Hey everyone, sorry for the radio silence on @Rahul Pandey and I's end - It's about time that we give an update about Imber.
Long story short, all active development on Imber is now stopped and is not likely to continue. This is due to 2 reasons:
- Rahul and I are extremely busy and don't have the time
- Frankly, we got it wrong in terms of expected user value and built the incorrect product
#2 is the more interesting of the 2 reasons, so lets break this down more.
At a high level, Imber was the incorrect product for the personal software project space, because it focused on the wrong part of the "funnel": Folks who already have a completed software project. This is the last part of the funnel, which means that it has the least amount of people there. Rahul and I severely underestimated the amount of people who would be here, even within this community. Ideally we would have liked something between 25-50% of this community being there, but in reality, it ended up being 2-4%. This is not nearly enough to generate a critical mass of projects to make the platform exciting and active. We should have focused on the earlier part of the funnel, in particular helping people come up with ideas on what to build to begin with and then guiding resources on how they can bring their idea to life, putting together an MVP and figuring out the overall design. Lastly, a lot of the people at the later part of the funnel (i.e. have several solid published software projects) have generally been rewarded for their strong "builder" mentality and already have solid software engineering jobs. Because of this, a lot of our target audience isn't that motivated to share their projects and get advice on how to improve them - They have shifted focus from their side projects to their career as they rightly should. It makes more sense to target people earlier in the funnel as they are probably struggling to find a job and can develop this skill to make themselves more employable.
The core value provided to the target audience also wasn't very strong and was not scalable, which was: Rahul and I manually leaving feedback on each and every Imber project. Since a creator-oriented/marketplace-style app takes an insane amount of users to get regular discussions going, most projects only got feedback from us 2. This makes it hard to compete with the elephant in the room: LinkedIn. Of course, the average LinkedIn comment is far worse than detailed feedback from Rahul and myself, but you get a lot more of them alongside a lot more engagement. For a lot of people, it makes much more sense to just post their project to LinkedIn where they can share images/videos and then get dozens of likes and 5+ comments.
All that being said, Rahul and I still strongly believe in the power of personal software projects, which is why I've been creating a lot of new resources to "substitute" what Imber would have done so we don't abandon the mission. Here they are:
For ideation - https://github.com/Gear61/Software-Project-Ideas
For building - https://chioualexander.medium.com/how-to-build-any-large-software-project-cf9b28f67ee8?sk=0917e4f1ab146c539030f73479456f24
For bringing it all together - https://chioualexander.medium.com/step-by-step-guide-to-build-an-impressive-software-project-4ed8845d34aa?sk=b6413293501e495178f1c958b5fe71d6
So what's the future for Imber? We will be keeping it in maintenance mode, especially as it's not likely to be that expensive to maintain. Imber still has clear tactical value for being a place where you can get permanent feedback that doesn't go away (we are using the free version of Slack so messages disappear after 1.5-2 months). It's also a decent portfolio tool, being far more visual and approachable than GitHub, which is meant to be much more of a code repository. Something I'm glad I can do with Imber is share all my side projects in a simple, clean way as you can see here: https://www.imberapp.com/profile/alex
Rahul and I will still check Imber every once in a while to leave feedback on your projects; if you aren't getting a response from us, feel free to just ping us with the Imber link to your project!