was, there were constant bugs (right now there is one that 2-3 people can't login, but we will fix that soon... PROMISE), but we do it with heart and soul and we believe that we can create something useful in the world.
If you want to be part of our journey, subscribe here!