A re-telling of the story of a crowd funding platform through the eyes of the CTO.
This re-telling is from the perspective of the developer, turned lead developer, turned CTO of the project. That is to say me, as in TJ Webb. My goal is to tell the story of the crowd funding platform that raised over three-quarters of a million dollars for atheletes that I helped build. This is all sourced from memory (and a little bit the Wayback Machine), so bare with me if a few details are dicey or omitted, this is my recollection of the project nearly a decade after it began.
So first a bit of backstory on what Pursu.it even was, how it came to fruition, how I got involved in the first place.
Pursu.it was a crowd funding platform, specific to high caliper athletes. Like, a lot of Olympic level athletes, including some that did compete after running successful campaigns on the platform. So think Kickstarter, but for one specific type of campaign, and also gated. Very gated. The site was dedicated to the high quality competitors with the highest quality campaigns.
Pursu.it came to life about midway through my second of over eight years with Halifax based web design and development agency, Norex. A significant detail as the platform was initially the vision of two of the partners of the agency, Leah Skerry and former Olympian Julia Rivard, in other words, my bosses.
Pursu.it was very much a passion project for the two founders. I don't know if you've ever tried to deposit passion at an ATM, but the bank gets pretty onery, especially when you use your own passion to CAD currency conversion. In other words, a passion project doesn't mean a money project. Since my two bosses, and representatives for our company, despite all of their business knowledge, leadership skills, athletic prowess and coincidentally great eyes for design have exactly zero programming skills they saught a partnership with another agency in town. Norex was providing the design, marketing, strategy, leadership, research, industry knowledge, and, oh, let's call them Company X was providing the programming.
Famous. Last. Words. Apparently Company X had already withdrawn all of their passion from that weird ATM last paragraph and were fresh out. Motivationally bankrupt. Passionately poor. They bailed on the project with about a month before launch, and not just like "oh, hey, our website is live now" launch. More like "travel to Ottawa/Toronto for a big athletic/Olympic event to announce the platform with banners and speeches and stuff" launch. (Remember the disclaimer about detail sketch? Not sure if it was Olympic specific and if it was Toronto or Ottawa, but something like that.) Out of professional courtesy, and the fact that's from my perspective it's all hearsay so I could be liable for slander, I don't offer Company X's actual name. While I do enjoy ripping on them for bailing when they did, I am greatful for them getting out of the way to set me up to make my first big impact in the local industry.
We had a handful of rooms in a shared office space 211 Horseshoe Lake Drive. Nice space, but the walls were a little thin. So when the would-be founders fielded the call from the bailing Company X, and had the subsequent "How do you solve a problem like Maria launching a platform with no platform?" happened, I was privy to a good amount of the conversation and concern. I went into the office where the two were discussing the situation and asked what had happened. They said "Comapny X said they could get the platform done in time, said they couldn't figure out how to have multiple PayPal accounts on one Drupal website, so they're out." (If you know what both of those proper nouns are and have a bit of experince in the world of web development you'll understand that the back-out phone call from Company X was, quite literally, the end of amateur hour). What was my response to the news that other programmers had left members of my team, our company leaders, high and dry with a month to figure something out you ask? Cleaning up profanities and pre-quoting Morty Smith by several years, "I'm in!".
A condensed version of the story of Prusu.it, focused on my perspective and performance as a developer, mentor, and thought leader.
Pursu.it was a crowd funding platform specifically for Olympic level and other high performance athletes. I served as the initial project developer as well as CTO and mentor to the development team as the product expanded over the years. We were a non-profit, so we were all volunteers (mostly).
Pursu.it was the vision of Leah Skerry and Julia Rivard, coincedenally my bosses (managers) at Norex at the time. While Norex was providing things like design and product leadership, another company was providing the actual software development. Until they didn't. That's how I got involved and voluntarily dove into a second role running parallel with my "day job".
