25 july 2017 /// Rieta Aliredjo
Just before the Christmas holidays of 2016 we received good news from Natuur en Milieufederatie Utrecht (NMU). We got €5.000,- to develop a pilot for 7DaysCircular and to work on a prototype for Warenhuisje. Once we set a date with a primary school in Utrecht for the project week on circular economy, we put the peddle to the metal to have a first version of the platform ready by mid March of 2017.
Because of the time and money constraints we researched some open source and cloud solutions that we could use as a base. The fact that marketplaces are not new was an advantage to us, but far from a ready made solution to the product we had in mind. Co-creating with kids and families is super important to us, so we take a step by step lean startup approach making the most of the possibilities we got in order to get them involved as quickly as possible.
We stripped down the marketplace template we used to go back to the basics and make it more suitable for kids. We also focused on implementing some of the most important features that distinguish Warenhuisje/sCoolMakers from existing platforms:
Testen met plusklasje Wijzer aan de Vecht #7dagencirculair
Een bericht gedeeld door warenhuisje (@warenhuisje) op
Een bericht gedeeld door 7DagenCirculair (@7dagencirculair) op
The first chapter of our journey taught us how important it is to start and learn by doing! We managed to deliver a good result and got another round of subsidy from NMU. With the second version we made a big jump forward and developed the following features:
We’ll be testing this second version soon. Stay tuned for that!