Get In Touch

After a hiatus, I'm making time to start working on Get In Touch again. Like many engineers, I'm prone to sitting down and cranking out features. Features are fun! Features are (relatively) easy! Features can be a distraction!

So I wanted to start with a goal to work toward. A long-term goal. But in the past, long-term goals I’ve set have felt distant, and have failed to motivate me. The goal doesn’t feel connected to my day-to-day efforts. So I also wanted to develop a roadmap that made the long-term goal feel relevant and realistic.

I set a goal five years out (somewhat arbitrarily): To have a startup that employs 50+ full-time staff, or has $5 million annual revenue.

To develop my roadmap, I decided to use this algorithm: Break my top-level goal up into ~5 milestones, spaced roughly evenly in time. Then take the soonest of those milestones, and do the same process repeatedly, until the chunks are small enough that they could go onto my to-do list.

For me, here’s what my list ended up looking like:

2025-07-01: At my startup, employ 50+ full-time staff, or have $5 million annual revenue

1. 2021-07-01: Have some web product with 1000+ weekly active users (free is ok)
   1. 2020-07-01: 4 users
      • Allocate substantial time to work on app
      • Start talking to potential users regularly
      • Implement features necessary to make it something I’ll want to use regularly
   2. 2020-10-01: 16 users
   3. 2021-01-01: 64 users
   4. 2021-04-01: 256 users
2. 2022-07-01: Get funding (VC or bootstrapped), and reach 10,000 weekly active users (it’s ok if I’ve pivoted since last year)
3. 2023-07-01: 6 staff, or $556,000 annual revenue
4. 2024-07-01: 17 staff, or $1.67 million annual revenue

I don’t think this is how things will play out in reality; I think I’ll end up adjusting this a lot as I continue to work on it. But it gives me a sense of what sort of progress I need to make in order to hit my goal. That’s motivational!

#looking-for-cofounder

Tl;dr: Technical cofounder with an alpha version of a webapp, looking for another technical cofounder to take it to the next level for fun and profit.

For the last few months I’ve been developing the Get In Touch webapp. I spend 15-20 hours/week on it. You can check it out here, though, be warned, it’s still an alpha version, so there are still more bugs and usability issues than there are features! https://www.getintou.ch . I'm working on it rapidly, though, so I expect it to be a much more viable MVP in around a month.

I started developing Get In Touch because I was frustrated by my inability to keep up with friends and relatives. The app helps you remember who you want to talk to, and how frequently. It’s all about helping you build stronger one-on-one relationships.

The idea is that the app will:

• Remind you when you should follow up with friends who are overdue for contact
• Allow you to save “stories” (snippets of text) that you can automatically paste into messages with friends, and tracks which stories you’ve already shared with which friends
• Enable you to compose messages within the app and send them out via other channels (email, text, Facebook, etc.)
• Track when you contact friends via other apps, and updates the “latest contacted” date of your contacts accordingly

People seem excited when I talk to them about this app idea. It seems almost everyone wished they did a better job of staying in touch with friends. About 25% of developers I mention this to say they’ve considered building something like this themselves! I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.

Besides the potential profit, here’s what you could get out of this:

• Experience working with a cofounder.
• Finding someone you might want to work with on future projects, whether or not this one takes off
• The ability to make faster progress than you could working on something on your own

On top of all that, our cofounder agreement would stipulate that we’re both free to use the generic webapp code from our codebase to create a boilerplate, which we can each use for free, and without restriction, on future projects.

I’m open to meeting remotely, if you’re not in the SF bay area. I’m interested in other types of collaboration, too, so hit me up if you want to suggest other ways we can work together.

I launched the "beta" version of my app, as described in my Kickstarter campaign, but the app is still very buggy, and extremely minimal. I know it's a good thing to launch a minimum viable product...I'm just not sure my product is viable quite yet. I don't really feel it quite deserves the label "beta". It's more of an alpha, or maybe even pre-alpha. See my Kickstarter update about the most recent launch.

In my kickstarter campaign, I had committed to launching the app by November 15, 2018, with some specific, very minimal features. I met my deadline! See my alpha launch announcement.

My Kickstarter was funded! Even before the time was up, though, it was already working its magic. The whole purpose was to motivate me to spend a lot more time on Get In Touch, and I noticed that after launching the campaign, I started working around 20 hours/week on Get In Touch. Before the campaign, it was more like 4-5 hours/week. See my Kickstarter update after receiving funding.

I wanted to spend a lot of time on Get In Touch, but I was finding it difficult to motivate myself to put in enough time. I decided to launch a very small ($60) kickstarter campaign and ask some friends to pledge small amounts. I'd use the campaign to publicly commit to several release deadlines, as a way to create peer pressure for myself.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nicholasbarry/get-in-touch-web-app/