Tuesday Hustle: IH Daily Stand Up!
Why?
That extra nudge of accountability to achieve even a small step on your IH journey each day.
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 July.
02 Share what you accomplished yesterday.
03 Share what you commit to accomplishing today.
04 COMMNET on AT LEAST ONE fellow hacker's progress and give them an IH Point for their check in. Let's get in there with the encouragement/feedback!
Optional:
05 Share your Work In Progress to underscore your accomplishments.
Then tune in the tomorrow to share how you did on your own tasks!
#daily-stand-up
01 Get some customers!
02 Not much of anything.
03 Make some changes to the website's copy based on feedback from this survey:
https://forms.gle/qHxnAwHVr4HGKMY28
Generally it seems like I need to clarify exactly what the program does, and maybe remove some vocabulary from the pricing page or add clarification there as well.
I'm also going to start working on a simple firefox or chrome extension that I can release for free as "engineering as marketing". Predicted dev time is less than a week so it shouldn't be a huge commitment.
05 stowbots.com
What kind of results did you get from the pricing survey? Curious how people respond to those types of questions.
Not sure how to qualify the results as "good" or "bad". Most people think the product should be at least $X, which is nice because they don't expect it to be free. There's a wide range of upper bound prices, some much higher than the current pricing. Some IHer's gave me very generous detailed feedback through the survey as well, which was very nice! Generally it looks like I'll need to adjust prices slightly downwards, but adding a pricing FAQ may help people purchase as well.
Hi, just answered the survey. I did not know about Stowbots before. What especially confused me is the number of "stowbots" on the pricing page.
I was expecting some kind of desktop app like picasa (I used it a lot)
And now that I am using Google Photos a lot, I know I can search for basically anything with good results (dogs, eiffel tower, beach, etc). So by reading the FAQ under the pricing "Each Stowbot organizes the images entering one folder into that folder's subfolders. You can choose a plan based on the number of incoming folders you would like to have sorted." I am even more confused.
What I understand here is that I will have an "animal" folder with "cats", "dogs", etc. But I am still not sure. I think wording could be improved like "...organizes images of a category (animals) into subfolders (cats, dogs, etc)... A Stowbot is a category".
Also, I do not browse folders anymore as I mainly search nowadays (Google trained me to always search instead of organize). So I would find more value in a Google Photo like search rather than a folder based organization. But probably I am not your perfect customer :)
Thanks for the feedback @255kb!
I agree that there's an issue with the vocabulary being confusing for people. I didn't even have a FAQ until a couple days ago. Like you said, there's some overlap with Google Photos. The main differences that may matter to people:
From some research I did, the vast majority of internet users are not using any form of organizational application, so FWIW I think I am competing more with the "no solution" than with Google Photos.
Thanks again for the feedback, super helpful. Do you think I should go as far as to include a small diagram of a folder structure with the Stowbot folders labeled? I'm torn between reworking the vocabulary and pricing scheme vs just accepting that customers will have to learn a little bit in order to buy and use the product.
Nice product, now I understand!
This part seems important to me "we create recognition systems for whatever a user specifies". Maybe it should be more obvious.
Maybe by improving copy: "Tailor made image recognition..."
I don't know if you should add a diagram, maybe in a help / tutorial section. But probably not on the pricing page.
Good luck with your product!
Thanks for the ideas!
Epic:
Launch 3 projects, or 10 landing pages, by end of 2019.
Last few days:
The filters on Naminator results page largely work now - try dragging around the various sliders, toggle buttons, etc. It makes it a lot easier to find a great name!
Also did a lot of bug fixes / making it faster / improving results. E.g if you put in a plural word it singularizes it - and ignores common words like 'for, the', etc.
Things left to do:
StartupSchool starts July 22nd - I'm hoping to have the above ^ done by then so I can reach out to people with a deal and start trying to get the first 10 companies named thru Naminator!
WIP: https://naminator.io - would love any feedback.
Yep, not working for me either.
looking forward to checking out the improvements
Looks way better than it did last time I looked! ..But didn't get past Starting the Engines unfortunately.
Same it looks good but did not give me a name
Haha I can’t catch a break with these scaling problems 😂. Thanks for giving it a try, I’ll bring it back online in the morning !
Epic
Add eBay support to AZLabels
Yesterday
Today
EPIC
YESTERDAY
TODAY
Do discovery callsSchedule a few explore calls for next week.WIP: Envoy
side note
Didn't get a chance to post my update earlier. Busy day preparing then talking to prospects before heading to my part-time job.
What's the part-time gig, if I may ask?
@Harlem retail shop... if I gotta get a job, might as well practice up on sales skills.
July
DONE:
TODO:
No progress on those in light of the threadbase issue. Should be able to stand up very early login models and setup. Also attempting a modification to my scheduling routine/algorithm in an attempt to squeeze some better productivity into my day and prevent myself from doing too much for too little for my clients.
WIP:
AutomatedAPI.com | Threadbase.io
I recommend an error logging system like Sentry.io combined with automated testing (I used Gitlab's free CI) before pushing anything out to production; if you don't have that, you'll always be terrified (or should be terrified!) of breaking things in production every time you commit some code.
I actually use sentry for caught exceptions, it's pretty slick. This was actually a DNS/SSL issue so it was more that no one could get to the app to generate an exception. I was fully aware of how it should have been set up, and had it running for a couple months, but for some reason the setting in Heroku seemed to change without me prompting. Cert hadn't expired or anything, just a bit flipped that I don't recall touching in the month prior. Very strange and something I'll have to keep an eye on.
Ah, that's the worst. Frustrating when the services we rely on do something weird like that.
Threadbase issue is scary! Maybe you can set some email push notifications somehow? I use https://pushover.net/ to push important notifications from my servers to my phone.
Kudos on the work so far!
01 - soft launch: Have the base application/library, documentation (both manual and API), and build tools publically accessible. Have license terms and sales flow (either contact or direct payment gateway) on the site.
02 - done: reviewed with co-founder a wordpress solution they've been developing. Third part dependency aspect of build plugin completed. Otherwise an off day.
03 - Goal today is completing current milestone of the sbt build plugin; sufficient to validate developer experience.
04 - @Davey kudos for prototyping "Add Location" then adding functionality. Prototypes are a great way to explore the implementation of an idea. :)
05 - tho it's boring - https://gitlab.com/glngn/sbt-glngn/commits/master
July Epic
Get the Announcr App ready for live demos: 31%
Yesterday
Today
Kudos
@aliakhtar for upping the feel/visuals on Naminator!
Work in Progress
Announcr
EPIC FOR JULY
Complete 42 pieces of content for evergreen launch. Includes:
4 Facebook ads for two funnels (4 of 4 completed)3 Landing pages (3 of 3 completed)YESTERDAY
On-call recovery. Slept like the damned.
TODAY
Finish home page.
KUDOS
@foreverhannahle Welcome to the stand up party!
Oh no, another privacy page! :)
Edit: Curious about those facebook ads, would love to hear any more info / data on them.
Epic:
Yesterday:
Today:
WIP: makerspartlist.com