Day 503: April Review

It’s almost a week until the end of May so…. let’s do the April review! 😅

I’ve clearly not been prioritizing Road to Ramen as much as I have in the past, but my energy fo it comes in waves so I’m just going to keep on truckin’ with the understanding that it’ll come back at some point.

This post is going to be a bit thin because I have a hard enough time remembering the name of the neighborhood that I lived in during my 3 months in Taiwan so trying to recall how I felt last month is kind of a stretch. I’ll try my best with the help of my trusty calendar and Road to Ramen posts.

What went well?

❤️ Vegas hau5

I had such a great time living with Shiva, Ben, Raj, Natasja, and Sam, and it was honestly super hard saying bye to everyone at the end of the month. Having been mostly nomadic for the past four years, I’ve gotten used to transitions, but it’s still hard letting go of a good thing.

Some highlights:

The time we cooked up a sick BBQ and had a lil murder mystery party with Ben and Mai.

We all got super hooked on poker and became degenerates, especially when Raj came up with “crack poker” which is where you buy in for $5 and get 5 chips total for a super fast game.

The time we all got super deluxe mani-pedis for funzies. I am way too frugal to be okay with paying $80 for this kind of experience again, but it was very relaxing and my manicurist told me hilarious stories about her mom the entire time which was great.

• Not pictured: Walks with Shiva where we’d talk about life and give each other advice that we need to implement in our own lives — it’s much easier to see the speck of dust in someone else’s eye rather than the plank in your own.

💫 Omega Mart

There’s an experiential art installation in Vegas that opened in February called Omega Mart by an entertainment company called Meow Wolf. You enter into a fake supermarket (with fake goods that you can buy with real money), but there’s a ton of more space to explore (e.g. you can crawl through a hole in the wall hidden inside a tent in the grocery story to enter a different area) and a secret narrative you can uncover.

It was mind-blowing. If you ever visit Vegas, you have to go here. It’s easily one of the most incredible art experiences I’ve had.

What didn’t go well?

🙃 Did not launch Browserflow

My goal for the end of my 2-month Vegas Airbnb stay was to either (a) launch Browserflow or (b) get a paying customer. Well, neither of those happened.

I’ve basically been falling into the “just one more feature” trap over and over, whether that’s better spreadsheet support, adding proxy and CAPTCHA support to Browserflow Cloud, or supporting multiple Google accounts. What’s especially funny is that most of these things were on my “feature creep” R2R post where I especially called out that “i should wait until after i actually have customers and people ask for it because otherwise it’ll mean many more months hermit coding”. Your boy is self-aware but has zero self-control.

Metrics

Users & Revenue

Time

Holy smokes, I spent much, much less time writing Road to Ramen posts than I usually do. (For comparison to even earlier times, I spent 30+ hours a month on Road to Ramen when I first started from Jan-Mar 2020).

Overall reflections

Hard to write reflections for April given we’re so far into May, but even though I didn’t meet my goal to launch or get a customer for Browserflow, I’m pretty happy with how things are going. I mean, I’d like to launch soon, but at the same time, I feel fine taking my sweet time.