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I am the founder of Flowtab, and my goal in writing this story was to share what we learned and accomplished instead of letting it rot for eternity in Dropbox.

I am the founder of Flowtab, and my goal in writing this story was to share what we learned and accomplished instead of letting it rot for eternity in Dropbox. Thus, we opensourced everything from our pitchdeck to source code on Flowtab.com. Kyle Hill and I are already back at it. Together, we launched www.homehero.org a marketplace for senior caregivers, let me know your feedback! - Mike Townsend

mintplant 13y ago
Thank you for going the open source route! There are so many cases where a company goes under and something of value is lost because the original developers couldn't maintain it. For example, I would have loved to have seen a community-maintained version of Glitch [1] take over after the game died out, but Tiny Speck refused to open up the source code because they believed it would be too complicated for anyone but themselves to run—a justification which has never made sense to me. And if nothing else, it gives a deep peek into how a production system is run, something I'm always grateful for. [1] http://www.glitch.com/ http://www.glitch.com/
- mtt05001 13y ago
  I agree, and thank you.
larrys 13y ago
Would like to know what your marketing plan is to get the product in the hands of the target market. Which is people that are old enough to have parents that need caregivers. How are you going about (or are you going to go about) doing that? Also noting on the page that there is a lack of information that can be had (it's one page) w/o supplying information and signing up.
OGC 13y ago
homehero isn't going to work either. You're competing with word-of-mouth, craigslist, basically any other thing where jobs are posted. On top of that, if you have nobody posting caregiver jobs on it, you have no product, because people will check it out, find that there are no caregivers there and then never come back. Flowtab provided a service that wasn't needed, this doesn't either.
- purplelobster 13y ago
  I don't agree at all. Care-giving for elderly is definitely a growth industry. It's not easy building a marketplace, but I think this one has potential.

mintplant 13y ago

Thank you for going the open source route! There are so many cases where a company goes under and something of value is lost because the original developers couldn't maintain it. For example, I would have loved to have seen a community-maintained version of Glitch [1] take over after the game died out, but Tiny Speck refused to open up the source code because they believed it would be too complicated for anyone but themselves to run—a justification which has never made sense to me. And if nothing else, it gives a deep peek into how a production system is run, something I'm always grateful for. [1] http://www.glitch.com/ http://www.glitch.com/

mtt05001 13y ago
I agree, and thank you.

larrys 13y ago

Would like to know what your marketing plan is to get the product in the hands of the target market. Which is people that are old enough to have parents that need caregivers. How are you going about (or are you going to go about) doing that? Also noting on the page that there is a lack of information that can be had (it's one page) w/o supplying information and signing up.

OGC 13y ago

homehero isn't going to work either. You're competing with word-of-mouth, craigslist, basically any other thing where jobs are posted. On top of that, if you have nobody posting caregiver jobs on it, you have no product, because people will check it out, find that there are no caregivers there and then never come back. Flowtab provided a service that wasn't needed, this doesn't either.

purplelobster 13y ago
I don't agree at all. Care-giving for elderly is definitely a growth industry. It's not easy building a marketplace, but I think this one has potential.