Day 319: Every Minute

I’ve decided: I’m going to focus on Browserflow.

Much thanks to David for sharing his thoughts with me, which made the decision easier. His reasoning in a nutshell: Browserflow has much more potential to be a successful business and in the long run, having a strong financial base will let me help more people through tools like Intention by giving it away for free, adding more features, etc. without the need to monetize it. That makes sense to me, and continuing to forge ahead with Browserflow aligns with where my passion is right now.

I wanted to make one last change to Intention before putting it on hold (I mean, it’s been on hold for a while so this is more of a mental letting go): re-enabling the prompt that asks people to rate the extension and share it with their friends. I had disabled that after Google temporarily shut down their reviews system due to COVID-19, but since the system has been restored for a while now. I figured I’d set the prompt back up so that I can at least get some reviews in the meantime.

I was also curious how many people would submit a review or share Intention on social media when asked, so I added some basic analytics using Amplitude to send an event when a review or share link is clicked. I’ve long struggled with the question of whether to add analytics or not, and while I’ve decided to accept the tradeoff to understand Intention’s usage better, I still want to be transparent about what I’m collecting, why I’m collecting it, and use the public nature of Road to Ramen to keep myself accountable.

Here are all the events I’m tracking:

• Share events (“How do people respond to the ‘please leave a review’ message?”)

  • View rate message
  • Click review link
  • Click share link

• Sites events (“How often do people add/remove distracting sites?”)

  • Add/remove denied site
  • Add/remove allowed page

• Lock events (“How do people respond to the lock?”)

  • Close tab
  • Unlock
  • End timer

• Privacy events (“How often do people toggle their privacy settings?”)

  • Enable/disable analytics
  • Enable/disable error reports

Things that are not tracked:

• What websites you’re using
• Who you are

The new build was approved in a matter of minutes, and it was incredible seeing the events pour in. It’s one thing to know that your app has some number of users — it’s another to get a stream showing people all around the world using your app in real-time:

It’s wild that every single minute, someone, somewhere in the world is interacting with a piece of work that I poured my love into. Of course, given that this is the “unlock” event we’re talking about, this speaks more to the powerful pull of distracting sites more than the value of Intention, but still — I was just humbled and thankful to see that every minute, something I built is nudging people toward living more mindful lives in its own little way.

The Internet can be pretty magical sometimes.