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Sunday Edition: Weekly Retro (What did you accomplish this past week?)

#daily-stand-up

The weekly retrospective gives hackers the space to:

  • Reflect on our triumphs for the week.
  • Reflect on where we fell short for the week.
  • Share concerns about being on track for your monthly epic and/or ask for feedback.

To join in:

01 Share your epic (a big chunk of work with a meaty objective) you'd like to complete by the end of March.

02 Share your triumphs for the week.

03 Share your failures for the week.

04 Share your course corrects/game plan moving forward.

05 Give feedback to at least one fellow hacker and give them an IH Point for their check in.

Optional:

06 Share your Work In Progress to underscore your accomplishments.

(Smiling) The regular scheduled stand up will resume tomorrow.

  1. 5

    EPIC

    By end of 2019:

    5K MR

    By end of March:

    • 🙌🏾Launched 12 March 2019.
    • Publish 18 articles. (18/18 determined, 14/18 written, 11/18 published)
    • Conduct 3 post experiments with a minimum CTR of 2.69% (1/3 experiments completed - 6.15% )
    • Increase organic growth from 0 to 11 persons (7 of 11).
    • 🙌🏾Persuaded an additional 15 influencers to contribute posts. (15/15)

    TRIUMPHS

    • Finally positioned to run and complete my first experiment.
    • Even though not my bread and butter, the first experiment converted fairly well. 6.15% is respectable given my market. But I had hoped for higher.
    • Finally stopped tweaking design (for the most part).
    • Managed to slay my influencers goal - a much easier pitch now that I've an actual website.
    • Started promoting my pillar post.
    • Implemented Pinterest growth tactics.
    • Learned a shit ton about SEO and what's required to get to the top of search results.

    FAILS

    • I haven't yet been able to deliver on my primary value proposition. I'm running into snags with my scraping algorithm, which are taking much longer to sort than anticipated.
    • Building an audience is tough. Easily a full-time gig. I wonder if I've the wherewithal to go the distance.
    • Still spending money recklessly.

    COURSE CORRECTS/GAME PLAN

    Today, I commit to a reckoning --- see how much I've spent on illustrators/retouchers. From this point forward, I check the budget prior to throwing dollars.

    I won't meet all of my goals. Which is tough to take. But the goals were gnarly ambitious. And ultimately, a bit of carry-over won't kill me. I'll continue to focus on delivery content and promoting the content that I have churned.

    This week, I'm excited to:

    ( 1 ) Wrap up the scraping algorithm.
    ( 2 ) Churn more content.
    ( 3 ) Lay the ground for my bread and butter experiment.

    (Grinning) Might as well see if I can increase that organic count. And because @louisswiss keeps inquiring... put into Google search Jeanius. I'm usually on the first or second page of the search results. Occasionally, the third page. I'm the one with "ass" in the description.

    Feedback welcomed!

    1. 2

      Awesome!

      Site looks great! (although for some reason the hero section is displaying at >100% width on my macbook using Chrome, so some of the main CTA is cut off)

    2. 2

      You know you can reach out if you need help with scraping :)

      Congrats! Your sites always look amazing, and I think part of that is you have an awesome focus on niches and have a good idea of your target market (in addition to spending loads of cash haha).

      Always excited to see what you're working on and the path you're taking!

    3. 2

      I admire your tenacity and commitment so much. Scraping algorithms are tough! Every company should just have a nice free public API ;)

  2. 3

    2019 Goals for Magnus Rush

    • 50 Augmented Podcasts: (4/50) 8%
    • 12k MAU for the App: (0/12k)

    March Epics
    (Stats from Clubhouse.io)
    Milestone: Soft Launch: 49% Complete

    • [Epic] Launch Marketing: 38% Complete
    • [Epic] SaaS MVP3: 71% Complete
    • [Epic] App MVP3: 50% Complete

    TRIUMPHS

    • Did some small bits of work here and there to get a little momentum
    • At the end of the week, pulled myself out of a 2 week slump to make some progress
    • Made registration/account creation optional so it doesn't impede the app use process

    FAILURES

    • Blurred the "end of the work day" line way too much over the last 2 weeks.
    • Allowed myself to get mentally and emotionally distracted by big things going on in life

    COURSE CORRECTION

    • Draw a firmer line on my personal time, despite crunch time in the day job
    • Schedule time for paperwork so it's not hanging over my head for upcoming court dates, which distracts me greatly

    WIP of the Magnus Rush podcast app and podcast augmenting platform

    1. 2

      Good job working through the slumps! Definitely understand that feeling. I often have trouble getting over what other people see as small hurdles. Like having too many options for an implementation and not doing anything because of it :-P I have to tell myself "it's ok to play around and try new things - it can be reversed if it doesn't work out!" haha

      1. 2

        Haha I literally had that exact issue. "Implement a download manager" was my big story for the weekend (you know why!). It was so big and gnarly that until I started busting it up into smaller pieces and putting them into the "ready for development" track, I just didn't even start on it. It's like PacMan needs the little balls lined up before he can CHOMP.

        1. 1

          I'm not trying to push my product, but I would like some feedback on something I built specifically because I wanted it. Wonder if you find the idea useful as well.

          Brisa has this feature where every card can be a board. For example, I have my main Brisa beta kanban, and if I have a big task like "Live Updates," I open the card, tell it to add a kanban, and then that card has its own throw-away kanban where I break down the tasks, work on them individually, and then that card moves to Done in the main kanban after everything is complete.

          It creates a sort of nested/tree structure to large projects.

          I don't think it's fitting for every task, but it has been helpful to me in a few instances. Wondering if other people think it has value.

          1. 1

            I have the same thing I can do in Clubhouse, which is to add tasks to a story. It is useful sometimes, though I prefer to break the hierarchy and just add the new tasks in as stories sometimes

            1. 1

              Yeah, definitely. I use it sparingly. When something is too overwhelming, having a nice, clean board with just the tasks for that sub-project is helpful. But most of the time, I don't use it.

              Also, another IH post just reminded me of the term "analysis paralysis" -- I think it affects me a bit too easily! haha

  3. 2

    EPIC

    By end of 2019:

    • Paying customers or shut it down :)

    By end of February:

    • Continue push to get out of beta.
      • Need to quantify this and set a deadline this month.
    • From January(!): Solidify next steps for getting some beta users and feedback. (Done-ish, Beta List)
    • 3 new blog posts. (2/3)
    • Create a new release. (Done)

    TRIUMPHS

    • Brisa is slowly becoming something I show to people and they like the idea of.
    • Adding features is getting easier as I'm more comfortable jumping in. Building on more experiences I haven't done before with past projects, iterating and pushing faster, etc.
    • Built a new open source release and blogged about it.

    FAILURES

    • Slowing down a bit the past couple weeks. A little complacency plus what @davey mentioned - The "big task" that sits around because I'm not taking time to break it down.
    • More specifically on the last point, I want to add some time-related stuff to Brisa (due dates, time est, reminders, etc) but there are so many ways it can be done, it just sits in my head instead of just jumping in to try and see what happens. Took a step to do this and tried a jsonb field in postgresql, and was quickly able to determine it's not meeting my needs.

    CONCERNS
    The usual. When is this thing going to be out of beta? When will I feel like "wow, I want the world to see this?" I'm showing it to more people I'm close to, and they do find value, but it takes some explaining before the UI even makes sense. About to have some other friends of mine (more pjm/product people) try it for a side project, and not looking forward to explaining how it works again (well, and excited to do that as well haha).

    WIP: https://brisaboards.com

  4. 1

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