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Collaboration

Hello, my name is James and Habit Daemon is my first product on Indie Hackers.
Having lurked for a while, it seems like an awesome community and I look forward to learning from you seasoned hackers.

For this project I decided not to try to do everything myself.
I reached out to Sam, a coder who I had worked with (many years) before and always respected as a coder and as a person. I presented my idea and asked if he would like to join me on this journey.

Whatever other decisions I make on this project, I expect this will have been the most important one.

I feel it is a bigger step going from solo to partner, than it is going from two people to ten people. I would be interested to hear other people's experiences of this.

Already, working together has significantly improved my processes. I am now forced to implement better versioning and more rigorous systems that I could be lax about when developing solo. We agreed a revenue split and job delineations before starting work. We are both working on this as a side project, although personally I would love to be working on it full time as it is so much more exciting than client work. [If any of my clients are reading this, you know I still love you].

We are aiming to have an MVP on the App Store before the end of 2020. New year's resolutions would be a key marketing opportunity that we don't want to miss. We have been very careful about ring-fencing the scope of the project. When new and exciting ideas pop up they get immediately reserved for V2.0 as we know the painful price of feature creep. There is a lot of iteration so we have changed ideas as we have gone along. However we have also removed some original elements, which is insanely satisfying as we know we are saving time and making the product more elegant. We are not afraid of discarding something we have put time into if there is an obvious better path we can commit too.

Our working practice is meeting on Zoom once a week and talking through our progress and next steps. During the week we work on our own tasks and our only communication is really notifications when one of us pushes changes up to GitHub or updates on Testflight.
We settled into this weekly routine in an organic way. When I first presented the idea, we were both very busy and worked in chaotic spurts, then we communicated almost daily, but this weekly meeting is certainly the most optimal.
A week is enough time to make progress on something worth sharing and there is an anticipation to the meetings, that I don't think we would have if we communicated every day.
Sharing updates is now one of the highlights of my week. We have overcome our previous stops and starts, and seem to be in a flow-state of working steadily with growing momentum, which I consider a milestone of sorts.

Thank you for reading this far.
I look forward to sharing more milestones.

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