Developing a Team with Yash

Hindsight is 2020 (#HI2020) is a ground up initiative founded and led by a class of 2020 graduate - Jessica Lee Yi Ling from Singapore Management University (SMU). In this series, she uncovers personal stories of resilience, courage and love amidst this crazy year we call 2020. Through the reflections and learnings shared in #HI2020, she hopes to empower internship and job seekers to improve their status quos and encourage aspiring entrepreneurs and volunteers to pursue their passions in 2021.

Developing a Team with Yash

An aspiring software engineer - that’s Yash Gadodia for you. Believing in the power of idea’s and technology’s ability to change the world, Yash has been working his magic on SMUMods. On top of contributing to the site's 10x growth since he joined as a Backend Developer, he also doubles up as the Project Lead and has helped grow the family from 3 to 14 people strong. Read on for his review of 2020!

Here’s 3 key things you will learn

1)     A small group of determined and like-minded people have the power to make history.

2)     80% of life is showing up.

3)     You cannot connect the dots moving forward, only backwards.

I know that SMUMods is really about encouraging the SMU Community to give reviews of courses. Now, it's your turn. Give us a review of 2020 and tell us how has Covid-19 affected you professionally and personally?

“I'm going to have to see some terms and conditions before I agree to 2021.”(Gadodia, 2020)

COVID affected me quite a lot - I had a lot of struggles with mental health last year - Like many others it was not easy to adapt to "Zoom University". Working remotely over summer for my internship also meant saying goodbye to the on-site experience I had eagerly looked forward to. Every day seemed to blend into the next.

Lockdown helped me to realise how the simplest things in life were so important - being able to meet new people and experience different things. I kind of had an existential crisis when that realisation hit me. I wrote a short story on this which you can check out on my personal blog.

This also reminds me of an excerpt from a book I read during lockdown called Moonwalking with Einstien - "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”

I understand that you are currently SMUMods's Project Lead and the Development Student Club Lead. Tell us a more about them.   

SMUMods.com is a student run and non-profit initiative that aims to redefine the college experience. At SMUMods, we aim to make the lives of students better. We ask ourselves how we can help the SMU community; as long as there is a need, the team will try its best to implement the most viable solution.

We are currently used by the majority of the SMU student body for professor reviews, buying and selling of textbooks, and analysing past bidding trends. We have a lifetime pageviews of over 2 million at this point, with 400k hits/week during peak bidding last semester.

Developer Student Clubs are university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies. By joining a DSC, students grow their knowledge in a peer-to-peer learning environment and build solutions for local businesses and their community.

I was recently the head of the Singapore Android Weekend 2020, which was an event across all the DSC Chapters in Singapore. We had 4 speakers from the industry give talks about Google technologies like Android and Kotlin, with a 'fireside' chat after for students to ask questions directly to our speakers.

How would you describe your job/role in SMUMods to a family member or a friend?       

I'd say - I'm the saikang warrior for SMUMods. We are all equals and have a small but extremely close-knit team at SMUmods, but as team lead I have an additional responsibility of 'guiding' the ship in the direction we set together, so to speak.

In a sentence, I would say I'm "that one guy who doesn't stop talking about SMUMods.com.

What motivated you to join the SMUMods family? Was this your first time working in a student-initiated project?      

The site was only 2 man strong when I had joined. The co-founders, Gabriel and Zachery.

The story of how I joined is funny, actually. I'm part of .Hack, a special interest group in SIS. Gabriel, at that time was looking to get fresh people onboarded on the team (both founders were about to graduate). We invited him to conduct for a short presentation on what SMUMods is and on all the tech stacks used.

The website stuck with me because it was so beautifully designed and solved such an important problem. That winter, at the start of the holidays, I asked around and got Gabriel's telegram contact. I sent him a cold message and basically told him 'look, I have 0 skillsHowever, I'm passionate and I will work hard'.

Turns out, that's exactly the kind of person that the founders were looking for. I joined as member #3 and we are now 14 strong and growing!

Essentially, I wanted to start working on my own idea that improves student life at college. and since there was someone already working on it, and had the platform up with real users, why not join them?

What kind of challenges did you face in growing the platform? 

So. Many. Challenges. I think there are 2 main challenges I'm trying to tackle at the moment.

How do we ensure the sustainability of our site? Both in terms of money (we are paying for servers out of our own pockets, which is about 50$/month USD) and also in terms of who will be taking over the project as the founders have since graduated and are working full-time jobs.

Financially - We started getting sponsors for our site and have also set up a donations page. https://ko-fi.com/smumods. It's not a lot of money, but it's a start. We're looking for ways to raise more money soon. Ideally, I'd like to give back the money we earn to the team, in terms of buying courses to upgrade our own skills. Or even paying students to develop their own features? But for now, we are all taking times out of our busy schedules to do this as a passion project.

The Team - For longevity, we're actually running like a pseudo CCA/startup at the moment. So, we have heads for each branch of our team (Marketing, Product, UX, Frontend, Backend) - these heads are sort of the most experienced members in their respective domains, and they help to mentor the other members. Once a head graduates / moves on to other projects, someone else can takeover. That's how I structured our project. because this isn't like a project we do in our mods, complete it in one semester and then chuck it aside. There are real users who depend on us now. We have different stakeholders involved and we can't just disappear overnight.

Tell us about your most unforgettable experience.        

Great question. I think it would be the first time I felt that the 'imposter syndrome' hit me like a truck.

