Happy New Year, everyone! I hope this new year brings you closer to your dreams. And welcome to my first post of 2024! One of my goals this year is to write a weekly newsletter. So if all goes well, I will write and you will read 51 more of these.
But why?
You can read my last post for all of the reasons why I’m doing this.
There are two reasons that I’ll mention now:
To become a better writer
To hold myself accountable
It’s certainly true that practice makes perfect. In theory, if I write more, I should get better at it. And since I really do love to write, why not get better at it while doing a bunch of other positive things along the way?
That leads me to reason number two. My plans for 2024 are ambitious, to say the least. I have a full-time job and I’m currently working on three side projects. In order to succeed more than I fail, I need to hold myself accountable. I need to stay organized, manage my time, and reflect on what I’m doing. I believe that writing a weekly newsletter will help me do all of this. I want to pay attention to signs or patterns that might tell me that I’m doing something right or wrong. And at the end of 2024, I want to reflect on my successes and failures, and ultimately learn from them.
What should you expect?
In my weekly newsletter, you should expect to read updates on my side projects. If I notice a theme, trend, or lesson, I might expand on it. Also, if there’s something related to my day job or personal life, I want to feel free to write about that too. I want this to be a fun writing and reading adventure for both of us so I will try to do just that! One last thing. Since I’ll be publishing these posts at the beginning of each week, they will focus more on what I did last week rather than what I plan on doing this week. So the updates I’m about to give are really more about the end of 2023 instead of the beginning of 2024. Okay, enough with the preamble and on to the good stuff!
Valence
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written code for Valence. We were working towards a prototype for a new idea. To be honest, I’m not sure what 2024 will bring for Valence. It feels like we’re at yet another cross roads. We’ve pivoted the product a couple of times in 2023 and we might not be done pivoting. We have a small but mighty team of five. We have some businesses that are interested in the problems we’re trying to solve and could potentially become our first customers. What we don’t have is a clear vision of what we’re building and team unanimity on that vision. All five of us have jobs and families outside of Valence. And due to the holidays and busyness of December, it’s been challenging for us to meet. So that should really be our first goal for 2024 — to meet and figure out what’s next.
Daily Well
Technically speaking, the Daily Well Chrome extension is in “alpha” right now. What does that mean? It means that Adam (my business partner) and I are currently testing it out and keeping track of what should be fixed and changed before we share it with beta testers. There are a couple of things that are not working right now that I need to fix. I need to devote some time towards that. Beyond that, I will have to connect with Adam soon to see if he has any additional feedback. And then, I’m hoping we’ll be able to spend time planning out our beta phase.
Project A
I’m thrilled to share more details about Project A with you! I’m building a Slack app to manage agendas for 1:1 meetings. The app will be designed with both managers and individual contributors in mind. I’ve had lots of 1:1s in my software engineering career, mostly as an IC, but also as a manager and team lead. I have many ideas on how best to prepare, conduct, and reflect on 1:1s. I can’t wait to validate these ideas and hopefully generate a recurring revenue stream with the app. But first, I need to build an MVP (minimum viable product) and get the app in front of some beta testers.
I’ve been incredibly busy with Project A over the past two weeks. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the things I’ve done:
I answered some questions from a business plan template I found online. This helped me think about things like target customers, problems my product solves, and competitors.
I completed all nine exercises in this Lean Inception Workshop Miro template. This is such a fantastic resource and I highly recommend it for any solopreneurs or small product and engineering teams that want to build an MVP. I loved spending some time thinking about product vision, product goals, personas, and feature brainstorming. In the last exercise, I created an MVP Canvas, which I can literally use as a blueprint while I’m building. It includes things like segmented personas, features, expected results, and metrics to validate my business hypotheses. Considering this is my first time building a micro SaaS app by myself, I feel very prepared to reach MVP. I’m so glad I listened to myself and invested time in product development and planning before I started coding.
I created an MVP checklist and started adding items to it. This is a comprehensive list of everything I need to do in order to launch my app, including branding, app design, development, and beta testing.
I created a brand new GitHub repo for the app and started coding! I’m using the Bolt for JavaScript SDK provided by Slack. It’s fairly easy to use and seems powerful. I have app authentication and initialization working. Next up is to build some onboarding views that users will see when they first interact with the app.
I’ve spent way too many hours thinking about a real name for Project A. Naming products is hard! I’ve used some brand name generators and even ChatGPT, but they haven’t been very helpful. I’ve also run some names by several people and appreciate their feedback! I have a short list of names and feel like I’m getting closer. Let me know if you want to help me pick a winner!
Closing remarks
Whatever your goals are for 2024, my advice is to start small. What can you do today for 5 minutes? Do that for two weeks. Show up every day. Then, do 10 minutes consistently, and so on. Good habits done regularly will help you reach any goal. I learned this approach from James Clear. His book, Atomic Habits, was the best book I read in 2023.
Thanks for reading this week. See you next week! 👋