Monthly Retrospective - July 2023

Stats

• Worked 85.75 hours
• Of that work, 52.75 hours was done while streaming live on twitch
• 62% of work was done live on twitch
• Revenue $0

What got done:

• Created a landing page
  • Optimized for mobile
  • Attempted to make this SEO friendly by adding customizability to the tag for things like title, description, open graph meta tags.
• Finished MVP for MinutesGenerator.com product
• Integrated stripe
  • Checkout page
  • Insufficient credits checking
  • Flow to create user post-checkout
    • Not sure about this, on the one hand could be lower friction for conversion, on the other hand it's weird and unclear if people will even convert via buying right away on the landing page.
• Created a zero downtime solution for updating the server
  • Patches Nginx config and reloads
  • Able to "drain traffic"
    • Logic to wait for async jobs to finish on the server before killing server process and restarting
• Read "The one thing"
  • Try hard to always be working on the right thing AKA the most important thing AKA the one thing such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.
  • If you don't know what the one thing is, then your one thing is to find out what is your one thing.
  • It's hard to know what this thing is because sometimes you don't know what you don't know AKA "unknown unknowns"
    • When it comes to marketing, for me, there are many unknown unknowns.
• Wrote a statically generated blog, with AI generated content. Takes 10-15 mins to publish a post end to end.
  • I may not end up pursuing the AI generated angle depending on the marketing strategy I choose.
  • Regardless I think having a simple, customizable blog platform that I control can pay dividends in the future.

Things I am Thinking About

Go to market strategy (what is my "one thing")

I had a "now what" moment after launching officially on twitter. No one is going to use this product unless there is a clear value being provided and potential customers are aware of this solution. "Who is my ideal customer?" is a question I need to answer. I think answering this question is the most important next thing to figure out.Strategy-wise I came at this project backwards in the sense that I did not first identify a niche or who my customers are. I created a product that I know has broad value, but there are other competitors in the space who are well resourced with large marketing budgets, designers, engineers, etc.

I will have a hard time competing with these companies head-on in the broad space of speech to text transcript and minutes generation. It's possible that I can gain traction here but I want to find the easiest path to success, and that's likely going to involve "going smaller". If I can find a niche community on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn and target MinutesGenerator to that community, talk with users to get feedback, and specialize it to a use-case, then I think I will have a better chance of finding paying customers.

When I create my next business, I need to find the niche first. Ideally talk to customers first. For MinutesGenerator my "one thing" is to drive likely-to-convert traffic to my site. How to do this will depend on who my ideal customer is, which is something I don't know yet. So figuring this out is, I think, the most important next step, and will involve finding a niche. Doing this will make everything else easier - for example, I could invest into targeted SEO "minutes generation for ESL social workers" or something like that.

Shared work making subsequent businesses easier

One thing I'm really happy about is the investment I've put into what I think will be reusable assets. My landing page, stripe and clerk webhook handlers on my server, my blog, learning about NextJS, PlanetScale, and zero downtime server update system. The cost of setting up a new blog for a new website is dramatically lower now that I have the code ready to go. Writing the code for MinutesGenerator took me about 3 months, and I estimate ~160 hours. Without being too scientific about it, I would estimate that at least half of this time was spent doing expensive "one time cost" activities such as building/designing/optimizing a landing page.

There will be more things to learn and more work to do on these things, but I am optimistic that I'm building a cache of assets that will help accelerate my productivity. If it took 160 hours to launch MinutesGenerator, then perhaps business number two will take 80 hours. Doable within one month, which is a ~67% reduction in wall time. How fast can I go?

Tracking my hours and streaming has been great for my productivity

I didn't start tracking my hours until the last week of June, but forcing myself to fill out a timesheet and be intentional about my work has been transformative. I set a goal to work 20 hours/week and didn't even hit it (I barely missed it would have been (20 * 31 / 7 = 89 hours) , however I am confident that I worked more hours this month than any previous month.To be clear, when I talk about working X hours, I really mean working X hours. Almost no time checking my phone, getting coffee, chatting with people, no meetings, no emails. Just sitting at my desk writing code, or reading docs, or asking chatGPT questions.

Working more hours isn't a perfect measure of productivity, but I can get a lot done in an hour. If I can consistently put in hours, and consistently ensure I am working on the most important thing, then I am confident that I will be successful eventually. Working hard is hard work.

Streaming has been a great motivator to work long stretches without interruptions. Not everything can be done on stream, and there's a balance to strike because streaming can lead to situations where you don't work on the most important thing, because you are biasing towards more interesting content vs. what needs to be done. But despite the nuance, it's a great tactic, and I'm gonna keep at it.

Goals for August:

• Find a niche and target customer for MinutesGenerator
• Invest in learning about marketing
• Decide on and execute a marketing approach, e.g. SEO
• Make a decision by EOM about continuing to invest in MinutesGenerator