Day 55: January Review

status

My Casio F91W (best watch ever) doesn’t know about leap years, so when I checked the date this morning, it told me it was March 1. Then I realized that I never got around to doing a January review, so I’m going to do that today and do a February review tomorrow.

Template for the today’s review:

  • What went well?
  • What could’ve gone better?
  • Overall reflections

What went well?

  • Started Road to Ramen!

    I started writing this daily, public journal and haven’t missed a day. Writing this thing has been a ton of fun and helpful for sorting out my own thoughts. This has helped me get used to building and thinking in the open.

  • Collected signups and started a private beta for Hide Feed

    The private beta helped me start collecting feedback from users before exposing it to a much wider audience. I got 23 signups on the first day, which was a great start.

  • Ran user tests for Hide Feed

    Watching people try out Hide Feed helped me discover a ton of usability issues and opportunities for improvement in Hide Feed.

  • Time tracking

    I started using Toggl for my time tracking, and I like knowing that I have a log of how much time I’ve spent working on different projects. I haven’t really looked back and reviewed my data, but I just like knowing that it’s there.

What could’ve gone better?

  • Working in the open

    Even though I started writing Road to Ramen and sharing my progress and thoughts on a daily basis, I still feel like I could be better about working in the open. I love it when people show their work in progress on Twitter and use that was a way to get feedback on what they’re doing. In contrast, I tend to not share things until I’ve already made a firm decision or built something out, and it’d be beneficial to share things earlier, when they’re in progress.

  • Product clarity

    I struggled trying to decide what Hide Feed should be and whether I should keep Intention as a separate product or merge it into Hide Feed.

Overall reflections

It’s been a month since the end of January so I don’t remember how I felt about it then, but looking back, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve been able to do. I feel like I could still get much faster at iterating and launching, but I know that I’m just getting started at this whole thing.