Projects

Here are the projects and initiatives keeping me busy, or still active

• The Sphere: I now publish a weekly newsletter all about relationship building – you can also find me on LinkedIn, YouTube, and yes… TikTok.
• GoodSphere: I’m a partner in GoodSphere, a cohort-based training collective, helping professionals grow their business – and happiness. We’re leveraging my past ten years of experience building CRM, writing a book, and working on various training initiatives to improve our clients’ relationships to their sphere and themselves, through a combination of habits, tactics, accountability, and mindfulness. Despite starting this in January 2021, we’ve already had ~1000+ clients join our flagship program, reporting incredible results, and become part of our growing community.
• Relatable: I believe that the most important asset for myself and millions of other professionals is the relationships we’ve surrounded ourselves with. I’ve spent the past ten years building CRMs to help with that, and Relatable is my newest project, bringing together all of my learnings and insights.
• I have a smattering of other small projects I might be hacking on at any one point in time.

Really, really dead projects

• Camp Social: I believe that one of the biggest problems in the world is tackling the increasing loneliness we feel from the tectonic shifts we are seeing in our society. After years of research into the issue, I’m working on Camp Social, which strengthens digital communities by recognizing, and rewarding members for self-organizing community events. We never found a sustainable business model.
• Contactually – Contactually’s relationship-based CRM helps you build the authentic, long-lasting connections that grow your business. By using the platform, discover the right person, and develop authentic personalized communication that keeps your business top-of-mind. In just minutes a day, engage your high value contacts to generate more repeat and referral business. We sold this to Compass Real Estate in 2019.
• DC Tech Meetup – I’m one of the founders and co-organizers of the largest tech meetup in DC, and one of the largest in the country.
• ProudlyMadeInDC – Marketing site for the tech community
• Run DMC Logo Generator – A small little hack project that gets a surprising amount of traffic.
• TalkToThe.Top – Intercom to Twitter synchronization tool – stay in touch with your top users.
• Angry Shakespeare – Wanted to hack on the Slack API, so built a bot that lets you send Shakespearean insults to your teammates.
• Internet High Five for Gmail – Being a giant nerd, I often drop in a “high five” into emails. I decided to spread the love.
• Get Metro Times – I got annoyed not being able to check times for the DC Metro from my phone and having to wait at the station, so I wrote an SMS tool to tell you the next few times for your station.
• Struc.to – DBAAS. Didn’t go anywhere primarily because I didn’t push hard to make it so.
• Localnik – My current pride and joy, and primary project I am working on marketing. An online marketplace for odd jobs, where people can save money by hiring someone in their area.
• Picket Fence Project – I’ve never had a chance to participate in an open source project, so I started my own! I wanted to build a tool that makes it really easy for web developers to handle user authentication. Check it out!
• Facebook – No no no, I’m not one of those people suing them saying it was my idea. I do a ton of Facebook apps for myself and for others. It was a lot of fun.
• Alex Grossberg – I made a site for my then-girlfriend 🙂
• BackwardBlog – A widget/trackback link bloggers can use to gather things from their readers and read it as an RSS feed. I really fought for this, but couldn’t get a single blogger to adopt this. Frustrated!
• Tsviki – Web 2.x application directory, where people can. I let the UI go a little too overboard, and faced some serious UX issues where it was scrap it and start over or shelve it for a later period. Tsviki also happens to be one of my nicknames.
• ThoughtFog – Similar to PostSecret. Users can anonymously post things, and other people can anonymously reply. RSS, tagging, etc.
• YesterdayI – Wow this was old school. Lifestreaming project – every day, you would write a short line about what you did yesterday. “Could have been the next Twitter!”