Week 29: Mid-year Review
Hello! You haven’t heard from me in a while. Did you think I’ve given up?
I think about giving up every weekend when I’m supposed to work on this…
ヽ༼ ಠ益ಠ ༽ノ
And my lack of motivation was especially severe after I skipped a week’s update due to our Fourth of July holiday…
But yesterday when a friend asked me how this project is going, I felt queasy and embarrassed because of both my lack of progress and written updates. So that motivated me to resume writing and working on this! My master plan of using a mailing list as an accountability system is working!
How is the project itself going? The bottomline is, the app in its current state has not been useful to people. I checked the Google Analytics of the last 90 days and it’s quite clear that the number of users the app has detected is only as large as the size of my mailing list (~30 people).
That’s a sad performance. And it’s become clear I’m in no position to meet the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year. I cannot believe I had the tenacity to think I could bring in $100/month by end of year. I still have faith in the business hypothesis though; I believe I flopped mainly on the execution. It still has some critical limitations, and not enough content.
So where do I go from here? To help this project succeed, I’m considering removing the self-restraint of ‘building it myself’. I wrote in an earlier piece on why I did not want to hire software developers for this side project. But I’m realizing that I have a growing list of implementation tasks that are not intellectually or professionally rewarding, and I’m learning that building the project all by myself is (for now) leading to diminishing returns. So I posted on a Facebook software bootcamp alum channel for some hired help, and got to reconnect with a former alum I mentored when I was a teaching assistant!
I brought him on to help for $25/hr at 10 hours a week, and will reassess continuation every 3 weeks. Had to spend a handful of hours just getting him acquainted with my code. Teamwork is hard, and getting organized and communicative took more time and energy than I had expected, but it feels liberating that help is on the way. Let’s see how much $750 (ouch) can buy me after 3 weeks!