Day 185: June Review

status

It’s funny — I always do these monthly reviews late (this time, I got sucked into writing about the fun (read: NOT FUN) technical details of moving everything over to Redux), but I’m surprisingly consistent in how late I am in doing them.

The May review happened on June 7 (31 days ago), the April review happened on May 9 (60 days ago), and the March review happened on April 8 (91 days ago). It’s as if once I’m a week into the month, my brain is like “yo dawg, if you don’t do it now, you never will” and so I finally do it.

Alright, here we go:

  • What went well?
  • What didn’t go well?
  • Metrics
  • Overall reflections

What went well?

🤖 Tons of Browserflow progress

It’s kind of hard to extricate myself from my present lack of enthusiasm about being in refactoring hell, but overall, I’m super stoked on Browserflow as a product and a potential business. Last month, it was a mere twinkle in my eye that I described as “an exciting new project” — now, it’s a fully-featured browser automation platform. Even though I wanted to have shared a build with a few friends by now, I’m quite pleased with my progress so far and what Browserflow is capable of.

What didn’t go well?

📉 Losing Intention users

Last month, I puzzled over how I lost Firefox users but gained Chrome users which resulted in no change in users. Well, now there’s nothing to be puzzled about: I’m losing users on both platforms.

There was a weird drop on June 28 where the user count dropped by 10%. This effect occurred across multiple countries and also appeared in Hide Feed’s stats, so either I got cancelled without me knowing it or Chrome changed the way it measures current users. (Update: Not just me)

I guess this is to be expected because I put in zero effort into marketing Intention last month and since my retention is not 100%, I’m going to lose users.

Once Browserflow is in a stable place, I want to make a big push to add some long-requested features, add a paid plan, and focus my attention to marketing.

😬 Hermit mode

One of the reasons I was able to make so much progress with Browserflow in June was that I worked nonstop. I’ll share the exact numbers in the metrics section below, but I worked more hours than I ever have and probably ever will again.

A consequence of this side effect was that I ignored everything else. I literally went weeks without checking my email, Slack, personal messages, etc. That probably sounds insane to most people because we live in a culture of constant connectivity, but (1) spending months in meditation retreats makes you realize that going off the grid for long periods of time won’t kill you and (2) since I’m living in the mountains and not exactly meeting up with people, my life runs perfectly fine just communicating in person with my housemates. I honestly enjoy living this way quite a bit.

That said, I do think that I can communicate my style of living / working much better given how atypical it is — for example, setting an email autoresponder or publicly posting my communication habits so that people don’t think I’m reading their messages and choosing to ignore them specifically. Nope, I just go offline for long periods of time.

Metrics

Users & Revenue

We’re going down, down, down, down, down~

Time

I use Toggl to track time spent actively working on project tasks, meaning activities like taking breaks, reading emails, browsing the Web, pondering the great mysteries of life, etc. are not included.

Observations:

  • HOLY CRAP I WORKED A LOT (more than twice the hours worked in April!!!)
  • It didn’t feel like it, but I spent considerably less time writing Road to Ramen posts (Journal category)

Overall reflections

As I mentioned at the beginning of this month (July), I want to bring some balance back into my life. More sleep, more exercise, more meditation, less working.

And yet, so there so many things I’d like to do like patch up Intention’s leaky bucket, ship Browserflow, open source my stack for building browser extensions, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc…