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17 Comments

Weekly Check-In (Week 51 - All welcome!)

  1. How did you fare last week?
  2. What's on deck for this week?
  3. What's your goal for the month?
  4. [Optional] Still on target for end of year goal?
  5. [Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable)
  1. 5

    Announcr MVP Goals

    1. "I come home and am announced over a speaker on arrival in my driveway and when I walk in the door"
    2. "I walk into a Target store and am announced over a speaker in a grandiose manner"
    3. "I can use the custom announcement feature to advertise something about myself that I want people to know"

    Last Week

    • Created "Drive By" mode, to allow for a further range definition and event trigger of Announcr locations
    • Added in-app voice recording to support custom messages (at a later time)
    • Added UI for custom arrival and entrance messages
    • Added location registration UI to mobile app

    This Week

    • Make a user flow UI/server code for custom Arrival AND Entrance messages
    • Plug device registration back into the location client code
    • Test drive-by triggers
    • Creation of DIY landing page (stretch goal)

    Goal for December
    A release to the DIY Smart Home crowd

    1. 2

      This product has a great potential.

      A couple of things make me wonder.
      Can Announcer also trigger other actions than an audio message?

      For example I can imagine for a shop for it to be interesting to know if a high value customer comes in and make sure they get swift service.

      Drive by mode? Would that be something like showing a specific offer on a video screen in a shop window for say a tablet, in the case that a prospect walks by that spent half an hour looking at new tablets in the tablet section last week? (Thinking about blue tooth sniffing here...)

      I'm not following the "announce something about myself", who's the myself in this case? The person getting announced or an employee at the shop.

      1. 1

        Yes!!!!!! I'm going to pick an IFTTT or Zapier integration soon after basics are in, to allow for some other non-specific automations.

        Not only arrives, but 4 different states potentially. "On the Way", has rolled into the parking lot, and finally.. has arrived inside. Imagine the concierge service you can do for that! Even a place like Target could roll that out of their service desk and give you like a little gift basket or something. Increase your loyalty 10x.

        Drive by was renamed to Passing and will probably be renamed again, but I thought of how it would be fun to virtually wave to friends as I drive by their houses. Or in my neighborhood, where there is one way in/out, to hear holiday messages and greetings from people. They might not want to hear about my driving by and virtually/automatically waving though, so I'll need to make a simple setting for that.

        There is a bluetooth beacon which broadcasts to any nearby BT listener and launches a listener but its considered invasive and not many enable it. I experimented with a few different libraries, and will probably end up using physical iBeacons or Eddystones and have the mobile app do the listening, as the user is in control that way.

        "Announce something about myself" the whole original impetus for this is because for the past few years I've lived in a cabin in NH, so it's a fun thing to actually drive to the city and go shopping. Last year, whenever we'd go to Target, which was always a fun trip, I'd quietly say "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Young Family has arrived!" After doing it a few times, I wondered what it would take to make something like that automatic. And then I thought what the store could do if they knew I was coming, and could send me personalized coupons/offers or greet me/announce me in a funny personalized way over a small speaker near the door. I pictured everyone who heard it smiling and laughing on their way in or out, and spreading that joy outside, and spending more money inside (ie better "CX" Customer Experience).

        Then I thought of what it's be like in a social setting where there's a line ie at a movie theater or a bar and I can check off different things "about myself" that were OK to be included in the announcement like a silly title, where I'm from, a status "Looking for a developer job" or "Is newly single!" or "Just won his 10th Battle Royale" and have that be an ice breaker/opening for people who heard it. Facilitate random meetings.

  2. 4

    How did you fare last week?
    Spent the whole week on the infrastructure change and am about half way down.
    Luckily the rest of the change is less urgent, so will refocus on other work and migrate bit by bit for the rest of the infrastructure change.

    On Saturday I got back to Vimalin and spent half a day on making one of the backup options more robust plus improved some of my logging and error reporting.

