Sharetribe opportunities

Hey everyone,

I was recently speaking on a panel with Juho Makkonen who is the founder of Sharetribe. Sharetribe is a product aimed broadly at people who want to set up online platforms. It’s a customisable off-the-shelf marketplace.

Tonnes of people around the world are using Sharetribe already. Many of these people need developer support to build new features and customise the UX. Juho (and I) would really love to see some of this work going to CoTech members, particularly when the client is based in the UK. Apparently Sharetribe get 5-10 enquiries a month from UK-based platform coops needing developer support. The size/complexity of the projects can vary quite a lot, and there’s also a fair bit of variation in terms of the languages needed.

Sounds to me like a good opportunity!

In order to become a Sharetribe developer you usually need to have worked on a project already (i.e a client’s already come to you directly), or you need to be open to completing a ‘bootcamp’ training, which is up to 5 days but can be spread out over as long as you want. So it’s a bit of an investment to begin with, but seems like it could pay off. Plus nice to be helping out platform coops :slight_smile:

So:

  • Are you a CoTech coop developer and interested in participating in the bootcamp/tutorials?
  • Are you a bizdev person who thinks this could be an opportunity for your coop?
  • Do you/your coop already have any experience with Sharetribe?

If so please respond here or drop me an email! I’m inviting Juho to the forum too so he can answer any queries too.

Thanks!

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Hi @polly and Juho, yes I’m interested in this! Often get clients wanting marketplaces custom built for them without really having the budget, so I’m very interested in exploring and gaining expertise in this solution :slight_smile: I haven’t used Sharetribe before but have used a lot of other website builder platforms, totally open to participating in the “bootcamp”. I’m interested to hear from Juho to what extent Sharetribe has been built with a developer experience in mind? You can really tell the difference eg. between Squarespace and Webflow with this. I’ve pretty much vowed to avoid Squarespace at all costs from now on, whereas I’d love to do more Webflow work.

@Lucy I’m glad to hear you’re interested!

To add a bit to what Polly wrote: there are actually two Sharetribe products today, Sharetribe Go and Sharetribe Flex. Go is a bit like Squarespace/Webflow in the sense that you can set up a marketplace without coding at all. It’s a lot more rudimentary than those solutions though, you can’t really talk about developer experience there – it’s really meant for quickly launching and validating concepts.

Sharetribe Flex, meanwhile, is not a no-code tool – instead it’s a “headless” solution, designed with software developers in mind – it could be said that this is a “developers first” product. Instead of Webflow/Squarespace, it’s more like Prismic, which is a “headless” website builder solutions. In Flex, all changes to the platforms are done by modifying the software code. I do think it offers a really great developer experience: we have a really flexible API, a command-line interface for interacting with our backend quickly, a customizable transaction engine and data model, comprehensive and clear documentation, a developer community with 1000+ people in it (in Slack), and a lot more.

The opportunity Polly mentioned in her post is about Sharetribe Flex: we have lots of non-technical founders who are looking for developers to help them build. This is the stack that you’d typically be using when building with Flex (you can use any other stack as well, but as our example templates have been built with this React + Node stack, it means using them will allow you to get up to speed a lot faster).

How does this sound to you? I’d love to tell you more about the opportunity, and answer any questions you might have.

1 Like

Thanks @juhomakkonen for clarifying everything. That’s really interesting and it’s very similar to the stack we typically use so fits nicely! I’d love to have a call about it - maybe you could send me an email and we can set one up? lucy@infactcoop.com

@Lucy sounds great, I’ll do that right away!

Hi @juhomakkonen and @polly - thanks so much for sharing! We also would be really interested in this opportunity in Yalla - it fits out tech stack and is the kind of opportunity we’ve actually been looking for recently.

If we can set up a call to learn more as well please that’d be great? Or happy to join with Lucy depending on what works best for everyone?

Hi @JoeFrielYalla sure, let’s do that! I suggest we take a separate one, as we already had some challenges finding a common time with Lucy. You can book a slot for the call directly from my calendar here: Calendly - Juho Makkonen

Sounds good! Have just booked a slot. One of my colleagues will likely join too. Speak to you shortly.