By the time the other company was out and I was in as the primary developer, we were about a month out from the product launch. Because all of the work had to be done outside of work hours (since all of us also had day jobs at Norex) I went with an initial build on the same framework/CMS I was using daily at Norex, WordPress.
While WordPress certainly provided a decent framework for pretty rapid development, it's a blogging platform turned CMS, it was not originally designed for such uses. So while we certainly got off the ground without much issue, it was not going to be a sustainable and long term maintainable solution.
I was able to accomodate most of the basic required features by working 'til 2AM most nights. The initial build had features like "Give Backs" (what donors get for their contribution), collecting some basic contact info from donors, payments via PayPal, and "flex-funding" (the athletes received all the money that was donated to them, even if they didn't meet their goal).
The launch was not a solo effort, while the core Pursu.it team was purely volunteer, Norex management made the decision to pull in a bit of extra support with some front end development (HTML, CSS) I just didn't have time for.
We launched (on the WordPress build) with six athletes with various aspirations, all of which required funding. The launch went pretty well, and most of the original six athletes achieved and exceeded their financial goals. Site issues were actually pretty minimal with the initial launch which allowed myself to focus on new features and for other team members to focus on athlete recruitment.
With the initial launch behind us and with the team growing, the project began to take a bit more formal shape as we continued to expand in all directions. It was at this point that we started meeting regularly as a committee to discuss improvements both to the technology and process as well as athlete recruitment and management. It was also at this point that I assumed the role of CTO, while still handling the bulk of the development tasks and also guiding the direction of the technology.
Over the next couple of years or so I continued on as CTO and primary developer adding features like "all-or-nothing funding" (a new campaign type that only bills donors and awards athletes if they meet their campaign pledge goal), integration with Stripe for payment processing, and "team campaigns", allowing a campaign to be made up of multiple team members with a single cumulative pool for donations while also tracking donation attributions to different team members.
Eventually, our leadership managed to secure funding. Good news: this meant we could have full time development team members dedicated to the project, we can finally rebuild on a more appropriate platform and continue building out new features. Less than good news (for me anyways): this had to be a new hire. So while I could no longer continue my role as the primary developer, I was able to continue is the leadership and mentorship capacity of the CTO role, and of course I could still continue making development contributions, just all on a volunteer basis.
Working with the new developement team, our first order of business was to rebuild the platform on something more stable and extensible. I'd been pusing for the resources to rebuild the product in Ruby on Rails, and with the new development team on board, my wish was granted. During the rebuild process, aside from direction, my hands on contributions consisted primarily of code reviews.
With the re-launch on the new platform, athletes continued to launch capaigns and donations continued to roll in. Meanwhile, we continued to add new features, categorization, a campaign manager dashboard, and we launched in additional countries supporting global athletes.
Once the funding had programming for developement had completed, Pursu.it was now in a bit better financial position to hire our future development work to Norex. As my roles within Norex continued to evolve (Lead Developer, Project Manager, Director of Product and Innovation) my ability within the company to be dedicated to a single project such as Pursu.it was not feasible.
At the same time, new funding was acquired to hire a fulltime CEO. With one person dedicated fulltime to all of the operations of the platform, and with less of a focus on new feature developement, the need for a CTO, even on a volunteer basis, was deminishing. There was no formal process of stepping down, but over time all of us involved recognized that the CEO was able to keep the project on track and with development tasks being contracted to Norex anyways, my continuation to hold the title of CTO was not really necessary.
Eventually, the funding for a CTO also ran out and management of the project fell back to its founders who were now busy running two separate successful companies. The project continued to run for a while and gradually wound down with fewer athletes joining and less time going into recruitment and management. Of course at this point I'm getting into the fuzzier details as my day-to-day involvement was gone and I was eventually no longer with Norex.
It appears as though today, the project has been completely abandoned with the domain name even being let go. But over the course of a few years, we managed to run a project that raised over three-quarters of a million dollars for athletes, strictly from their fans and supporters.
Worth it.