The Gekko Daily Digest - the product of Knowtify Hack Day #1
On Friday, we held our first Knowtify Hack Day. As I mentioned in the earlier post, we decided a while ago to hold at least one internal hack day per quarter at Knowtify.
Get a better understanding of our own platform: For me, this is probably the most important benefit of a hack day. There's nothing like building a new product off your own platform to identify areas for improvement. By putting yourself in a position closer to that of an actual user, you get a much better perspective on what you are trying to build. And we certainly did that.
Good team challenge: A nice, focused, time-boxed project helps to either bring the team together (or expose cracks!). It forces quick creativity, communications, etc.
Raise awareness for your primary app/platform: There is no denying that hack days should help promote your main product/app - either to the general public or to the development community.
Build additional products: This doesn't have to be a goal of a hack day - but for me, it's a great way to set a clear vision for the work. Trying to produce the v1 of an actual product is a day is not always easy, but it's a great goal. Even if you don't get to a full v1, the product you start may actually be something really cool and open up some opportunities.
And if none of that other stuff happens, it's never bad to step away from the daily grind and play around for a day.
WHAT WE BUILT - THE GEKKO DAILY DIGEST
We started the day hoping to build out a random idea we had walking back from lunch the week before. The idea was to build out a daily digest email (off our platform) that would be useful to early stage investors. We would hack together information from various data sources - Product Hunt and AngelList to start - and ship investors important, timely info about startups/products making waves.
The digest looks like this:
You can sign up for the Gekko Digest here. We think it's a cool product and we think it will offer some surprising value over time.
HOW WE BUILT IT
For more detail on how we built it, you can check out our live blog. At the last minute, we decided to live blog the hack day in order to create a little real-time community as well as to create a record for ourselves going forward. We really liked that experience and definitely plan to continue doing that for our future hack days.
At a high-level, we were able to work with the Product Hunt and AngelList APIs to gather the data we wanted. We found them both to be really great, really clear APIs. After getting through a few snags around matching the companies from both sources, we were able to combine information in our table and set up a schedule to aggregate it. From there, it was just about shipping it over to Knowtify and setting up the actual email in our system.
We'd definitely like to thank the crews from both Product Hunt & AngelList (especially Andreas from PH & Joshua from AL) for the support through the day. And to several others for pointing us to different data sources and helpful feedback.
With that said, feel free to signup for the Gekko Daily here. It's likely that we'll be iterating a bit more over the next few days, but we're pretty happy with the v1. Love to hear your thoughts!