Weekly Check-In (Week 43 - All welcome!)

How did you fare last week?

I did ok, I had some life events take up a lot of my time, but that's to be expected.

I worked on getting more instagram followers for @orderlymenus and we are now starting to gain some organic traction which gives me hope.

I got as much of the programming of our new desktop view for order.ly as I could. Waiting on a few designs now to be able to finish that up.

Just re-recorded our landing page video and sending it off to be cleaned up with after effects.

Squashed a bunch of 🐛z

Added a cool image viewer for our menu items with animations and gesture controls that I feel good about.

What's on deck for this week?

We made the decision to start being serious about our @justshipped.io instagram page, we are going to make content for our past projects and start trying to tie that into our commercial work.

I'm going to build out a cool demo page for our order.ly/menus app that emulates using the product on an iphone when in desktop view (and just a mobile experience on mobile)

I'm going to add the new video to our landing page

I'm going to hopefully tie up loose ends on the desktop piece for order.ly and launch that feature

I'm going to add a teaser for another curbside delivery project we have had in the works for ~6 months to the bottom of our order.ly landing page

I'm going to keep doing whatever it takes to gain traction on our instagram

I want to figure out a more direct solution for marketing to businesses organized through spreadsheets

Squish 🐛z

Brainstorm some improvements for bits of the app that feel off currently

What's your goal for the month?

Given this is the last week of the month, the last bit ;)

[Optional] Still on target for end of year goal?

Nope, but that is ok

[Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable)

order.ly/menus

A contactless QR menu solution that aims to be best in show and affordable to boot.

(If you know any local restaurants that might be interested drop them our link will ya ;) )

How did you fare last week?
Looks like the 1 week project is going to be a 1 month project.

The basics work OK, but there's some issues with attaching a console to the VM once you are logged in.
This turns out to be not supported, something that surprised me as I knew I had done it in the past.
Alas things have changed and it is no longer supported, or working.
So I have been looking for ways to work around that.

Besides that the main gig has kept me busy.

I've now got 9 candidates for beta testing.

What's on deck for this week?
Resolving the "attach a console" issue for vimarun.
Hoping to start the beta before the end of the week, let's see how that goes.

Goal for the month?
Release vimarun so I can get back to Vimalin.

Brief description
Vimarun - run VMware Virtual Machines automatically

Last week

A lot of finishing touches toward an open beta release for Eager.app. Mostly fixing UI quirks.

Also decided that the landing page needed a redesign.

Why?

Honestly, I felt that [1] It was hard to really convince people to sign up and [2] a better idea for how landing pages (in general) should be. I know, I know... sounds crazy, but consider it an experiment as I'm working off of some data and want to try something out.

This week

Onboard a few prelaunch sign ups. I'll be sending emails this week and getting in touch with (potential) customers.

Smoothing out the UI and app some more.

Finish my landing page.

Goal

First paying customer.

Year end goal...?

I didn't really set one. I'm taking it month-by-month at this point.

Project link

A customer service / help desk / help widget / knowledge base software that's affordable and really polished.

Check it out at https://eager.app. DM me @geetfun and I'll bump you up on the prelaunch list.

[LAST WEEK]

Lots of good stuff.

• Launched to not much fanfare. But launched. Onboarding emails went out last week. The first newsletter goes out this week!
• Found and populated a LinkedIn scheduler.
• Proofread and polished the onboarding emails.
• Started polishing the first newsletter.

[THIS WEEK]

• Finish polishing and proofreading the first three newsletters.
• Figure out my publishing groove on LinkedIn.
• Fix anchor links! (Thanks, @koaty, for the catch!)

While I would like to put together a plan for promotion, I'll likely have my hands full with content. I'll begin promotions in earnest beginning in November.

[GOAL FOR THIS MONTH]

3 of 14 signups.

[YEAR END GOAL]

333 subscribers and 10K.

[BRIEF DESCRIPTION]

Diversity Decoded is a weekly newsletter to help engineering managers refactor tech teams for diversity.

[Last Week]

• I finished creating my Startup Modeling for Founders course and found out that I goofed the audio on 3 hours of video... so I spent the weekend re-building the spreadsheet and video from scratch in between other things. Finally finished today and released it!
• Sent follow up emails to the folks who said they'd help raise a seed round for me, got one response back today (positive)
• Sent my pitch deck to 3 angel investors and 1 startup-investor matching site
• Applied to 3 jobs and had 3 interviews and one coding test
• Dealt with an amazing amount of drama! I would love to come up with a way to not get affected by drama. Sometimes it ruins a whole day it feels like!

[This Week]

• Keep an eye out for "next round" interviews for jobs
• Keep the ball moving on any investor interest
• Research PH launches
• Launch my Startup Modeling for Founders course on PH
• Test the Lift Academy app out on iOS to see if it's responsive or not
• Resolve some DB security issues I am getting warned about from Google Firestore

[This Month]

• Launch the Startup Modeling for Founders course on PH and get 30 customers (1/30 done)

[End of Year]

• Launch the Lift Academy Mobile App
• Re-launch Lift Academy Mid-Year Assessments for Common Core

Still on target, though the job hunt is hitting me hard for time!