Building in Public January 26, 2021

Weekly Progress Report - A working prototype!

Bryan S. @OrionSeven

First off, this is a night and weekends project. So the fact I carved out 14 hours of my week last week feels awesome. That I've continually done that 3 weeks in a row after fit and starts last year feels epic. What's different? Well Building in public for one.

Anyhow, I'm posting these on Twitter and my blog (https://bryansmith.io/Interweave-Progress-Reports-Build-In-Public) but thought I'd start being more active on IH now too.


Another great week of proving that ๐Ÿข > ๐Ÿ‡. It's amazing what you can do if you string enough 1 hour chunks together. That said, Interweave is still far from an MVP. Today it's basically a note taking app (and only a mediocre one at that). However, the foundation is essentially done!

That is a milestone!

On the manager side lots of audience building this week. Really excited about the progress here. But I think the biggest thing to highlight this week is progress in Jobs to be Done thinking. I rewrote the byline to the Interweave website to read:

Before Interweave: You've got too many spreadsheets, notes, and tools. You know a customer said it but can't remember where. You think you're making the right call but can't quickly show why. After Interweave: You've taken control back and now your whole team understands why things are on the roadmap. The evidence is at their fingertips.

interweaveapp.com

I wanted to highlight the customer as the hero in a journey. Where they started (pains) and what they've been able to achieve. As I was looking at ways on how to write this out I saw Basecamp's website and blatantly "borrowed" the Before/After format. It's just a v1, but I like this SO much better than the previous feature statement.

Anyways onto the report! The stats below are only things relating to audience and company building. (e.g. I didn't count my tweets on Brady beating Rogers ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿˆ)

Weekly Project Progress Stats:

  • ๐Ÿ’ป Commits: 18
  • ๐Ÿ“ Words Written: 407
  • ๐Ÿฆ Tweets: 19
  • โฑ Hours Worked: 14.08 hours (~1.0 hours / session)
  • ๐Ÿ—“ Days Worked: 5

Maker

  • ๐Ÿ”จ Wrapped up a 0.1 version of Interview capture!
  • ๐Ÿชš Refactored authorization and routes. Simpler & better.
  • ๐Ÿš€ Now properly hosted using Netlify ๐Ÿ˜ฑ
  • ๐Ÿ—บ Mapped out the high-level functionality for an MVP (!!)

Manager

  • Audience building:
    • ๐Ÿš€ Published 1 essay (used a launch plan)
    • ๐Ÿ“ Republished an old essay
    • ๐Ÿ“ Started a new one
    • ๐Ÿฆ Published a tweet thread (using @casjam's Thready)
    • ๐ŸŒŠ Lots of activity on key audience watering holes
  • Reframed marketing content on before/after Interweave #jtbd ๐Ÿ’ฏ

Lessons Learned

  • ๐Ÿข Consistency mattered. 14 hours is both a lot and not much. But constant progress, across many sessions, still equals progress!
  • ๐Ÿ’ก Major #JtbD thinking this week, realized not spending enough time thinking through Anxiety and Habit negative forces on progress.
    • Not thinking in features is HARD. Reframing language for Interweave away from it means needing to live the customers voice.

Next Week

  • Achieve 50% WIP on the next essay ๐Ÿ“
  • Introduce one more foundational component (Projects) ๐Ÿชจ
  • Dig into one of the key major features, the evidence vault. ๐Ÿ”’
  • Actually start on the first major content anchor ๐Ÿ› 
  1. 1

    Nice work! Keep it up!

    BTW, I like the format of your post. I may steal that :)

    1. 1

      Haha, thanks go for it!

  2. 1

    Cool premise. I am fascinated with product management so I signed up. And the name is nice. Though, you should throw an indent before 'After Interweave' cause it just hits like a wall of text right now.

    Also, the animated headline is cool and all, but I have no idea what it looks like yet. Best of luck on the launch. Let's see if you can keep me as a custy :).

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback I was worried it was a bit like a wall of text too.

  3. 1

    Nice! For the audience building part, do you have some goals about how big of an audience you want to aim for by a certain date? This might help you focus on curating on top of publishing. Keep rocking!

    1. 1

      No I don't have a goal, other than "don't launch to an empty room". My thinking is I'm going to work on a couple big content pillars, really solid community resources. Something I've noticed is I become aware of a brand generally through something really valuable/useful rather than a ton of blog posts. Either way, as long as there's someone to launch to I'm happy, the launch is a nice milestone, but it's not the be all end all.

  4. 1

    Hi, really ๐Ÿ‘Œ cool name for the product. Waitlisted. Also, Nice landing, though I couldnโ€™t quench my curiosity to learn more about features and the roadmap.

    1. 1

      Hey thanks! I'm purposefully keeping it light on features for the moment because as a tech guy I'm likely to go "buy all the features", but honestly that's not a good sales approach. So I'm really thinking through how to communicate the value (aka not a features list). I have some ideas I'll start working through next month.

  5. 1

    Love your landing page + name of the product! Interweave sounds really cool. I waitlisted :) slow progress is better than no progress.

    1. 2

      Thanks! It sure is. @arvidkahl posted a while back on Twitter about the power of consistency and man I can't keep that thought out of my head.

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