- When
- Jan 2013 – Jan 2015
- Stage
- Grew into a real business
- Role
- Founder and CTO
- With
- Nick Marsh, Paul Birch
- Outcome
- Product Hunt started as a group on Linkydink, Makeshift's link-sharing tool, in November 2013.
Makeshift was an early London venture studio. Nick Marsh, Paul Birch and I founded it in January 2013 to make tools for startups, mostly things we needed ourselves, and to grow the ones that worked into companies. Paul put in the money and his experience of growing startups, Nick brought product and design, and I brought the tech and the hacking.
We tried out around fifty ideas as prototypes, honed those down to twelve that looked like real products, and took three further, with teams, revenue and growth. The products were Wrangler for database reporting, Hire My Friend for finding a job through your friends, Attending for event pages and Help Me Write for writers. Behind them sat the hacks, Rumbleroll, Shhare and Linkydink, and a deadpool of the ones that did not work: Savemates, Listerly and Bitsy, kept on the site to remind us what not to do next time.
The thing most people know came out of a hack. In November 2013 Ryan Hoover started Product Hunt as a group on Linkydink, our link-sharing tool, and ran it there for three weeks before it moved to a site of its own.
By the end of the first year we were a team of ten on Mallow Street in east London, and we wrote up the story as we went, the failures included. The Hospital Club listed me in its HClub100 in 2014, for Makeshift. Makeshift ran until the start of 2015.
Coverage
Ryan Hoover“The Wisdom Of The 20-Minute Startup”2013
“After noodling over a few ideas, I was reminded of Linkydink, a link-sharing tool by the friendly folks at Makeshift.”
TechCrunch“New London Startup Lab Makeshift Gives Birth To Its First MVP: HireMyFriend”2013
“Makeshift, a new "Startup Lab" in London's Eastern tech cluster, has now produced its first product, HireMyFriend.”
Made here
Made
Linkydink
The simplest way to share links with your team
Rumbleroll
Keep up to date with your favourite blogs
Shhare
Share passwords securely
Wrangler
A simple way to query and analyse data, and collaborate with your team around reports.
Hire My Friend
A service for people who are in a job but want a new one: use your social network to find opportunities without your boss finding out.
Help Me Write
A very simple service aimed at bloggers and writers facing the common problem of 'what shall I write next?'.
Listerly
Make and manage a list of people
Bitsy
A tiny little service to help makers, musicians, designers, crafters, developers and small business owners sell their stuff directly to the people in their networks.
Attending
Simple, social event pages: free to make, and guests said they were coming with one click.
Savemates
Create a monthly savings group
Talks
- Hack, Play, Learn (Hacker News London)What we’re learning by building play, failure and parallelism into the Makeshift process.
- Hack, Make, ShiftAn overview of our stage-gate process for evaluating new ideas.
- A Morning with MakeshiftStef Lewandowski spoke at Digital Shoreditch Festival 2013.
- Hack, Play, Learn (Tech Talkfest, Google Campus)“Hack, Play, Learn” is the part of the Makeshift process that precedes the “Build, Measure, Learn” workflow that many people will be familiar with.
Writing
- Cheers, Medium!You turned me into a writer
- Higher resolutionsCan you commit to doing something every day in 2014?
- Hackathon and on and on24 hours of hacking! Crèche not included
- Hey Twitter! Let me send a private link to a friend…URL be back
- This is from everyoneThe Web will only be for everyone when we can say that it’s from everyone too
- Don’t just do one thingCould parallelism be an appropriate way to find the thing you should focus on?
- How can we teach all the kids that want to code, how to code?A shedcast with Clare Sutcliffe, co-founder of Code Club
- How to lose form data and alienate peopleOn poor form
- Magnificent failures, hand made video game cheat books and the absurdity of startups: An interview with Ryan HooverTalking shop
- Make a useful thing and don’t be a dickStartup or upstart?
- A hack is worth a thousand picturesCould making a prototype be better than using words and pictures to communicate your idea?
- Accelerating serendipityCan you make happy accidents happen more often?
- Not just another blogOn making an article engine for Makeshift’s new website
- Shedcast #1: Stef on the early days of MakeshiftThe first in our series of podcast conversations from our two-story shed at Makeshift (yes you read that right)
- Shedcast with Joe ScarboroOur first guest conversation in the Makeshift Shedscraper, with Joe from 3 Beards
- Showing your work in progressShow people early, get feedback, listen
Around the same time
- In conversation: Max Fraser, Stef Lewandowski and Christopher RaeburnSpeaking · 2013
- A tiny act of feminismWriting · 2013
- The ideas won’t run outWriting · 2013
- East Dulwich ForumProjects · 2013