**March Edition: What's your Epic?**
March Edition: What's your Epic?
#daily-stand-up
Why?
Epics serve as your guiding star for the month to ensure your meet your long-term goals.
To join in:
01 Share your goal for year 2019.
02 Share whether your accomplished your epic for February as well as the "Why?" or the "Why not?"
03 Share what your epic will be for March. And how it supports your goal for 2019. Extra bonus points if you make it S.M.A.R.T.
04 Congratulate, encourage and +1 at least one other IHer who's checking in!
Optional:
05 Share your Work in Progress.
Then tune in tomorrow and get cracking on the daily stand ups!
I am about to launch Spicy Meatball, a marketplace for English speaking travelers to find awesome experiences in Italy. I am a lifelong entrepreneur, but this is my first go at a tech company. Whew, no pressure... 💪
We are taking an affiliate approach so the back end is heavy.
Goal for 2019...
Launch Rome at the end of March, add at least 2 other main cities by year end.
Epic for February was to try to get a handle on what we will need to maintain the software going forward. I have a year long contract with the developers, but I wanted to get a jumpstart on some alternative options and better understanding of who we should be looking for going forward.
I received some great advice here which led to a fantastic convo with an old contact and now feeling much more secure.
March....
Today actually, March 1, I have the capacity to load all of my products into the front end of the marketplace. We are doing a tutorial with the devs, learning all the functions and nuances. This is a super exciting milestone, we have been building this for what seems like forever, but well over 6 months in normal people time.
Side note- I’m American, I have lived in Italy for 7 years, my devs are Italian, that has been challenging. I love Italia and “la dolce vita”, but it does cross over into business and it’s hard to do both simultaneously. There’s very little sense of urgency.
Solution: Really good wine is really inexpensive here... 😊
The last 2 weeks of March we are uploading our first 30 or so affiliates, with the goal to reach another 150 by the end of July. They have their own portal, so most of our efforts will be providing initial training and then support and daily updates on products.
We are thinking of using WhatsApp for daily updates. Everyone is on WhatsApp here so it seems like the right space. This is a huge part of our marketing to keep the affiliates informed of daily “specials” to promote. Eventually want to hire someone to maintain these regional groups daily, not sure exactly what that position looks like yet..
My other challenge over the next hot minute here is to find great branding and UX/UI design. What we have is functional, but I did a lot of the graphic design, and it shows, it looks a little mom and pops.
We hired a UX specialist designer, and he was great for the booking panel and product page layout, but he is super corporate style and I want a more playful feeling especially on the info pages and general navigation of the site, some of the people using this marketplace are purchasing products for a once in a lifetime experience, I want it to feel like that when they are browsing. It should reflect what we are selling, fun, unique, awesomeness.
I am so stoked to have found IH, this community is true gold, feeling way less alone right about now. Thanks!
Welcome to the stand up party, @SpicyMeatball! (Love the company name!) Appreciate your enthusiasm and your ambition! One question... what are the S.M.A.R.T. epics you'd like to complete for March? I couldn't clearly glean 'em from your post. Are they:
30 affiliates?
Daily updates via WhatsApp implemented?
New paint job for website?
Thanks @Harlem I love this! The name is fun, right?! 😊😊😊
Yes. Yes. New paint job: I hope, but not having any luck finding talent. I did find one agency that definitely fit the bill, bearddesign.co, but after our initial chat I haven’t heard a peep. 🙅🏻♀️ So I’m a little stuck there. Still fishing...
2019 GOAL
Automated Api in Open Beta with 10+ customers
EPIC - FEB RETRO
I'd hoped to get AutomatedApi to alpha in Feb, but other considerations had to take precedent. I've re-evaluated the project priorities and think I can reorganize dev priorities while still enabling completion of core functionality in Q1.
Added goal of replacing/augmenting some or all of my day job income with freelance work in service of building products that can leverage AutomatedApi. Unfortunately this was mostly driven by my enrollment in courses for an MS in CS. Better performance in one required slower performance in the other. Calling it an even trade given that I wasn't committing enough time to it at the beginning of the month.
EPIC - MAR
My goal for March is to get the product to a live alpha. This is defined as a product that can autogenerate web api service code and database code, and deploy both to an accessible web address given an OpenApi 3.0 spec from the customer. This explicitly excludes full user self-service. Alpha users will receive concierge service from me, I'll take specs and babysit them through the product personally. Two large pieces need to happen, but they're both doable.
