Day 464: March Review

status

What went well?

☁️ Browserflow Cloud is real!

On March 20th, I decided that running things in the cloud would provide a lot more value than running things locally and started exploring what it’d take to get a super basic version working in the span of a month. 11 days later, I had a prototype working end-to-end! I’m actually not that fast at developing — much of the foundational work was done during the time I spent in quarantine in Taiwan. I just had to refresh my memory of how everything worked, implement some of the existing commands, and add in some features like better error reporting and scheduling flows.

I’m incredibly excited that Browserflow Cloud is a reality now because that means I can give away the local version for free (as least for personal use; I think I might charge a monthly fee for business use like Obsidian does) and charge people when they want to run flows in the cloud.

This will be painfully obvious to anyone who’s been reading Road to Ramen over the past year, but I’ve definitely spent way too much time building features that I didn’t need. Things that I should’ve skipped and instead spent that time getting in front of customers:

  • Recording mode
  • Multi-tab/window support
  • Undo/redo
  • Almost all of the commands
  • Almost everything I worked on 🙃

I mean, it’s nice that Browserflow is so robust and fully-featured, but this is the opposite of the classic MVP that’s useful for collecting feedback as soon as possible. I’ve built a Maximum Viable Product.

❤️ Living with friends in Las Vegas

As much as I loved my time in Taiwan, I’m very happy with my decision to come back to the States and live in community with friends. We’ve established a solid routine of various group activities like working out, balling it up on our half-court outside, playing poker, screaming over Smash, and watching terrible movies and awesome shows (we recently started Mob Psycho 100 and it’s amazing), and we’ve all gotten along quite well. Can’t believe I only have a few weeks left with this crew. 😭

I was also extremely happy to find out that Ben and Mai are also here — we’ve been meeting up every week to play tennis (I’m a rank beginner but I watched like 2 YouTube videos so I’m basically a pro now), and I’m glad I get to spend so much time with them because they’re some of my favorite people.

What didn’t go well?

🐚 Too much hermit coding; not enough marketing/sales

Who’s surprised? Not me.

Building Browserflow Cloud sucked me back in the c0d3 z0n3.

Oh yeah, I set a monthly challenge to tweet every day at the beginning of the month, but uh, that kind of fell through once I started coding 24/7 and stopped going on social media.

🤖 Overly focused

I’ve been spending so much of my waking hours either working on or thinking about Browserflow, and I don’t think I’m giving myself enough space to slow down. I realized that the regular inspiration I get from dead time has been absent — normally I get this when working out, but since I’m working out in a group, my mind doesn’t wander as much which means there’s less serendipity in my thought patterns. I NEED TO RELAX

Metrics

Users & Revenue

The big change this past month: Churn!

I started charging for Hide Feed early last year, and many people hit their 1-year renewal this year. Quite a few of them have cancelled their subscription, which makes sense given that many of them subscribed to support me (as opposed to being in love with the product). Still super thankful to all the homies who threw money in my direction <333.

Sometime this year, I’d like to introduce one-time payment for both Hide Feed and Intention as opposed to a subscription. (Also considering just making Hide Feed free and open sourcing it; or maybe bundling Hide Feed and Intention together.)

It’s wild to think just how little and how much has changed in the past year. One year ago, I thought Hide Feed was going to be the product I’d been working on for a while, but little did I know that Browserflow would creep up on me and consume everything. In hindsight, it’s clear that Hide Feed is not suitable for sustaining a business.

I wonder how I’ll feel about Browserflow a year from now?

Time

And we’re back!!! After a few months of barely working while living in Taiwan, it’s good to be making progress on Browserflow again. In terms of hours spent on Browserflow, this is the highest since July, when I worked 178 hours. More hours definitely doesn’t mean more productive (especially I have a history of sinking tons of hours into Things That Don’t Matter), but it is useful as a proxy for how excited I am about the work.

Overall reflections

I started working on Browserflow at the end of May of last year, which means that I’m almost at the 1 year mark. It’s nuts to think that I’ve devoted this much time and effort into a single project.

I want to do a soft launch of Browserflow before I leave Vegas.