From local network to global platform
Foodhack is a platform that connects entrepreneurs and innovators in the food sector.
Initiated in French-speaking Switzerland, it now federates an international community.
Context and issues
In February 2020, the 3 founders of Foodhack, Arman, Camille and Emilie, are looking for the best approach to grow their community on an international scale. Their website developed with Squarespace reached its limits: indeed, the solution is not designed to manage communities. Moreover, Squarespace does not allow them to navigate other than by sight, they need data to make informed strategic decisions.
Camille, whose background in interactive media design allows her to coordinate the design and development teams, contacted Octree: Foodhack wanted to be able to continue to test its ideas on this platform in a fast and agile way, while "solidifying" the functionalities and areas of the site that had proven themselves.
We specifically chose to work with Octree because of their agile and modular approach, which allows us to pursue this cycle of "ideation", "test/validation" and then "development".
Camille Bossel, co-founder of Foodhack
The option of a complete redesign was quickly discarded for obvious reasons: no prioritization is possible in the absence of concrete data to differentiate between urgent and important functionalities and the consequent investment would represent a risk.
However, one thing is certain: the community needs to grow rapidly. This observation allows us to establish an initial hypothesis.
Initial hypothesis
By allowing members and the Foodhack audience to follow the activity through exclusive content and access to members-only spaces, the community will grow.
After a few brainstorming sessions with Octree, Foodhack decided to continue the adventure with a no-code MVP developed by them, without developing anything custom for another year: the site will be redone with Webflow and the member part managed with MemberStack with automation with Zapier.
N°1 Testing the hypothesis
To test the audience's interest to create an account and interact on Foodhack, a board "à la ProductHunt" of the most popular entrepreneurs and products in the food and food-tech sector was launched in July 2020. With this first no-code MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version, Foodhack collected about 10'000 sign-ups in 6 months, allowing them to take the next step with Octree: the hypothesis is verified!
Several needs quickly emerge: private content does not offer much leeway to administrators and user account management leaves something to be desired. But above all, the overall need is to be able to rely on a platform that is robust and scalable, allowing several types of users to interact and contribute to the community: FoodHack HQ (the internal team), Ambassadors (local community leaders around the world), contributing members, and the general audience.
So where do we start?
No. 2 Understand and prioritize
The need was then clear: user account management is where all the useful data is found and MemberStack quickly proved to be too limited in adjustments to the account creation part. The priority then appeared obvious: start by consolidating the back end by rewriting this part to measure using Strapi in order to have a solid base to add functionalities later on.
Together with Octree, we established step-by-step validation cycles, which gave us time to progressively elaborate on the strategy, while concretely advancing the development of the features that have been tested and validated.
Camille Bossel, co-founder of Foodhack
Strapi has the advantage of allowing the rapid creation of back-end providing an API. As Webflow offers a well-documented API, the front end can be linked to the new back end while waiting for custom development of the user interface. This has the advantage of discarding no-code automation solutions like Zapier which were not reliable enough.
The strategy adopted is to build Foodhack around the community's data, while making the change as invisible as possible to the public at first.
No. 3 Establish the roadmap
The first decisions of a project are always delicate: several criteria intertwine and make comparisons difficult: what has perceived value for users does not always have the same value internally, and the investments required to develop these features are not necessarily correlated to an added value in the user experience.
For example:
Ambassadors' access so that they can more easily manage their local activities via the platform
The development of the database, allowing users to easily search for members of the Foodhack ecosystem
A privileged access for the network of investors, who would like to identify promising start-ups.
Regardless of the priority placed on these features, the project now has room to move with a more flexible and scalable back-end than before. This allows for strategic leeway without ever having to negotiate on what is central to a community: the data and the connection between members. These two features create diversity and strategic intelligence within platforms.
The continuation in the next episode...
Stay tuned !
