Day 311: October Review

Let’s do it, fam.

What went well?

📈 Intention got featured by Mozilla

Intention was featured on addons.mozilla.com as part of their Promoted Add-ons Pilot, and it led to doubling the number of users on Firefox:

Given that the addons page gets a few million impressions per month, I was surprised by how few of those visitors end up checking out Intention and downloading it, but i’d guess that most people end up on that page with an extension already in mind rather than trying to find extensions to download.

Regardless, it led to way more downloads of Intention than I was getting previously, and I’m thankful to the Mozilla Add-ons team for including me in the pilot.

🥳 Browserflow Gallery

After talking about it for so long, I finally built a gallery for flows to be shared and imported for Browserflow:

This enables being able to learn about Browserflow use cases and use flows that others have created, which is what I think will be a core driver for Browserflow marketing and adoption.

I’m also quite happy to have built a performant way to sync the application state in Redux with Firestore (Firebase’s database) because now I can reuse that in Intention and any other extensions I build that’d make use of cloud storage.

🌳 Oregon with friendos

I spent October staying in Oregon with my friends David and Ranna, and I loved it there. I was in a quite rural area an hour outside of Portland, and it was lovely being surrounded by so much nature and seeings cows, sheep, and llamas when I went on runs.

Much love to David and Ranna for inviting me out there and being such chill housemates.

What didn’t go well?

😕 Lack of Intention support

Due to being featured, I received (and continue to receive) a ton of feedback on Intention, but I’m not able to act on them right now because of my current focus on Browserflow. There was a period of a few days where I tried to do a bit of work on Intention, but it felt like I’d get sucked in and leave Browserflow in limbo so I decided to wait until I’d gotten Browserflow to a stable place before working on Intention.

There’s a lot I want to do with Intention, and I sometimes feel like I’m squandering a big opportunity by not focusing on the product with lots of existing users (Intention) rather than one with no users (Browserflow). I’d like to be able to work on both simultaneously, but I know I work a lot better focusing on one thing at a time rather than context-switching.

Hoping I’ll be able to spend some significant time in the next few weeks improving Intention because there’s much room for improvement.

Metrics

Users

Everything stayed mostly the same with the exception of Intentention’s growth on Firefox. Maybe it’d be worth adding analytics to Hide Feed and Intention to get a sense of actual usage rather than just the number of users who have the extension installed as reported by Chrome & Firefox… will have to think about that some more.

Time

Spent more time working on Browserflow in October than in September, which makes sense since the place in Oregon was much more conducive to working than being at my parents’ place. Still boggles my mind that I logged 251 hours of active, focused time working on Browserflow in June — almost double the number of hours.

Overall reflections

I’ve written about this in my November posts (I should try to do these monthly reviews at the end of the month rather than several weeks into the new month so that I capture my state of mind at the end of the period that’s being examined), but I really need to spend more time talking to people and getting more people on Browserflow rather than focusing purely on product.

There’s still so much low-hanging fruit, but I’m proud of where Browserflow is right now and can’t wait to have more people using it and building on top of it.