A secondary goal is to get my freelance work up to half(or more) of my day job income. For the month of March. I am actually about 80% there already with pre-booking of project to begin next Monday.
WIP
AutomatedApi.com
Contracting Agency that leverages other WIP.
CONGRATULATE, ENCOURAGE, +1
First time I've seen this post, but I love it. Thanks @Harlem. Glad to see you're hitting the ground running on your next idea.
@jpusateri Thank you! I'm a little nervous that I'm humoring a symptom of "shiny new ball" disease. But we'll give a month and see where I land.
Live alpha for March! Exciting! (And I love the specificity you included to define what an Alpha is!) You've got this!
Goal for 2019
Get DroppingCoin.com up and running.
Epic for Februrary Accomplished?
Not to the level I wanted, but at least have a landing page online for pre-launch.
Epic for March
Get site into beta and testing.
Work in Progress
Finished a whole new landing page and connecting with MailChimp for pre-launch interest. Better design for website and working on various components.
I like the landing page, but noticed a couple little things.
What is your target audience?
I can see that this could be useful, but for the sake of clarity, if I were telling someone about your product how would I know if I should expect them to be interested?
What's the elevator pitch?
I'm thinking floor 1 to floor 3 as max time, so I have about 5 seconds before they shift focus, start fumbling for their keys, or fiddling with their watch.
These are all questions I myself have yet to answer for AutomatedApi, but the more I look at launch pages the more important they become to me.
On the browser tab, I think I fixed that a little bit ago.
The target audience would be independent content creators, I thought that was clear from the first point, but will think more on that.
Yeah, that horizontal scroll, had it fixed once, grr. That's all fixed now.
Thanks for the comments.
Well, it is pretty clear on the site. Something there just feels a little ambiguous or broad somehow. I'm a little confused if its about monetizing, or growing an audience, or distinguishing your brand from another, or all three.
Do I use this if I'm:
I've been giving a lot of thought to targeting lately and I've found it very tough myself. Imagine you wanted to hire someone on Upwork to do some cold emailing of a thousand people, obviously random can't be good if you want to get conversion. If they have 10 million people to choose from, how do they know which thousand to email first?
@olly you got one of your killer lists that could help me and @MDWolinski out? I'm sure I'm overthinking something :P
Good thoughts.
Dropping Coin is a service for monetizing content by independent bloggers or journalists who operate their sites (initially on a WordPress based site, for the beta testing) independently and not part of a site like Medium, etc.
We do have other types of integrations planned.
Ah, that's sounds way more useful and sellable than what I was imagining. Very interested to see how it goes. Might even end up a customer (signed up for the list).
Am I wrong in thinking of it as a tool to help us bootstrapping-independent-folks unify monetization across platforms?
Can you elaborate on the question a little for my better understanding what you're asking?
2019 Goals for Magnus Rush
FEB EPIC
Prepare for beta, get beta signups. Crushed my goal, thanks to a Medium article I put out, and a little persistence. Got beta launched a little early!
March Epics
Milestone: Soft Launch
I'll be incorporating all the feedback in from the Beta/Early Access to do a soft launch sometime mid-late month. If it goes smoothly, full launch:
I got an early start on this so it's already 33% Complete, comprised of the following epics:
WIP of the Magnus Rush podcast app and podcast augmenting platform
Android App Beta: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.magrush.speech1
iOS App Beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/BOG412aL
SaaS App Beta, for podcasters: https://magnusrush.com/app
01 Goal for 2019?
02 Share whether your accomplished your epic for February. As well as the "why" or the "why not"?
03 Share what your epic will be for March. And how it supports your goal for 2019.
04 Congratulate, encourage and +1 at least one other IHer who's checking in!
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Thanks, @satvikpendem! I hope you'll jump in someday with your own project.
( 1 ) How will I get to 5K MR (or MRR if I'm lucky)? (Grinning) No idea of yet. I'll try 3 experiments in March and depending on the user feedback, I'll know my path forward for April.
( 2 ) Given the idea I'm formulating, the long term play is critical. I think more important than the question is 18 posts a good use of time, is can I produce 18 substantive posts economically (time + money). We shall find out in March!
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Ah! I love the look of Artemis! (I'd check it out, but I know myself. If there ain't a native Mac app, it won't stick.)
Yeah. The 12 startups in 12 months is just not my thing. For me, generating substantive value tends to take longer.
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This is a really cool idea!
Seems like I might be able marry my todo list directly to a pomodoro timer. Or build it right into some ultrawork cycles.
Could be a huge productivity booster.
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