The following is a story written by Daniel Shafer, a member based in San Francisco, CA. Daniel is a full-stack web developer with experience in business intelligence. He specializes in JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Angular 2, PHP, and Python. He loves working on teams, parsing problems, learning, and teaching tutorials on his YouTube channel, Arachne Tutorials.
I joined Simbi, if I recall correctly, in the spring of 2016 after seeing a Facebook advertisement that talked about sharing local goods and services. It seemed like a really awesome premise, but how good could it be? Do I have something to offer that people out in the world want? Do people out there have something I want? It seemed plausible. But who knows unless you try? So I signed up with the hope that I could offer some coding tutoring or website development in exchange for a logo and other art for my YouTube channel, Arachne Tutorials.
There were a few non-starter conversations, which is common when you’re networking or doing networking-like activities, and there were some that materialized. I got some massages in exchange for helping to make a website for a massage business. Win-win. While that was an extremely socially profitable trade, it still wasn’t the logo I needed. I don’t doubt that I could have made a logo myself, but it seemed like there were a lot of people offering those design services and thus that I’d be remiss to not continue to seek out the opportunity.
Time went on and eventually I “swiped right” on someone who swiped right on me in Simbi’s Matching Game. It turns out that he was in the process of launching a startup and wanted to learn Ruby on Rails to get the technical side of his project going. I was happy to oblige and just generally excited to be making a deal.
I really enjoy meeting people and working together on projects so when we finally did meet, it was a really enjoyable time and we “broke ground” on his new app.
A little while later, the first draft of my channel art came in and I was really pleased with what he came up with. The logo was sleek, modern, and just spidery enough to be a hat tip to the channel’s namesake from Greek mythology (Arachne = spider = web work). That was a pretty big improvement over the past channel art when the channel started I and was relatively new to web development/design.
He and I built an ongoing relationship as I was pretty excited about his business and was happy to hear, some months later, that he had gotten accepted to a prominent accelerator program and along with that, got a big chunk of seed funding to make the dream a reality. How exciting! At some point, when the stars aligned, I had the opportunity to freelance with him for a few weeks prior to and just after their launch. That was a real joy. The company is a social enterprise and I really connect with their mission. It takes care of an underserved market, which has a lot of business potential, and is tangibly making peoples’ lives better. I couldn’t be more proud of what they’ve done and am excited for what will be accomplished in the future.
Thus far, Simbi has surpassed my wildest expectations. I just wanted a logo but got so much more than that: a friend, a job, and the gratifying feeling of knowing that I was a small part of bringing a positive force into the world.
In the meantime, if you know anything about hydroponic gardening or want to learn web development, be sure to get in touch with me! My basil needs a greener thumb than mine to get it back to health.
Simbiotic Stories are real anecdotes told by you and other Simbi community members. Tell us about your Simbi deals and experiences with other members. If your story is published, we’ll credit your account with 150 simbi. Submit your entries by starting a conversation with us via this link.
