Announcement: First round of Maker Fund recipients

News from Coda
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At our October Block Party event, we announced the Coda Maker Fund. With this pledge, we’re investing $1 million dollars to empower makers with flexibility that affords them the resources they need to build and promote finished solutions on Coda.

Whether its supplementary income to complete an existing project, distribution to take a solution to the masses, or professional mentorship to launch the first of many side projects, we designed the Maker Fund to accommodate applicants of all needs.

Today, I’m excited to announce our first round of Maker Fund recipients.

  • Mykola Bilokonski is a developer at Mode Analytics who is using the Maker Fund to create the Neurodiversity Support Center with the world’s largest public dataset of neurodivergent traits and supportive essays for the neurodivergent community. You can find more on Myk and what he’s building by visiting his Neurodiversity Support Center doc and by following him on Twitter @mykola.
  • As an Executive Assistant at Bungalow, Ariana Alvarez is building templates for all things executive support — from onboarding new leaders, to managing travel, expenses, and more.
  • Blossom is building a Pack to develop Coda into the all-in-one research platform that the entire team can rally around to make better product decisions. You can learn more about how Blossom empowers teams to “research together” at tryblossom.io and by following them on Twitter @tryblossom.
  • @Andy_B and the Outsource.digital team are building a WordPress Pack that web designers can use to enable their less-than-tech-savvy clients to update their websites with a simple Coda UI.
  • Many of you have been inspired by @Todd_Olson Time & Money financial modeling prototype. He is following up with an exciting finance pack to enable a bunch of interested use cases.
  • @Tomislav_Mamic is working on a really slick multi-step form template to enable the creation of dynamic forms that provide different questions based on the answers the user provides.
  • And last, but certainly not least, is one that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: we are excited to fund @Paul_Danyliuk to build out his Coda Courses. I know most of you have been helped by Paul either directly or through his awesome content and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with him on this.

For those who were funded, feel free to share more about your projects below!

Calling all makers
We aren’t done yet. We still have a bunch of promising makers in the pipeline and we’re looking for more.

As a help, we wanted to share some of the criteria we have been using to evaluate applications.

  1. You’re creating an effective solution - Your idea successfully solves a problem for a clear target audience
  2. You have product-maker fit - You have the experience, expertise, and/or passion to deliver this solution to the market
  3. You’re building sustainably - You have the ambition to support your solution for the long haul - whether as a successful side hustle, growing it into a multi-million dollar business, or somewhere in between

We’ve purposely kept our criteria open-ended in order to truly jumpstart an ecosystem of dynamic, maker-created docs and Packs. And it hasn’t disappointed. We’ve been blown away so far by the creativity of those who’ve applied, and we’re thrilled to see what this community will make next.

You could build a Pack that adds new powers to Coda. Create templates that model innovative ways of working. Or publish a doc that solves a problem for an underserved audience. Whatever you decide to build, we want to support you and your vision.

To submit your idea to the Maker Fund, fill out this application, and we’ll be in touch shortly.

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Congratulations Everybody :raised_hands: :partying_face: !!!

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congratulations all

cant wait to see the results of your work

and well done Coda for doing this

max

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Congrats everyone!! :clap: :clap:

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Congratulations everybody! :tada::trophy:

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Congrats all - thanks for helping make Coda what it is and shaping the future of what it can be!

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Oh wow, crazy day yesterday. Only now I finally have time to properly say —

Thank you Coda and everyone who didn’t mind listening to what I had to say! :grin:

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I am happy @Paul_Danyliuk you got selected and you deserve it very much. Though as power builder I am surprised to learn that you got funding for a video course and not to create a super Coda app’ :wink:

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Thanks @Christiaan_Huizer! Well, I got funded for what I was the most passionate about — which is teaching :slight_smile:

I started my Coda path with teaching: answering questions and sharing tricks that I was coming up with. Consulting and doc building for hire came later. So it’s coming full circle.

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BTW I have plans for not one but five video courses:

  • A Udemy course for the very beginners (people who don’t even use Sheets that much) — basically the fundamentals like the official Coda videos but with accents set as I see it fit (e.g. more attention to database design and proper good practices from the very start without going too deep, also talking about common gotchas like Filter().First() and lookups by text columns that sometimes collate to wrong data types). A gateway drug to Coda, a course that’s always on sale :joy:

  • A Udemy course for small businesses — basically the best practices showcase but in a concise form. Used to upsell people from the basic course onto something that’s, uhm, not on sale :grin:

  • A pro course on Schemas & Formulas

  • Another pro course on UX Patterns

  • And another, the Citizen Kane one, on Optimizations & Performance

The three latter courses will be aimed at enterprise teams adopting Coda but not necessarily willing to invest into hiring a consultant — i.e. teams where it is easier and economically more viable to hire someone internally to do Coda development but also it’s important that they do a good job about it (so that when they actually need some consultant’s help, the latter won’t vomit at the mess of a doc there’d be, lol). Also another prospective path I see there is certification: I could build a Coda experts directory of my own, each being approved by me after going through the pro training (and being approved by an Eastern European… sheesh, that’s some accomplishment! :grin: )

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Congrats all!! :raised_hands:t5::grinning: Some inspiring projects that I can’t wait to follow.
Excited to see this program continue to grow and what comes out of it :heartbeat:

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Congratulations to all of you! Can’t wait to see what you build, all the projects sound tremendously exciting!

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Hi, Thanks for the informative post!

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Dear Jeremy,

Sorry for being that impatient, but I am wondering about the status of the Coda Make Fund?
I understood from other Coda community members that also they didn’t receive any news, nor a confirmation of their proposal.

Thanks for your attention to this matter,

Amicable,
Jean Pierre

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Hi @J_Pi , thanks for reaching out about this. I appreciate your frustration with how long it has taken to get back to you on your application. I should have done a better job communicating with everyone about the delays. They come from a couple places:

  1. Overwhelming volume. The response to the Maker Fund has been incredible, not only in the quantity of submissions but in the quality — which means that it is harder to quickly eliminate applications and each one requires more deliberation.
  2. Capacity to support. We consider that supporting the makers who join the program (now 23!) is the main point of the fund, so we are spending a lot of our cycles with helping make the current cohort as successful as possible. That sometimes comes at the expense of processing applications.

We’ve spent some planning time at the beginning of the year to try to come up with a plan to address some of this. One thing that is happening is that we’ll be getting more staffing for the program to help scale it. Another is that we are optimizing our systems and processes to try to get to faster response times. I totally get that it’s frustrating not to have an answer for many weeks. I apologize for that and am working to do better. In the next couple weeks we will shift some focus to processing applications to try to reach decisions on as many as possible.

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Oh and also, it’s my bad that a lot of submissions have gone unacknowledged. We are fixing that as well.

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