Lamar Elimbo / Creations

Ambikor is the passion project of a 7 year old boy who wanted to become a "diggerologist".

He was fuelled by his miniature excavation kit and his dinosaur bone accessorised daydreams, but when he later learned that there were terms like egyptologist, archaeologist, and palaeontologist, he quickly spiralled down a path of wanting to unearth all of the other cool careers that he wanted to have.

So as any indecisive second grader does, he made a list of his top 100 careers and started experimenting.

Now in his twenties, that little boy grew into a young man eager to check entrepreneurship off his list by reviving his list into a company.

His goal was to evolve his list into a directory of mentors from every career imaginable who'd be eager to guide and inspire beginners with the professional insights they had gained over the years.

He made the rookie entrepreneur mistake of becoming so seduced by his grandiose vision that he skipped over creating and validating a minimal viable product and instead went full steam ahead with his master plan.

It was 1 year after he first started Ambikor and he had:

He enjoyed having something to build and design everyday, but he loathed the thought of moving into a sales phase where he wouldn't get to spend the majority of his time in crafting a mode anymore. He decided that he would rather look for a career that would allow him to continue crafting than to move into the next phase of selling Ambikor. He wasn't sure of what career he wanted exactly, but luckily, he had just built out a career discovery platform with a directory of over 900 professions he could search through.

In an attempt to find his next path, he envisioned potential futures as a smart home integrator, an interior designer, and an industrial designer. But when he considered his current skills and interests, he discovered that user interface design described exactly what he was looking for. And it wasn't too long after that I was born, Lamar: The Product Designer.

It had been a few months since I had begun to immerse myself into the product designer's world and I was fired up by the prospect of getting to use my freshly-minted skills to help others get their product ideas off the ground.

But, I couldn't help but feel that I hadn't given my entrepreneurship hat the send off that it deserved. So I figured, what better way to put my new product design skills to the test than to use them to repurpose Ambikor into something useful.

I decided that if I wasn't going to configure any marketplace abilities for users to interact 1-on-1, then I could still mimic a feeling of guidance by allowing professionals to leave general advice and recommendations of their favourite career resources.

At this point I'd only used Webflow as my NoCode tool of choice to build interactive websites, but I wasn't sure if there was a way to build a web app with CRUD capabilities (CRUD: where users can Create, Update, Read, and Delete information). I knew that these functions would be necessary if I wanted to give professionals the ability to create, read, update, and delete their posts. It didn't take very long before I learned about all of the helpful tools that could be integrated into Webflow.

I knew that compared to codifying out an entire marketplace from scratch, building Ambikor 2.0 would be a lot easier. But there were 2 primary obstacles that I knew I would have to overcome:

Webflow doesn't allow website visitors to manipulate data in the CMS (the database where I was keeping all of the career and recommendation data). So I needed to figure out a way to allow posters to add, update, and delete their recommendations.

In order to allow for CRUD capabilities, I resorted to using 2 primary tools to get the job done. I used Integromat to give me the ability to validate whether or not the poster of a recommendation was the one trying to edit or delete their post. I used FinSweet CMS filters with a some javascript customization in order to enable visitors to conduct more advanced queries when searching through the career database.

By not creating users, I had to figure out a workaround, in order to allow visitors to leave recommendations and come back to edit or delete their own post later. Without a database record to pair a user to their own post, I needed to think of a way to preclude people from editing or deleting recommendations left by others.

I used a security question method in place of a traditional password. Any time a user posts a recommendation, Ambikor asks them a question like: "What was your dream job as a child." If they want to come back to edit or delete their post, they'll simply have to answer the question in the same way.

After I got Ambikor 2.0 to function like I wanted, I needed to update a few aspects of its design.

Ambikor was originally devised as a marketplace, so its interface was designed to accommodate a lot of features that Ambikor 2.0 wouldn't need (features like: signing up and logging in users, payment, messaging, and bookmarking careers, advice, and professionals).

I wanted to scale Ambikor down to its most essential features, so I decided that all I needed were two pages: the career discovery page and the individual career page template.

I also decided to play off of the fact that I was essentially using Ambikor 2.0 as an MVP for Ambikor 1.0. So I styled the new interface with a more brutalist design aesthetic (noted by its exposed grid, typographic orientation and styling).

Ambikor 1.0

Ambikor 2.0

At its core, Ambikor's first objective is to help people discover careers. The most obvious way to organise careers is by categorising them based on their industry. The problem is that there isn't one intuitive classification system.

For example, where one system might place "neurolinguist" under "language", another might place it under "health".

Instead of taking each career and placing it under a single industry, I decided to opt for a more flexible system that could tag each career with multiple industry themes. For example, my system tags "neurolinguist" with both "health" and "language" themes, therefore increasing each career's visibility. I also wanted a sense of novelty that offered more than industry queries. After playing with different strategies, I noticed that I was able to narrow down every career to some combination of six primary functions. So I developed a "function-industry" career classification system, where a user could ask Ambikor to find careers based on professionals who perform a specific function in a specific industry.

Ambikor is the product of my wish for a world where everyone is paired up with their dream career.

Through the process of building it out, I've come to an even greater appreciation for the fact that careers and career paths cannot be templated. New careers are invented all the time and each career path is unique.

I plan to continue adding new career titles, I want to continue highlighting unorthodox career stories, and I want people to inspire and motivate each other with their insights and resources.

Right now Ambikor is a tool for career discovery and community curated recommendations. Anyone can filter through 900+ professions to discover the dream career they never knew existed and learn what professionals from each career have to recommend to their fellow and aspiring peers.