Over the past couple of weeks, I have been hacking away at my first web application while learning backend development, and I’m thrilled to release Signin App to the world (well, for now the Northeastern Entrepreneurs Club).
It all started with a business case: the E-Club was growing like crazy last year, and as President, it was tough for me to get accurate insight on how many members were attending our events, which events were the most popular, and what demographics of members our club appealed to the most. We relied heavily on disorganized spreadsheets, creating hours of work for Cory Bolotsky doing V-lookups to get an accurate view of member retention.
So, I decided to leverage software to fix that problem. The Signin App is a PHP/MySQL web application that tracks member attendance for any event-driven organization and shows administrators real-time data on who their members are and how events are performing.
With just the click of a mouse, the E-Club leaders can now find out which events are working, who their most dedicated members are and use that insight to create more engaging events. While the software is being piloted with the E-Club, it could be valuable for many similar organizations.
What I learned:
- Coding is incredibly valuable to learn. This app revolutionizes a simple business process.
- You need a real business challenge to learn to code. Online tutorials are not good enough.
- User feedback is key. I iterated on the sign-in page of the app 4 times before I got it right.
So far, users have signed in using the app 1,500+ times. I’m looking forward to gathering more feedback, iterating and seeing how this project might add value to other organizations.