Don't ask for help. Get help.
Asking for help is the hardest when you need it the most. I'm building this for myself and my friends: an app to keep track of who needs help and when. So I know when to call them, and they know when to call me :)
A bit sooner than expected really! User numbers have climbed which is great and suggests that I just might be building something that people actually want, but it has definitely put the pressure on; it’s still a bit broken around the edges and doesn’t even have a logo yet.
I've also gone from an 'I' to a 'we' in making Bestie; I've commandeered my partner to manage the copy, social media, and help out with the marketing; it's good to have a teammate again (who can fix the logo issue…). We’re both working on it outside our usual day gigs so time is currently our most scarce resource.
I - sorry, WE (re)signed up for Pioneer two weeks ago to help us maintain steady progress in the time we have towards launch, and we’ve now reached #45 in Europe! Obviously the big goal here is to reach the top 50 globally… It's helping us coordinate efforts and figure out priorities if nothing else.
Started a public beta of the system. I think the look and feel can be improved but thanks to Tailwind UI it's not that bad. What worries me the most is the email interactions and whether anybody would want to use it. If you want to access the public beta it's at:
Decided to build heavily in public and part of it was improving the brand a bit (went from being called "I'm OK" to being called Bestie, changing the logo) and creating a presence in many social media accounts:
I tried building this as a Ruby backend with a React frontend, a NodeJS backend with a React frontend, but I wasn't happy with the results of either. There was just too much boilerplate or workaround code to maintain for a part-time solo founder.
Eventually I settled on a Ruby on Rails app, with a Stimulus frontend, that is, no API, server generated HTML, old style... It's the smallest and tightest codebase of everything I tried.
I'm now running a private beta.
For some of us, asking for help is hard and when we are down, sad, depressed, lonely, suffering it becomes even harder (everything does). Talking to a fried I came up with the idea of implementing an app that reverses the equation, that doing nothing means you need help, clicking a link means you are ok. I'm OK was born and I started coding.
Asking for help is the hardest when you need it the most. I'm building this for myself and my friends: an app to keep track of who needs help and when. So I know when to call them, and they know when to call me :)