Why I Created Plaazaa

Every good project starts with a small irritation. Mine was a chat group. Not a bad one. A very ordinary one, with forty people, a reminder about a meeting, a photo of lunch, and one important notice that scrolled away in about ten minutes. Nobody did anything wrong. The tool just was not built for that job.

That is the itch behind Plaazaa. I wanted a place where a community, an office or a small business can keep its important things tidy, and where "important" does not lose to "lunch".

The question before the features

I did not start with a feature list. I started with a plain question: what does a neighbourhood, or an office, actually need to say to the people around it? Usually it is a short list. Something is broken. Something is happening. Something is open or closed. Please read this. Please come.

Most of those messages have a person waiting for an answer, and most of the time the answer gets lost. So the first idea was not "a social network". It was a place where those few kinds of messages have a shape, and where someone can see that they were read.

Small tools that do one job

That is why Plaazaa has tools inside each Space. A way to report a problem and follow it until it is fixed. A way to announce something and see who saw it. Events. Booking. Each one is small on purpose. If a tool needs a manual longer than a page, I have probably built the wrong tool, and I have built the wrong tool more than once. Cutting a feature I liked was the hardest part. It still stings a little.

I design, extend and run Plaazaa as a product. That means I also answer for what happens at the boring hours: logins, backups, a page that is slow on a cheap phone. Building the interesting part is only half the job. The other half is being the person who gets the message when it breaks.

One sign-in

Early on I noticed that I was asking people to make yet another account, and I did not like it either. So the network got one sign-in, which became IDUnify. One account, several places. It sounds like a small thing. It removed more friction than any feature I shipped that month.

Why there are games

People sometimes ask why a platform for communities has a hub of small games and apps. The honest answer: a place made only of forms does not feel like a place. A community needs somewhere to waste five minutes together. So the games are there for the same reason a good office has a kitchen.

What I would tell my earlier self

• Start with the smallest message that matters, not the biggest feature.
• Make the first version boring and reliable. Make it fun after it works.
• Write the help page while you build the tool. If you cannot explain it, the tool is not finished.
• Show it to real users in a pilot earlier than feels comfortable.

Where it is now

Plaazaa is in use with local-government offices as a pilot, and the business side is growing next to it. It is still moving, and I still use it myself, which is the best test I know. If you want to look at what it does, the work page has real screens. If you have a community or a business that lives in a messy chat group, I would be happy to talk about it.

Below is a small way to walk through the story. The mascot does the walking. I do the explaining, usually after the fact.

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