I have been hyper-focused on overhauling Breadwinner over this past weekend, a startup I founded with the intent of uplifting Cottage Food. Why now? The past couple years has given me the opportunity to observe the broader landscape and determine which features would be best suited for this use case.

The previous iteration of Breadwinner was very directory focused, because of the intention of uplifting Cottage Food. However, directory functionality is old hat. Everyone and their mother is offering a platform for producers to sell their goods. So, same song, different dance.

That is why I redeveloped Breadwinner from the ground up. The game-changing factor here is the ability to RSVP and ultimately place a pre-order for your meal, good, or service. This type of relationship is what’s needed for food producers to be able to balance their current freelancing workflow with the sporadic nature of consumers’ appetites.

Process

The time I’ve spent noodling over the relationship between producer and consumer and a possible third party has enabled me to quickly set up the structure needed to facilitate a transaction like RSVP’ing for an event or placing a preorder.

Based on the tabs above, I need:

• Users to log in and engage with the app/save their engagements
• Events the user can RSVP to
• A directory from which users can be invited or claim a profile
• A form that hosts can add new events through
• The ability for a user to choose their role based on if they’d like to host an event, be a vendor, or an attendee
• Registrations to track RSVPs and invites
• Claims to track profile claim requests
• Notifications to centralize data from all of the tabs, based on specific, time-bound parameters

The previous version of Breadwinner had the skeleton necessary to envision what was possible, but didn’t have the full body necessary to function properly. On top of that, it was built using an entirely different version of Glide.

To start things out, I wanted to redefine the tabs and how they’re viewed. For me, this meant trimming down the staggering number of tabs at the bottom. Three seemed like a harmonious amount.

I sanitized the home page to encourage people to think about posting their event. And notifications.

In the search page, I’ve included buttons for quick access of events and users. The last tab is a simple calendar.

Roadblocks

CLEAR BLANK ROWS

Glide has a tendency to append new rows to the bottom of the sheet, which is typically what you want. However, a cell with a value of ” ” or an empty string, is still a value, and thus a new row will be appended where there are no longer empty strings. All of my development these days is ChatGPT or AI-assisted, and everybody’s should be. With my prompt for clearing blank rows in my mind, I plugged it into ChatGPT and received an earlier version of the code below. I was able to tweak it and it now runs on regularly to clear my Sheets and remove the possibility of missing a new notification.

NOTIFICATIONS

Getting the skeleton of the app set up is a walk in the park, but working out the kinks in the functionality can be very tedious. Luckily, we have ChatGPT to bounce ideas off of. I knew that I wanted a value appended that would give me a summary of the information in the row. So I created an array formula that pieces that together the values in each sheet to dynamically create our notification.

The script was originally written to function off an edit trigger in the Sheet, but rows appended were not associated with any particular user, eliminating the possibility of using an edit-based trigger. The next step involved creating a TRUE/FALSE column in each tab that would be edited when the user engages with the row. This is my notification gathering mechanism.

Every minute my script runs and looks for relevant TRUE/FALSE values and other columns to append to the notifications sheet.

Next Steps

ENHANCED NOTIFICATIONS

Notifications are successfully being transferred from their source to the notification sheet. Glide users can view and manage their new notifications. I will next be working on a page users can manage their notifications preferences and settings through, including the frequency and means by which they receive them.

CLEANUP/ROLLOUT

I’m excited to get Breadwinner out there again. I will be working on the visual experience of the app once the notifications are in place, and then focusing on the rollout.