“Keep The Change Bruh”, was the narration of the bank transaction initiated by one Miss Ore after a ‘date gone wrong’ as one Twitter User put it. While the hashtag #KeepTheChange and it’s numerous variations trended, a group of young Nigerian Twitter Users (Me, Biodun, Early, Ace) decided to do what I’ll call a reincarnation of the viral Bride Price App – an app that calculates the value of your bride price and that of your friends and enemies, LOL . But in this case, our app calculates how much change you can keep on a date (should you be refunded, LOL).
The final decision to develop the app was born out of a positive reply by Biodun to my tweet.
Any front end guy awake ATM? Please DM. Let's build this ish.
— Benjamin Dada (@DadaBen_) March 29, 2017
Prior to that, I had joked about percentage earnings that accrued to Mr Pablo Ayodeji (the man in the date) which I pegged at around 31% profit.
In about 36 hours the first version of the app (MVP – Minimum Viable Product) was built and we sent it out to a few beta users (I had sent the link personally to people whom I thought could help us publicise/strategize it). I tweeted in excitement:
Proud of my boys Biodun, Early and Ace!!! @Ace_KYD would really be a good mentor and colleague.
1/— Benjamin Dada (@DadaBen_) April 1, 2017
Sadly, the app was not looking as beautifully designed as Early’s. Hence, we had to enlist the help of another FrontEnd Developer, who in this case was Early’s colleague, Yomi Eluwande. Yomi asked that we gave him the night to work on this. By the morning he had exactly what Early had designed! Such a boss!
In total, the app was developed and launched in about 62 hours.
Hi everyone,
Today we are set to announce the launch of a fun service that allows you find out how much change you can get on a date.
1/— 5kBae (@keepdchangebruh) April 2, 2017
A summary on each team member’s role is below although, at different points, everyone had to cover up for the other.
@Ace_KYD – backend and configuration@Adetona77 – FrontEnd@DadaBen_ – project manager@earlyattoh – UI Design@yomieluwande – FrontEnd
— 5kBae (@keepdchangebruh) April 2, 2017
App Views
In less than 3hours of launching, the app reached 1,000views.
Try your hands out on the app. Remember, it is just for fun.
Famed comic handle, KraksTV got on the wave (Oh yes, we created a twitter account and a logo for it!):
Lol! I can keep ₦6,158 change on a ₦19,500 date. Check yours now https://t.co/5c07r5OtdR #KeepTheChangeBruh #5kBae via @keepdchangebruh
— Kraks TV™️ (@KraksTV) April 2, 2017
Beyond the fun we got out of creating a real-life app from a viral social media trend (psyched!), there are some entrepreneurial and career lessons on building a kick-ass team and developing one’s portfolio via hobbyist projects here. Guess I’ll be writing about that in another post. Till then, I hope you appreciate the effort we have put into creating this.
P.S – For people looking to create contribute to this open-source Development by making it even more fun or refactoring code, here is the codebase situated on Biodun’s Github. Also, it is open-source for complete newbie developers to learn how to make Single-page Applications (SPAs) and more.
