The story begins with my closest friend, who for many years had been struggling with filtering potential customers for her online business. For anyone who has ever dealt with running a business (on or off the internet), there is always a problem with finding the right customers (the people who are serious about buying your service/product). This was the exact problem she had: having her time/energy wasted by potential customers that are never going to buy.
After watching her struggle with this, for years I might add, and after knowing enough general programming and computer science I realized I could build a simple solution: a contact form completely written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but leveraging a rigorous unit testing framework (in this case pytest in the language Python).
So I did indeed build the software, and although the actual HTML/CSS/Javascript was not that bad, the tests were BRUTAL … because I wrote the tests to PROVE that the contact form software worked as expected. This level of rigor and standard of quality was intense … but necessary and when complete it was complete (for all time I might add) at least until more features are added.
We immediately put the form into production and over the course of the following months we found that, surprising both of us, it worked … she no longer got false customers (i.e. potential customers that are not interested in buying). When she did get a customer it was a real customer (i.e. extremely high likelihood of purchasing something).
From that point forward we both understood the power of filtering the right people and that this matching problem would continue to occur in every domain. Upon reflection I became interested in attempting to use the form to help filter the matches from online dating platforms (e.g. OkCupid). Why not right? It only makes sense that, if you are serious about finding the right people for your business, you would also be serious about finding the right people for your life in general.
The point of all this, if it’s not already obvious, is that this form really represents the level of seriousness by which I do the things I do. It represents the kind of person I am: my values, my work ethic, my interests, etc … the form is not intended to offend or disrespect, it is only meant to make it EASY for the right people to contact me, and HARD for the wrong people. Now what is the difference between these two groups? That’s a good question, and one we will explore in a future post.