#weekly-retrospective, #daily-stand-up
The weekly retro gives hackers the space to:
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 April.
02 Share your triumphs for the week.
03 Share your failures for the week.
04 Share your concerns 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.
End of 2019: 100 (paying users)
End of April: 15 (unpaid) users -- complete
Triumph
Interviewed and reinterviewed at YC, and they really liked us as founders, so that felt good. Talking to 7 different partners and getting their feedback has helped us gain clarity on what's ahead for us. We know our marching orders, as it were, now, and we're set up well to take things on.
Failure
Well, didn't actually get into YC. It's tough because I think if we'd had more sales & folks that had actually taken our recommendations for optimization, we would have. There's a REASON we didn't get our rejection email till late in the day.
Concern
Maintaining that clarity and actually executing on it. I want to be more focused so I can spend half my time doing development again, and the other half being very effective on sales. The latter can be a big time/mental energy sink, not always for the better.
Kudos
@Davey. Also, WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET FEEDBACK. Like right now I'm inclined to give things away forever for free to anyone who just writes me a paragraph about what they thought.
WIP
Sunshower.io
When I've done game projects, it was always easy to get feedback because I'd open up a forum, get on some sites, and be on IRC. Now that'd be a FB Group, still some sites, and a Slack both of my own and maybe in another area or two. This ensured that I built up some champions early on and cultivated them.
I guess it depends on who the target market is. For yours, developers/engineers are ridiculously hard to pin down for feedback. We all know everything :)
For mine, I did have some people reach out early on, but I went heads down building, and neglected them. And now I've forgotten who some of them were, or where they first reached out (wasn't email). Self promotion is frowned upon in many places where your target market is.
In retrospect, if the product is valuable enough, and we've positioned the messaging well, it's just going to take time and relentless effort. Here are two thing I've seen work well, from people who requested feedback from ME:
EPIC
By end of 2019:
5K MR - 699/5000
By end of April:
I'll know within a few days whether the epiphany is worth spending more time on.
SUCCESSES
FAIL
None. Although I hate pivoting. Feels flighty.
NEXT WEEK
Sticking with the epiphany. Or back to the drawing board.
FEEDBACK
Responding to my buddy's @Davey email!
WIP
Jeanius
So all I can say is that you're in GOOD company lol. It's a curse to be looking at the new shiny thing and there are ALWAYS going to be new shiny things which beckon to us. But sometimes they bear looking into to, we only get one go-around on this blue planet :)
Nice!
I hate pivoting too. But one of my favourite bits of advice I ever received was to
be fixed on the goal but flexible on how you get there.
I think about that a lot, even years later.
As for feeling flighty about pivoting, that's why I always start with really understanding (and verifying the existence of) a significant pain-point for a specific audience...
If you know you have that, you can just keep selling, learning and iterating on the product - you're guaranteed to be successful sooner or later!
Epic: I'd like to launch by the end of April
Triumphs:
Failure:
Concerns: I'm feeling optimistic so no immediate concerns but I do want to be wary of this project being useful for people and the lack of revenue causes me to neglect the community
Feedback: @helengriffinjr Keep up the searching! Maybe the sales job candidate journey is a problem worth fixing!
https://www.todidlist.com
EPIC
TRIUMPHS
FAILURES
CONCERNS
WIP
Job hunting is sales x10000. Also, I grew to really dislike coding tests, as they took a long time sometimes. Though I understand the need to screen sometimes.
Yes, I've learned the hard way. smh Oh well onward and upward!
I've been kind of excited for this week's retro, but had to wait through a long day of church and then driving to get back home and get into it.
2019 Goals for Magnus Rush
April Epics Stats from Clubhouse.io
Milestone: Launch: 100% Complete
Triumphs
Failures
I got almost zero feedback from my feedback requests, both on direct and mailing list. The feedback I DID get was via a small survey I embedded into the email, which was positive, but not nearly as useful as the direct feedback I was looking for. Although I did send out some updates over the course of development via email list, in retrospect they were super infrequent and not very meaningful. This translated into a failure to capitalize on the early potential I built for excitement and buzz via Medium articles and such.
Concerns
I'm concerned that it will take a much longer time to build the userbase I am looking for to hit my 2019 goals for Magnus Rush, which would make it a sustainable and profitable business. I also currently lack the quantity of data I need to validate some of the original market research assumptions I had from user surveys. So I am going to focus much MUCH less on development next month and more on finding and on-boarding new podcast hosts.
Luckily, in one of the FB conversations I was in, I got the feedback that SOME podcasters DO want an automatic email to let them know they're on the platform and receiving tips. I already DO have podcaster's email addresses from their RSS feed, and I could have easily emailed tens of thousands of them by now to try to bring them into the platform and try out a free account. But that felt a little too easy, and I was shying away from doing this.
So now it's going to be a relatively simple task to carefully evaluate the conditions under which these kinds of emails go out, and how frequently, which is going to multiply my expansion efforts dramatically, and be automated!
WIP: Magnus Rush Interactive Podcast app and Platform
https://magnusrush.com
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.