POW!

POW! had been live for 6 months already. That is half a year, can you believe it? I do not know if I can.

The highlights from August are:

• 12 new customers, 39 in total
• My good friend, and often partner in crime, Marit, is back from maternity leave and will be helping out with user testing and user insight.
• I fixed a common complaint from users. Watch all the way to the end of the video to hear more about that.

The focus forward is more contact with exciting users to pinpoint what is working and what is not working.

I had a great July, and while spending time under the Norwegian summer sun we passed 1000 USD in revenue.

I also decided to listen to my own advice about focusing on the core product. So I am moving the marketing pages over to Squarepace, even though it is breaking my developer heart a little.

I decided to document the journey of making POW! on YouTube.

In this first one, I talk a little about my motivation and what we are doing differently.

POW! is a privacy-first menstrual cycle journal.

Its created using React/Gatsby, Material-UI and Userbase.

You can find POW! at usepow.app.

I invited my friends and family to join me in celebrating the launch of my app POW! — a privacy-first menstrual cycle journal.

In the tweet below you can see me summarize the day after some glasses of wine.

It was so much fun, and I am already planning to it again for a new and improved version March 8th, 2021 :D

The weekend before Budapest the Norwegian Financial Times had a big exposé on menstrual trackers sharing data with third parties.

I contacted the journalists about my work with POW! and ended up getting a full page in the paper newspaper.

There I promised an official launch on International Women's Day, March 8th, 2020.

I spoke at JSConf Budapest on this date.

But I also spoke at RuhrJS in Bochum, Javazone in Oslo and Mobile Era in Oslo.

It was a fun and nerve-racking experience. And it got me excited about sharing what I learn about encryption and privacy with other developers. How this will look like in the future I do not know yet.

I made the competition deadline and launched on Product Hunt from the lovely Slow Business Festival (https://www.slowbusinessadventure.com/) in the Norwegian mountains.

POW! was top 10 on its first day. Still do not understand PH very well, so must learn more before official launch March 8th.

If you have any tips send them my way!

While doing some late summer research I came over the Can't Be Evil Competition by Blockstack: in part a framework for creating private and distributed apps.

It might have been a poor excuse to procrastinate creating the slides for my talk, or it might be a genius decision. Time will tell!

It turned out I was onto something with my talk proposal. I was accepted by four conferences for the fall of 2019.

JSConf Budapest
RuhrJS in Bochum
Javazone in Oslo
Mobile Era in Oslo

So I spent the spring and some of the summer researching what I found out to be the key in a privacy-first app: encryption.

A week after the Global Diversity CFP Day event, I sat down to work on my talk ideas.

In February, the Wall Streep Journal had reported that many popular health apps, menstrual cycle trackers among them, were leaking personal data to third parties such as Facebook.

My tracker wrote me an email explaining, "Only a few people have access to the tools we use to look into the database. As a precaution, we also have restricted access to the tracked cycle data." on March 7th.

As a developer, I have always known that someone at a company has access to the data in an app's database. But suddenly it hit a lot closer to home.

So I wrote out some "demands" for a tracker I would like to use, and it became my talk proposal.