Weekly Progress Report - The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

I'm posting these on Twitter and my blog (https://bryansmith.io/Interweave-Progress-Reports-Build-In-Public) but I'm sharing them in full here. Why? Because this is a great community and your feedback rocks.

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Progress is progress, I didn't get as much done as I'd like, but still I did make progress, so I'm calling this last week a win. That said, after reading a tweet by Noah Bragg, I thought I'd add a new section to these progress reports and talk more about the upside and downsides of startups. Because building a SaaS on the side is not all 🌞 & 🌈.

MVP ← Do I know what that means? I'm not always sure, I, like many other founders, often suffer with "my eyes are bigger than my stomach" syndrome. I started the week out with a vision of what Interweave is. And after the Bad/Ugly below I started wondering what I'd have by Spring when I want to soft launch.

Then I started realizing I'm way over shooting! You can check out my initial thoughts on saying "Not Yet" when planning an MVP out on my latest essay start: The Art of Saying Not Yet. Just some short notes so far, but I think this will be a great essay for anyone who suffers from the same syndrome.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Good: I haven't been paying attention, but would you look at those subscribers! That's 13 people who came across Interweave and are interested enough to give me their email. 13 isn't huge, but that's 12 more than last week. Writing about what I'm doing and sharing about it appears to be working. I'm sure they're not all target customers, but still, it's nice to see.

Bad/Ugly: I spent 90% of my time this week implementing something I thought would take a couple hours. I had multiple false starts on the text editor in Interweave. I tried out 3 or 4 of editors (paid and free), finally settling on one that I think will be a great choice. But then getting it to do something that their example made simple looking... was not simple. Because they don't mention anywhere if you don't give it valid default starting data it'll just throw some esoteric error at you. Plus also their examples were in Typescript. Ugh.

Weekly Project Progress Stats:

• 📧 Subscribers: 13 (🔺 12)
• 💻 Commits: 11 (🔻 7)
• 📝 Words Written: 168 (🔻 240)
• 🐦 Tweets: 23 (🔺 4)
• ⏱ Hours Worked: 9.67 hours (🔻 4.11)
• 🗓 Days Worked: 5 (-)

Maker

• 🔒 Made the login page "pretty" because I wanted something light and fun to do.
• 👨🏻‍💻 A bunch of refactoring early in the week.
• 📝 Implemented SlateJS as the text editor.
  • The editor matters because of what it will enable, not for the actual data entry.

Manager

• ⛔️ Did you see last weeks list? I wanted to get a bunch of writing in and start on a major content pillar. Neither were achieved.

Lessons Learned

• 🧐 You can't always predict where you'll get hung up. Don't stress over it.
• 🔬 Look critically at everything you're working on. Is it necessary! Likely no.

Next Week

• (Dare I try to guess?! I'm going to aim a bit smaller) ⁉️
• Start on the Evidence Vault 👨🏻‍💻
• Investigate hiring someone on UpWork to make a plugin for me 💰
• Get writing on that essay 📝