April Retrospective

Last month with the COVID-19 Edition of these updates, but really, this month was the month that hurt the most. Not because business is bad or anything, but because we had to cancel a decent amount of travel and well-deserved downtime.

Both cancelled trips were birthday-related. Big 70th bash for my MIL and my daughter’s inauguration into her teens. That doesn’t mean things were a complete bust, we made things work thanks for Slack and some Apple products being released and procured.

Shout out to another business that’s making it work during the plague years, https://cardmyyard.com/. They do “greeting cards” in your yard by way of little signs and stuff. Absolutely amazing, well worth the nominal fee, and their service turned the dark times light again.

On a personal level, without the already scheduled downtime and weekdays blurring into weekends and all of that, I’ve been on a serious grind. I’ve been getting up earlier, sleeping better, and have been moving at a pretty solid clip all around.

Oh, and didn’t get a YC interview for this batch. Perhaps the disappointment is being channeled into “shippers energy” or I actually really don’t care because things have been going as planned.

I’ll definitely be applying again next batch, probably not on the first day applications open, but if nothing else, I still appreciate their application and the act of filling it out to help me ground myself, focus and all of that.

On the business side of things, we’ve been doing fantastic. Day to day efforts include the usual amount of data corrections and improvements as well as improvements to our website. We’ve completely revamped our documentation and actually fixed a pretty substantial bug today (more on that in a bit)

Really big news is, amidst everything that’s been going on in the world, we’ve recently exceeded $30k ARR (which is actually ~50% of our all-time earnings if you wanted to try to back in on the math of our growth rate).

Not to gloat and/or humblebrag, but getting here has taken a lot of work, and it’s the third time I’ve achieved this level of success with a side project (first being my social network, second being my blog).

One of my biggest fears is that whatever I’m doing is the last thing and/or the best thing I’m ever going to do, so it’s really just a friendly reminder to myself that I didn’t “just get lucky” as I’ve said about my past successes.

Wow, this post more than others is really starting to drive home the fact that I need to be doing personal retrospective posts instead of posting these under this particular project of mine. If nothing else, as I’m starting to cultivate some new projects, it definitely starts to make sense to do one rambling post instead of one per product.

Back on track, as mentioned, we fixed a bug today that was pretty huge and comes with a small bit of “TIL” to share with folks.

So every day I monitor a handful of things, usage recordings, third-party API usage and even Google Webmasters (I think it’s called Google Search Console now?) to make sure I have a pulse on what’s going on.

Over the last few days I had noticed a spike in 404 errors coming from links in our sitemaps. As it turns out, we actually had a pretty substantial bug in our website code that was causing these 404 errors and I’ve actually attributed to a handful of other errors that we’ve “fixed” in the past.

Just a friendly reminder that external monitoring is extremely important (in b4 a dozen replies from people that built no-code monitoring solutions they are trying to schlep on here).

The bug in question went undetected for at least a couple of months, primarily because “it all seemed fine” when in reality it wasn’t. Sadly, we don’t give our website the same level of testing that we do our data (over 1.2 million data point assertions, thank you very much) and that’s where different monitoring mechanisms can help gap fill.

All about getting 1% better every day, and sometimes that includes shipping some bugs that will later turn into epic wins.