Hello people!
Ishant this side with the newest issue of Packed-Unpacked. I serve you summarised content about psychology, life, money and startups straight to your inbox.
Sign up for free here 👇
In this issue, we will talk about how Crework, the community I run where we help students build better projects, came into being and why we felt the need for this. It’s a bit personal story which I have tried to summarise as much as I could. This is also story of my growth as a person, learning from my mistakes and trying to not make them again and again. Hope you will like it 🤞.
The Origins
So this story doesn’t start with a garage, but with a WhatsApp group. In June 2020, after doing my first internship at a small consulting firm in Gurgaon (yeah, I’d never call it Gurugram, suck it), I was stuck at home for 3 months due to COVID. I spent most of the lockdown doing projects, trying to implement things I learnt and colouring my Github green.
But I felt I was not going anywhere. I wanted to build a project which isn’t just some Google Colab Notebook, but something that I can use. I started looking for people to build projects with, but surprisingly, I couldn’t find anyone. No one from my college friends was actually doing something related to what I was doing, and those who were doing something, were not interested in collaborating.
That’s when I started complaining about this to my friends on a WhatsApp group that we had. Sahil listened to me, and shared that he faces the same problem, but the reason is the lack of motivation in his peers. That surprise was not so surprising actually. We knew education was broken, and specially in a city where we lived, you wouldn’t expect everyone to be enthusiastic about tech, even if they are studying computer science as their major. This was Sahil’s college.
But what about mine? I studied in a “good” college, with good placements and a good peer group (debatable). Why couldn’t I find the right set of people there? Well, there were a few reasons.
Because of good placements, everyone was preparing for that only, and nobody wanted to risk their chances by wasting time in building projects which won’t help them solve DSA questions.
Well, that was the only reason.
Sahil was also thinking of some project idea at that time, it was something related to creating a forum for developers to suggest and rate online courses (mostly tech framework related courses) to help others who are looking for the right course to learn a new skill. He shared it with me, and that gave me the idea of creating a community (yeah, that’s the only good contribution Sahil has made on the idea side 😂). And trust me, “community” was not the buzz word around that time. Stoa didn’t exist, Clinify (now bluelearn) had around 6K members only (which is still a large number, but consider they are at 60K right now, it seems small).
I applied the brute force approach in my mind and came up with this idea of creating a platform for students where they can come and become part of a team to complete an ongoing project, or start a new project and invite people to join that. The idea was that, if you had this platform, you won’t need to depend on your peers, college, or branch to build a project and learn new skills in the process. (I know, lots of assumptions here, we must have done some user research after this to back the assumptions, right? Nope, we did not)
Then we got to naming it, and went with one that Sahil thought of: Crework. Simple and effective. The logic was simple, Crew + Work = CrewWork. But one extra “w” was bugging us, so we thought let’s name it Crework. It’ll be cool right? Seems like it was cool, but not so intuitive to others as it was to us. People still don’t know how to pronounce it. Anyway.
Luckily, I was seeing some YC videos while all this was happening, so I knew a few things about not jumping in without giving it a real thought. So, it was decided that we will experiment with a small set of people first. We made plans, curriculum, resources and made a telegram group. We thought that we would get some 10-20 people who would be interested. We made all these rules and regulations for the group, wished each other luck and started it on 1st July 2020.
First day, we got 50 people. Second day, we had around 80, and I revoked the link to the group. The number was way above what we expected. This seems like a buildup for something really amazing and revolutionary, but guess what? We knew we were gonna fuck it (and we did).
Long story short (yeah, I know, it’s already been stretched long enough), we couldn’t do what we planned. We failed in a month or so. Sahil started his full time job, I started my final year and we forgot about it. But we still had this small WhatsApp group of just 5 people who stayed even after the whole thing went south. Antaripa was one of those 5 people.
One Eternity Later (It was 1 year, chill)
We were now a community of 11 people and not just the first 5 members. There were many new people, I didn’t even know most of them in 2020, but over the span of one year, they became this small group of people who knew more about me and my plans than my family. I used to share things, ask for opinions and talk the whole day in our WhatsApp group.
A lot had happened between the time we stopped working on Crework in August 2020 and June 2021. I got a job, tried another startup in mental health space, fucked it up beautifully, left it to join a corporate job (that I left in 3 months without serving the notice period, sorry for the spoilers here), realised I don’t want to code for 8-10 hours a day to make a living (I still might do it for fun though), learnt from all my mistakes and did lots and lots of self reflection.
But, was that reason enough to jump into things again? Well, no. But there were a few things that pushed me to start Crework again. Lemme list them down for you:
Stoa School.
We completed one year.
So, I will explain them one by one, in order. So, second reason first 😂
We completed one year 🥳
So, July 2021 came and I realised that it’s been 1 year since I started this small group. Now, as we were discussing this whole thing in our group, we realised that we have actually grown a lot and have some achievements to prove that. So, I decided to show off, because why not?
Our 11 people group had bunch of jobs, handful of internships in tech (industry and research both), and around 5 admissions from some good B-Schools (all credits to Patro). That post got lots of attention because that’s how LinkedIn works right? People started reaching out to me wanting to know how they can be part of Crework.
Stoa School 🦁
I got introduced to Stoa in 2021 only, but it didn’t take me long to realise that what they were doing was brilliant. I instantly fell in love (yeah, I am romanticising it) the concept of cohorts (which I thought of in 2020 btw, even before it was cool or something).
The way Stoa was handling community and the experience they were providing to their students, it was like a dream for Ishant from 2020. But they were doing this in the MBA space. In the tech space, people were still selling DSA courses trying to make bucks (and making a lot of them too). So, after we completed one year, and I started getting approached by people, some chemical reactions happened in my brain, some strings were pulled here and there, and I tweeted this:
The Plan (and the team)
First Step: Talk to people, as many as you can. So, I did a tweet and a post inviting college students for a 1:1 meet with me asking about their experience doing projects, working with teams, and communities. Got lots and lots of data, which helped me pin down the key problems that people face while working with groups, specially online community programs. I talked to around 40-50 folks at that time.
Second Step: I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it alone. No matter how pro I consider myself at talking to people or convincing them, I needed others who would want this to succeed as much as I do. I have had a below par experience with “co-founders” before this, so didn’t go out reaching out to people asking them to join me in this, instead I took one of the best decision of my life. I asked the people of Crework: “I have something crazy in mind which I am thinking of implementing. I want to make Crework something bigger than what it is right now. Who wants to come onboard?” Antaripa, Herumb and Akshat joined.
Next Step: So, stuff after that is like, we sat in many meetings and had some discussions about the best way to do it. Working with these people was always easy so things didn’t take much time. We opened the applications without any expectations, and somehow selected 8 people for the first ever Crework BWU batch. 7 out of these 8 people stayed till last.
This was it. This was what we needed. You can call it validation, success, one milestone, or whatever. We completed 1 batch, had awesome feedback, amazing results and we knew that we want to do it again and again. It was pretty simple. That’s how Crework came into being. That’s when our WhatsApp group really became a community.
Random Thoughts, and Gratitude ✨
Now, writing this piece doesn’t mean that we have succeeded or reached the destination. Trust me, we are just getting started. We are gonna get much bigger, better, and we definitely would not stop.
Writing this piece serves just one purpose, to show my gratitude to all the people who have been part of this journey. As community members, as mentors, as participants, or those people who liked our posts so that it can reach to the right people.
I want to thank each one of those people, because all of you are making it possible for me to dream again, and not fearing what will happen in the future. Because whatever happens, I’ll still have all the people I have earned while building this special community. ❤️
Routing for Crework !!! 🚀