Brace yourself, scary times are here

What’s happening:

• The second wave of Covid is here, and it is really bad. Two people I knew are no more. Damn lot of friends have covid. Things have got super scary super quickly. Everyone please stay safe and take care.
• To help people find covid resources quickly, I launched https://covid19.neera.ai on Thursday 22nd April. Design wise it wasn’t great, but it did “work”. Aishwarya Bharadwaj, reached out to me on Twitter and helped build a unified search on covid with great UX which launched at https://covidsupport.neera.ai/

Demo of the covid app

Observations

• Good UI/UX makes a *lot* of difference
• Your product improves extremely quickly if you have users. I had a cousin call me at night telling me something wasn’t working when he was trying to use the site to help out some of his friends. So I fixed the issue within next hour.
• Marketing is extremely important, our app reached many more people when I posted a 10s video about the app on Whatsapp and instagram.
• Impact of your work = (Quality of the work) X (Number of people using your work)
• We Engineers often ignore the second part of the equation
• Even after the apps and all, the situation on ground is grim. We would like to believe we are helping, but IDK. We are doing what we can.

This post originally appeared on https://hargup.substack.com/publish/post/35822194