What do you do if you're looking for something to be done by a group of people, but you don't have an audience of your own?

Maybe you just posted your first blog article and you want some feedback. Perhaps you're a fourth year psych student looking for research participants for an online survey for your thesis. Or maybe you've just built a new app and you want people to give it a try. As someone who's been in all of these situations, but isn't keen on building up a personal audience, I wanted to come up with a solution for finding an audience without the need to maintain an audience.

And my solution was Easy Asks.

I used building this app as an opportunity to learn the MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS, NodeJS) tech stack. I decided to choose to create a React app because the concept of component reusability worked nicely with the image I had for the app. Since I needed to build a backend to handle the data and interactions between users and their task requests, I went with MongoDB because I've grown comfortable using it in the past.

Some of the main features that I wanted to implement included:

Point Tracking System

Request completion earns 1 point and request posting costs 3 points.

Request Validation

Request poster can opt for proof that a request was completed. If they opt for this then people would have to upload a screenshot or image in order to get a completion point, otherwise they would simple have to check a checkbox.

Request Expiration

Requests remain public for 9 days. Users can postpone expiration date by 3 days for 1 point.

And after all of that is said and done, after some ideation and dedicated codifying...

I ended up with my first React app.

I'm hoping that Easy Asks will grow into a convenient and useful place for people looking for a task-ready audience. In terms of profitability, if this current iteration is able to find traction, my plan is to add a paid alternative to the point system. For example, I'll give people the option to pay a small fee to skip the 3 request completion requirement for submitting an ask. I'll also provide the option for paid expiration extension tiers (ex. $10 to keep your request public for a month).

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