October Retrospective

Wowza, feel like it was just yesterday I was putting together my task list for the first week of the month, and here we are about to close it all out.

This month has been an interesting one. New revenue has been good, churn could have been better. Churn could always be better though, right? Got hit with some downgrades as well, which I'm about to go into.

The big bork of the month was when I carelessly sent out an email to a bunch of paying customers offering them a 20% discount. I was able to salvage the snafu by further qualifying the offer as being for converting from annual to yearly and ended up converting quite a few folks.

Live and learn though, proof read the heck out of your emails. Then ask some other people to proof read them if you can. Heck, pay them to proof read, it will probably end up being cheaper.

On a positive note, we now own a trademark on Holiday API™, which I think means I probably should be starting to chase down a few people or something. Really though, I wanted to make sure I had myself protected, more so than trying to chase people down over things.

The month's been extremely productive on the development front as well, new features going out, a handful of bug fixes and we added another web server to the mix to handle the load.

On a more personal note, I've been beginning to feel more and more productive as of late and the product vision and division of labor is starting to grow more and more obvious. I'm really hoping I can capitalize on this productivity going further into the holiday season as to not lose my edge while everybody else is taking it easy.

Mentally, I've been way less cloudy and I've actually been taking more time off from working. My goal for the year was to not work on the weekends, and while only moderately successful, the last 3 weeks I have been about 99% keyboard free from Friday evening until Sunday evening, which has been a huge win.

This week's not over and I'm excited to see if I can finally roll out a bunch of account-based functionality that has been long pushed to the side.