---
layout: post
title: "Phase 1 successful!"
subtitle: "MobileSpace is off to a great start!"
date: 2016-10-16 18:26:00
author: "Monte Thakkar"
header-img: "/images/bg_image.jpg"
comments: false
tags: [ milestone ]
---

#### It's been a very exciting week. This week the MobileSpace community grew 650% from only 2 members last week to over 15 members as of today. Hence in this post I want to talk about a couple things: 1. Explosive growth of the community 2. Where does MobileSpace go from here?

### 1. Explosive growth of the community

#### If there is one thing that MobileSpace is about.. it's got to be the community. The idea behind it is that each one of us can bring something to the table and so learning does not have to be limited to just one source/person, but in fact you can crowdsource you learning from the community around you. Hence from the start, I wanted to have a strong community with weekly meetups that folks can rely on. Although I believed that going from 0-100 and onboarding everyone on Day 1 was definitely not the best approach. That's why, for the first month and a half (6 meetups) of MobileSpace we only had 1 community members besides myself. I call this Phase 1 of MobileSpace. During this time, I experimented with content, pacing of the course, and also created youtube videos so that MobileSpace could scale faster and more effectively. Last week I decided that I had all the infrastructure in place to scale and hence decided to spread the work and grow the community. On Monday last week, the details about MobileSpace were sent out in a weekly CS newsletter to all CS students on-campus at SF State. As a result, MobileSpace got over 34 responses within 24 hours. I was wonderful to see that students were really excited to learn iOS development and be a part of the community. In my mind, Phase 1 of MobileSpace was a success!

### 2. Where does MobileSpace go from here?

#### This weekend we held our first formal meetup sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Out of 34 applicants only 15 of them got in and it was wonderful to meet them all in person and introduce myself as well as get to know them a little better. This kicked off Phase 2 of MobileSpace with the following objectives: make sure members are effectively learning iOS development, while also ensuring member satisfaction and weekly attendance rates.

#### I believe that building a strong community is a two fold process: first is to make sure that you make the best resources and tools available to the community and second is the fact that every community member is self-motivated to learn and grow their skill-set. Hence I don't believe that the size of the community is a good indicator of the success of the community, but what's more important is that each member enjoys being part of the community and consistently attends the meetups each week.

#### #StayTuned 💯
