Polished
Turn ideas into polished writing
For the first rolling 30-day period, Polished received over 500 page views according to Simple Analytics!
I bet half these were me looking at my own site since my IP isn't filtered from the analytics. It still feels like things are going in the right direction, though.
I've been submitting progress updates on https://pioneer.app for a while now. I did it back in the summer, then took some time off. I've been doing updates for five weeks now and am in the Global Top 50 on the leaderboard. This means I'm now eligible to be selected as a Pioneer. Based on the other people that became Pioneers, I think it will take me a few more weeks to be chosen just because of where my product is.
Pioneer is great for forcing you to continually make structured status updates and get good feedback. Getting feedback from other players is part of the platform. If you don't know who to ask to get feedback on your project every week, I highly recommend trying Pioneer.
If you do try it, it's pretty simple to climb the leaderboard. This is how I did it:
- Check off all "side quests" that give you points. Fill out your project description, take a quiz, etc. Low-hanging fruit that gets you started
- Have an ambitious plan every week, even if you won't achieve it.
- Be honest in updates. If you don't finish something, that's okay. Don't lie about it.
- Have links from your updates to your site showing specific points of progress. Showing your progress is better than just saying it. It also gets people to visit your website and give feedback about the latest updates.
- Don't take it too seriously. There are some serious benefits to winning Pioneer, but the results are really up to peers voting on you. Don't stress about it, have fun with it and make progress on your work.
I quit my job a month ago and am just now filling in the milestone.
I've saved up a runway to allow myself to take a year off from working full-time. It's a huge leap of faith but it was time to quit.
In the beginning, it was an emotional roller coaster. From the moment I gave my job notice I was leaving I kept questioning myself if it was really the right decision. I was giving up a ton of money by quitting. One day I would be sky-high about being free from a job only for the next day to be filled with terror that it would be a huge failure.
Zoom to four weeks later and that roller coaster has chilled out. I'm convinced I'm on the right path.
I've been submitting status updates on Pioneer.app. That keeps me in check to continuously make progress. I've been in touch with potential customers. I've been structuring the way I go about things to force me to keep moving forward.
I'm excited for the future! Even if things don't work out, it will be an awesome journey. I'm learning a lot about myself and everything involved in running a business. I'll never look back and wonder "what if I quit that job?"
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Congrats Ryan, this isn’t easy but it sounds like you have a plan. I recently have done the same and have gotten over the initial fears and uncertainty. Keep us posted!
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Thank you! It's great to find people in similar situations. Best of luck to you! I'll be following :)
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Congrats, this is a very important milestone. As someone who's been through this, good luck - it can be overwhelming at times, but also very rewarding.
Make sure to prioritize health, and work/life balance - if you burn out (and it's easy to do when you're on your own, and the stakes are high), it can have a disastrous effect.
I wish you great success, keep us posted.
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Thank you! That means a ton.
I plan to focus on my health as a top priority. I was getting really burned out working typical 9-5 jobs and then working on projects on nights and weekends. I've already had some time to recover from that and get into a good groove.
I know there are gonna be a lot of ups and downs for the whole ride. I'm excited about it!
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Very jealous!
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This has been a goal of mine since before I graduated from college. I literally know nothing but all I can say is take smart risks!
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Congrats, keep us posted!
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Thank you! Will do :)
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I've taken a break working on polished.app for almost 2 months now. Between moving and working overtime at my day job I simply haven't had time for it. Some may say that's making excuses, I'm not prioritizing it, etc. etc. That may be true, but I'm totally okay with that.
I've been able to take a real step back and contemplate the direction I want to go. I think it's a valuable perspective I wouldn't have if I remained heads down all the time.
Another benefit of the break is I'm now coming back to the code and having a terrible time understanding what's going on. This struggle is highlighting places where I need to refactor and write cleaner code.
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Your site is kinda broken on iOS Safari
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Thanks for the heads up! I haven't gotten to any mobile styles yet. Was actually planning to do that this coming week
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Looks really awesome!
I have a project that I've been picking up and putting down (for months at a time) for the last five years. I think it's a horrible way to make a living from something, but as a side project, it's really been helpful in the product's evolution!
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I'm with you there. I've probably been working on this for about 2 years and it has morphed quite a bit from the original idea.
There's an internal battle happening because all the blog posts say you have to move fast. I think moving slow is totally fine though as long as you are honest with yourself about what the goal really is. I like the idea of taking time to orient the direction I want to go before rushing full speed ahead.
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Congrats :)
Taking breaks without losing the momentum is really tough.
Polished looks clean and it's full of good ideas, I look forward to seeing how you'll develop it in the future.
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Thank you! That's really motivating to hear :)
I've definitely lost all of the momentum I had before. I think the best thing I can do is acknowledge that and just move forward. With consistency and patience, it will build back up.
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haha, a great incentive to write modular and well named code. UI is very nice :)
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Thank you!
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I have begun breaking up every piece of functionality into a toggleable feature. The appearance of pages, grammar tools, and editor controls are all now toggleable. These features are collected into "editor profiles" which is basically just a certain set of these features turned on.
Right now these profiles are hard-coded, but I plan to add the ability for users to customize their own so that they can make polished the perfect editor for them.
Had the first signup for polished! I was surprised by it because the tool had a ton of bugs and was almost unusable. I haven't done any paid advertising yet. Only posting here once in a while and regular status updates on https://pioneer.app. The user came from Pioneer.
From here I need to keep getting more users and talking to them to get their feedback.
This week I did some much-needed design work for the landing page (https://polished.app).
I still need to add more copy and images but it's a great start. The hero feature is an iframe of the actual app.
I implemented a "player piano" effect. It's the actual app and demos what it can do for the user. It's more powerful than a video because the user can actually interact with it. It's also way easier to produce than a video. As I add more features to the app, it will be easy to add them into that demo on the marketing site.
This week I wrote and published the first blog post (https://polished.app/improve-your-writing/) on the polished blog. This is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to build up a lot of quality content on the site for the purpose of SEO.
It will take a few months to pay off. My plan is to be consistent and post once a week at a minimum.
I had the idea to embed the product on the landing page so that visitors wouldn't have to click anything to see the product. As it's a react app, I tried a few different things like:
- pre-rendering the app so the landing page portion would work for SEO
- Running multiple builds with different entry points
Those approaches were too complicated and I realized I could do it simply by using GatsbyJS for the landing page and embedding the product as an iframe. In the iframe src attribute, I can pass query parameters to the app so it does different things because it's embedded.
Right now it just shows the app without the control bar on the side. This week I'm going to work on a "player piano" feature, so that on the marketing site, the app plays through like the a video. The awesome thing here being that after it's done "playing", visitors will be able to click around and use it right there on the landing page.
I've been working on this side project for a while now. It started out in January of 2018 as a design tool like figma.com. After having some technical challenges, I got bored with that project and stopped working on it.
Roughly a year went by and I got a new idea for a writing app that worked like a design tool - mainly the canvas where you can drag pieces around. I knew that I could build the foundation for the canvas pretty easily, and design tools are not optimized for writing. They excel at laying things out.
So this thing I am creating is a writing tool. There will be many different elements from other existing tools combined in a way that makes great writing much easier.
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