How and Why I built Membersdrive - A Web based Contact Management App for SME and NGO

About me

My name is Mathew, i am a web developer with 8 years experience, got my first shot in high school and upon graduation i have already gotten into making my own web pages and tiny apps that does make some revenue.

The problem I wanted to solve

Contact relationship management was a big deal for Business owners and a simple enough solution to help achieve the desired management goal doesnt exist so i had to build it.

What is Membersdrive - Web based Contact Management App for SME?

Membersdrive [https://membersdrive.com] is a web app for Contact Management for SME and NGO, a user of the application can create tables to store different contact groups, categries record, generate online form link to the contact table, send sms and email communication to all/any contacts, use @personalization command to make messaging more personal.

Even much further the app manages important dates and deliver birthday messages automatically for the user contact, the user can set their preffered message template and every user uses a wildcard subdomain to access the app.

Tech stack

The app Frontend is built with Bootstrap and some Jquery, Backend uses PHP and Database storage is MYSQl. I uses htaccess for cleaning url.

I have actually been an active PHP developer in the community for 7 Years now and have love for building scallable PHP Web application systems.

The process of building Membersdrive - Web based Contact Management App for SME

Typically starts by understanding the problem at hand.
I had wanted the product myself been an administrator at my mum business, i just want a tool to work for me.

I had a basic planning fron Wireframing and Mockup and through to detail roadmap of development from start to finish.

I employ a physical feature development tracking list and i built everything in the app myself.

It literally took 7 Weeks to complete the work for its initial release.

Challenges I faced

Just one thing which is about a scallable Table Schema (How i can allow a user of the application to create table and maintain the schema of the table and allow edit/updated/delete), i did sort it out but it even requires more re-thinking.

More than 300 Users of the app and over 10,000+ Contact saved,
How to process Thousand of communications to contacts in few minutes was also a slight challenge initially but after several iteration its get better.

Key learnings

I would have imploy a more Front-end system like React early on to make UI even better and experience better.

Tips and advice

My advice to Developers building stuff is that, local thinking can help us build fast, writing code to solve local problems can make us feel great quickly but Quality and ease of use is the most important thing if our tools is going to go beyond our town and we need to have the tech stack on our plate.

Great at front-end and Good at Backend.
Over all is just Learning More.

Final thoughts and next steps

Again over 10,000+ Contacts relationship is managed on the app now and there is a continuous demand for improvement and international demand outside of the locality here. I am continuing to make the service better and introduce new tech stacks.

By the way a new version is on plan that will allow international users to make use of the app easily and for a better app quality experience and good design paradigm.