Day 154: May Review
Note: By talking about my projects here, I don’t mean to trivialize current events and the discussion around racial injustice and police violence. These are important topics that deserve our attention. At the same time, I’d like to continue using this journal to share my experience building indie products. Just want to acknowledge that these are trying times for lots of folks. (Wrote some reflections on this earlier this week.)
Still not getting any better at doing these on time, but hey, I’m doing them!
Review Format
(I removed the question “What would I like to do differently?” because while it’s not quite identical, it felt fairly redundant with “What didn’t go well?”)
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- Metrics
- Overall reflections
What went well?
Man, I’m really bad at remembering things that happened anytime over like a week ago, so it’s a good thing I keep this journal and a changelog! I was literally staring at the monthly view on Google Calendar and thinking, “wait, what the heck did I do this past month?”
💙 Created the Intention Community
I finally got around to creating a Slack community for Intention and wrote a step-by-step guide for doing so. There are now 83 members. It’s relatively quiet (~5 posts/messages a week), which I guess is to be expected because people aren’t going to have feedback all the time. I feel like I haven’t made much use of the community yet, but so far, it’s nice to have a central place to make announcements and respond to bugs and feature requests.
🛠 Made major improvements to Intention
I added some features like blurred backgrounds, cooldowns, and more granular tracking around site visits, unlocks, and time saved, but the one I’m most proud of is the significant improvement made to Intention’s performance.
I rewrote how Intention is injected into the page from using an iframe to a shadow DOM element, and loads became twice as fast. On facebook.com, for example, the average time for Intention to appear fully rendered dropped from 5.7 seconds to 2.9 seconds. The difference is huge (before on left, after on right):
🆕 Started an exciting new project
During the last week of May, I wanted to take a small break from working on Intention because I started feeling some classic signs of burnout (drop in motivation, not enjoying my hobbies as usual). Literally the next day, I was struck by a new idea that got me incredibly excited, and I’ve been working nonstop on it for the past two weeks. I haven’t shared it publicly yet because I fell into the classic “omg this idea is so incredible and I don’t want anyone stealing it” scarcity-mindset trap, but I’m planning to create a video demo of the working prototype in the next few days.
To be clear, I’m still planning to work on Intention. While this new project is a separate product in its own right, it will actually help me run Intention better. My plan is to run these products simultaneously, and given that I’m sharing code between them and they’re both centered around helping me spend my time and attention well, working on one will help me improve the other. Also, I feel more excited to work on Intention again so I’m glad I took the break!
What didn’t go well?
🐌 No user growth
The number of Intention users didn’t change between the end of April and the end of May: Intention got ~300 more users on Chrome but lost ~300 users on Firefox. That’s a bit surprising because I’d expect either both to grow or both to lose users. It’s a bit concerning that Intention seems to be bleeding users over time (the dips are weekends, when I’m assuming people are disabling Intention):
The lack of user growth is on me though — I always talk about focusing more on marketing but end up coding instead. I need to come up with a better system for balancing out building and marketing because left to my own devices, I always just end up building.
😵 Poor self-care
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been in a coding frenzy for the past two weeks where I’ve been working on a new project. It’s become an all-out obsession where it’s all I’ve focused on to the detriment of everything else I care about. While I’m fine with entering periods of hyper-focused work, I wish I could do it without destroying my healthy habits around sleep, nutrition, exercise, and meditation. I’ve been going to bed at 3am and waking up at 11am pretty consistently since I started this coding binge, and I know that this schedule naturally leads to everything else going poorly (staying up late makes it easier to binge on snacks when my self-control is at its lowest and waking up late makes it easier to feel like I should just start working instead of exercising and meditating).
Funny — one of the highlights of last month’s review was having better self-care. And so it goes.
Metrics
Users & Revenue
Baby milestone: $100 MRR!
Time
I worked an average of an additional full hour more each day this past month, and that’s due to the monster coding sessions I’ve been having with my new project.
Overall reflections
This was a much less glamorous month compared to April where I got a ton of users, but everything happens in phases and I’m not in a big rush. Slow and steady!
While there’s a lot more I plan to do with Intention, it’s honestly hard to think of anything but the new project right now. Super excited to get it out there.