SMUMods is working with Outside app, a startup on developing a feature called Tasks. The idea is for students to list small tasks like 'help print notes' or 'help buy lunch' on the app and others can help you to complete tasks and be compensated for it.

When the CEO of Outside reached out to us for a potential collaboration, I was still really new at that point, and our team was about 5 members strong. The founders and I went to meet them for breakfast at SMU's Koufu. It felt kind of surreal to be in part of such discussions with C-suite level members.

That is the experience that stood out to me.

How have you contributed to the growth of SMUMods since you started with the team?

My proudest achievement would be growing the family from 3-12+ members. I'm also really happy to share that the site is also grown about 10x since I've joined.

? grew monthly visitors by 10x from 40k to 400k

? coordinated efforts to raise over 2000$ in donations, sponsorships, and partners within a year.

? launched books feature, with 380 books listed till date in 1 year

How did you cope with SMUMods on top of your studies, your CCAs and your social life?

So, the good thing is if you know me you know I have no social life.

Nah, kidding. SMUMods is low-key during the semester. In fact, last year, we only did 'customer service' and basic maintenance over the year. That means manning our telegram chat for users who reach out to us (usually cannot log in or cannot get verification email) and spinning up more servers doing bidding as we keep crashing.

This year onwards though, we have planned to do some work until recess week. the first half of semester is usually less fast-paced (then again, YMMV). We do weekly team calls on Sunday's where we assign 'tickets' or tasks, every week. then we do the call to check if there are any blockers and review the work done before we launch.

I think the work doesn’t really feel like work at this point. It's more passion which carries me through all the tough days. I have a fantastic team. Absolutely top notch. Everyone works independently, learns on their own, and never backs away from putting in the work. That has made coping with school and my additional commitments a lot easier.

What do you think enabled you to recruit and grow the core team?      

Trial and error. When I first recruited people after I joined as #3, it was just asking my close friends. Some of them stuck but most of them left after a bit as it wasn't a good fit. Then, when I was recruiting the marketing team, I did an open call on ask.smu for people to reach out to me. From there I got 5 new recruits - one of whom is Casey, a marketing legend. He now leads marketing team and has been doing AMAZING work for us. From the 5, only Casey and Zack continued with us. In the 3rd iteration, we realised we were growing and people were actually reaching out to us. So we could sort of 'choose' people and started having a hiring process. We don't look for skills necessarily, more of a willingness to learn and work in a team. We're all unpaid after all. So now, how recruitment works is each team head will create their own 'interview' process for a fresh hire. That has really helped a lot, because now every one of our hires recently has been a hit. 0 misses during the last cycle of recruitment.

In the capacity of a leader, how do you encourage the rest of your team to stay innovative and hungry to improve the SMUMods platform?       

I would say I try not to think too much about it, just do my job and constantly ask my team 'help me better help you’.

I also try to do bonding activities so we are a bit closer, for example, we always do a fun activity at the end of each weekly meeting. That has helped break the ice. Also, each weekly meeting is now led by a different person on the team so I'm not the only one talking. Lastly, I try to organize team dinners so we can get to know each other on a personal level. I think knowing one another as friends is really important. If not for Gabriel, the founder, I think my life would be very different. He's like my mentor now. We talk every day and are also working together on another side project.

What have you learnt as the new Team Lead?  

Gosh, there's so many! I'd say it's about having amazing people working with you. When the team is good, everything tends to fall in place. Try to create an environment where everyone feels like an equal (because they are), where everyone feels like they are heard and can contribute, and where everyone expresses themselves. It's all about people at the end of the day.

Having gone through this experience, what would you say are traits one must have to survive in a start-up whilst studying?        

Hustle. Grind. Learn how to learn. Move quickly and break things. Do whatever it takes to get it to work. In a startup, you get to wear many different hats. I learn marketing, project management, public relations on top of coding.

Comparing the 2019 and 2020 versions of you, how you do you think YOU have changed/grown?

Haha, in 2020 I learnt to 'surprise myself' - it's my motto. I constantly tried to do things I wouldn't think imaginable. When I do achieve something, I think, 'wow' - 'never knew I could do that'. I think we don't surprise ourselves nearly enough.

What's next for SMUMods and how can the community support you in your efforts?    

We have so many features in the works and the team can't wait to launch them.

Features in the Pipeline

- Forums for students like freshmen to ask common questions.

- Communities, an integration with telegram that shows telegram groups for people with similar interests to meet.

- Tasks, a feature built in collaboration with Outside.

- Notes, a marketplace like smumods.com/books but instead for notes.

If you wish to pay it forward, you can leave reviews, list your textbook (you keep 100% of the listed price, we don’t take a cut just in case you're wondering!). And perhaps if you can afford it, buy us the amount of a cup of coffee? That'll be the best way to help us - the team is trying to figure out how we can create a 'pay it forward' culture where all students donate $1 for using the site. We've seen such a culture in other universities around the world, but that culture doesn't exist right now. We're going to change that. Students supporting student-run initiatives is the best way to grow. But we'll see.

Would you like to give a shout-out to your SMUMods core team?

Every single one of them is amazing! In no particular order:

Gabriel Chuan, Zachery Ng, Cindy Zheng, Teo Jia Cheng, Casey Liaw, Low Zheng Ming (Zack), Sean Choon, Mika Sasaki, Pua Yen Ting, Tan Hui Min Grace, Djulian Badua Naval and Tay Rui Xian.