Here’s a quick update on Meeting Cabin's Technical Needs, what we’ve done so far this year, and where we’re headed.
First Half of 2024
At the start of the year, Cabin Labs was pivoting away from rural coliving in nature and exploring multiple paths to try next. My work focused on deprecating the old product and tech cleanup, improving citizenship, and having many conversations with @jon and the Cabin community. A few highlights:
New citizenship invite flow
During my first week at cabin, I tried to buy a cabin citizenship. it took me over an hour and I had to jump an unreasonable number of hurdles to do it. So I knew that one of my projects would be to fix that.
The new citizenship purchase process I built right before EthDenver made it so you could invite someone to become a citizen with a single link or by showing them your QR code in person. Then they could sign up and buy citizenship in under a minute and with crypto wallet confusion or back-and-forth around getting vouched.
Simplifying and refocusing
When we decided we would no longer do co-living, many parts of the app became unnecessary. So I removed features like event listing and the booking of stays, hid roles and stamps, and updated neighborhood pages. I also added the map as the core way to visualize and explore the Cabin network.
At the same time, we realized that putting crypto front and center throughout the app was causing confusion and limiting our reach with people who are not deep into crypto (aka just about everyone). I re-architectured our app to make crypto optional. There’s no more wallet login, onchain features are transparent to users, and in fact no crypto knowledge or awareness is needed to use the app.
Marketing pages
My most visible user-facing works were three new landing pages: the cabin.city homepage, the Neighborhood Accelerator page, and the TNS Camp homepage (shout-out to @savkruger for all her work on the accelerator page copy).
Internal changes
Fauna (our database provider at the time) was deprecating several core features that we used, so I had to migrate us to Postgres. This was a major rewrite that touched almost every part of the codebase. We got it done and deployed the changes with only a few minutes of downtime and close to zero user-facing issues.
I also upgraded our smart contracts to Sepolia testnet when Goerli reached end-of-life, and made tons of improvements to every part of the code and deployment process.
Non-app work
In addition to the product work, I joined @jxn on several episodes of Cabin’s Campfire podcast and did a ton of ideating with @jon and others on strategy and next steps for Cabin.
While there’s still a lot of uncertainty, our new focus on local, long-term, inter-generational community feels really strong to me. I firmly believe that the best way to build is to solve your own problems, and the problem of “what are my kids doing this weekend?” is near and dear to my heart.
Going Forward
Over the last few months, we’ve gained confidence in local community-building and the neighborhood accelerator as our new focus. So my upcoming work will be to
- enable neighborhood stewards in showcasing their neighborhoods
- help prospective stewards find and join the accelerator program and set up their neighborhood
- connect cabin-curious people with neighborhoods (or encourage new neighborhood formation in places where there’s demand)
- show off the cabin network to the world
My concrete near-term next step are:
- Improve neighborhood pages to help stewards tell a story about their communities, what goes on there, and why you’d want to spend time there
- Build out member profile creation, add activity notifications, and improve matchmaking between members and neighborhoods.
- Update onboarding to walk new members through the new offerings.
- Fully burn the ships on everything that’s out-of-focus.
Updates
If you want more frequent updates, subscribe to our newsletter on cabin.city or follow the cabin.city code repo on Github.
While my next several weeks of work are set, I’m open to feedback on what comes after that. Given Cabin’s updated vision and the Labs roadmap, what would you change or suggest?