davnicwil/okfounder

Interview exercise

The Project

"OkFounder"

You are the founder of a startup called OkFounder. Your startup's mission is to help entrepreneurs find a co-founder. You've found a Venture Capitalist who thinks this is a good idea, and you're meeting her in a few hours. The only problem is: you don't have a product!

The task

We'd like you to build an MVP version of your "co-founder dating" product. It should be a web app that lets entrepreneurs connect with other entrepreneurs who might become their co-founder.

The priority is to build a true MVP – something that solves the smallest possible version of the problem.

We'd like you to spend no more than 3 hours on it*. You should feel free to cut the scope as liberally as you like, and use any shortcuts (product or tech) that you like.

Also, to help save time on the things that are slow:

• Don't build any secure authentication – we'll let the users log in with just their email address
• Don't worry about building a backend – this starter kit includes a localStorage hosted database
• Don't worry about security – this is all all going to be demoed on your laptop
• Don't worry about code quality or testing – if you've got this far we're already confident that you can write good code!

The priority here is to build something which works, and solves the user need.

*We mean that. This isn't code for "spend 18 hours on it and tell us it was 3 to impress". We want to embrace the limitations of creating something in a short time.

What we're interested in

The point of this task is not to see how many features you can build.

We want to see:

• how you go about solving the product problem
• how you embrace limitations and make pragmatic product and tech choices so that you have something that's demoable by the end.

The codebase

Provided here is a very simple starter kit for the app.

It includes:

• Basic app structure (header, etc)
• Logging in (via username, no password necessary!) and logging out
• A UI component library
• A sample localStorage database and demo component for how to read and write to that db

Getting started

1. Fork this repo
2. Clone it to your machine
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm start
5. Get creating!

The output

• You should have forked this repo and make your changes there. Once you're done, make a PR back into this repo (see here)
• We'd like to be able to run this ourselves, so please don't add any dependencies to services on your machine. Adding new node modules is fine though!

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Meta: Why we ask you to do a project

We have two aims when asking you to do this project.

Firstly, we'd like to see how you approach a product problem on your own. We don't think "test conditions" gives a good indication of how someone performs when they're at their best, so this gives us a way to see what you do when working on your terms.

Secondly, we want something that we can pair with you on. We've found that's best when it's a 'greenfield' project in a codebase you're familiar with.