    It turns out that a reasonable amount of my support is spent on diagnosing faulty hardware.
    I appreciate accurate backups over broken backups and I think that it is good that Vimalin has good checks on detecting when a backup isn't perfect. In other words, I have no intentions on easing up on those checks.

    However me spending half an hour to an hour on figuring out another broken backup disk for a user is time wasted. Easy detection is key and preferably also present that in a way that the user can come to this conclusion without having to ask me to analyse that particular problem.
    Besides that I do not like having to inform people that the problem they see is because of faulty hardware on their end.

    What's on deck for this week?
    Running tests for the changed logic and see if I can implement more features.

    Goal for the month?
    Same as my EOY goal.

    End of Year goal
    Keep on growing the sales for Vimalin.

    Brief description
    Vimarun - run VMware Virtual Machines automatically.
    Vimalin - automated Virtual Machine backups for VMware Fusion, Workstation and Player.

    1. 1

      Informing people.. I can definitely see that one being difficult. It's heartbreaking or worse to find out that your only backup plan is invalid when you needed it!

      1. 1

        Still working on improving the messaging/reporting in that area. Not sure if it will lead to less of these kind of reports, but having good reporting on this is helpful as eases the blow a bit in case I have to clarify why that error message pops up.

        Of course it is adamant for this bit to be correct, so doing a lot of testing. Testing broken network connectivity wasn't too hard, it is a matter of pulling a cable, but simulating file copy errors is not easy.

        Guess I'll have to dig out a faulty disk for that. It is surprisingly difficult to test this without using actual broken hardware, which is a good thing.

        BTW, these errors already pop up when making the backup! There is a number of rather simple and fast checks you can do that the OS doesn't do and that will detect a lot of problems.

        The restore has an additional level of checks though. If one bit is different from the original, you'll be informed, but you can still use the restored virtual machine.

  3. 4

    Last Week
    Still making some progress but I'm coming to grips with needing to slim down my expectations of pace until next year.

    • Researched design ideas for the digest email and have an almost complete initial design mock.
    • Started digging through Chrome extension developer docs. Bit of a mess so taking longer than expected to run through their quick start guide.

    This Week

    • Finish digest email design
    • Make browser extension design mock

    This Month

    • Finish redesign and rewrite of landing page
    • Get rough back end service ready to be able to start mobile app and browser extension dev

    Product Description
    Browse Me Later is an email reminder to help you set aside focused time to check out articles, websites, and videos.

  4. 4

    How did you fare last week?
    Pretty good. Flurly launched :)
    What's on deck for this week?
    Building out coupons
    What's your goal for the month?
    Get 1000 sellers on the platform
    [Optional] Still on target for end of year goal?
    Yes
    [Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable
    https://flurly.com

    1. 1

      Congrats on the launch!!

  5. 4

    Ugh. Sorry so late this week, y'all! The holiday crunch is real. I'll be in here tough as soon as hand off deliverables for my day gig!

    1. 2

      Definitely feeling the same on the holiday crunch. With 2020, it's like crunch crunch.

      1. 2

        Haha well said! Crunch crunch, indeed

      2. 1

        [Nods head vigorously.]

  6. 3
    1. Found a frontend developer for my web app.
    2. Need to work on some backend stuff, scoring objects based on their content.
    3. Get a public beta out there so people can start playing with it.
    4. I hope so. :)
  7. 1
    1. How did you fare last week?
      --Stop everything to review & reassess my progress, customer insight, & behavior.
      --Identify the real problem.
      --Redefine my value proposition.
      --Identify/pick a product category & business model that support solving this problem, the business, and me.

    2. What's on deck for this week?
      --Simplify the value proposition.
      --Redraft and edit the entire website copy.
      --Update outreach copy to support new messaging.

    3. What's your goal for the month?
      --Launch new website copy that supports new thesis & model.

    4. [Optional] Still on target for end of year goal?
      --Nope, not at all. Taking the L so that I can focus on a better win in Q1

    5. [Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable)
      --Coming soon 😉

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