Showuply

I skipped yesterday because I was driving from Newport Beach to San Fran via Big Sur (super awesome drive BTW) with my brother.

On Friday I added timezone support so that you can check in based on your own location, not based on UTC. And I also added a page similar to Slack's "all unreads" page where you can see all of the threads that you're participating in and which of those threads have unread posts.

Yesterday in the car I didn't do any "work" but I talked a lot with my brother who is a professional business consultant, and we ended up talking about Showuply for a bit and some cool marketing ideas came from that. Specifically, I think in the next week or so I'm going to relaunch an old accountability tool that I built called imgoing.to. I shut that down because it had no business model and because I needed to go find myself. Realized yesterday that relaunching imgoing.to and keeping it free could be a fantastic start of a funnel into this paid community. Could potentially also relaunch and make free an app that I used to have called Feed Hero, but that'd be for down the road.

Today I want to build the vacation day stuff so that tomorrow the check ins start becoming mandatory and vacation days start being taken away automatically.

Grateful for having the balls (or whatever the PC version is) to get a divorce. Best life decision ever. Wouldn't be doing this project right now had I not had the courage to make that decision. And I certainly wouldn't be traveling like I am.

Yesterday I got a lot of user setting stuff done, as well as got email notifications set up for when one member @mentions another member.

Today... I'm not exactly sure. I know that I want the official accountability stuff to be finished so that check-ins can start being mandatory as of Monday. But I also really want to re-add the good morning videos that I had to delete yesterday because of the Safari issue. And TBH this text editor could use a few tweaks as well.

Struggling with what to do about the good morning videos. It started out as a requirement that members attach a 1-7 second video to each post they make, simply smiling and saying good morning. I really freaking liked it. There's something special about seeing other people in that way. But I had to remove it yesterday because of an encoding bug. Then I realized that recording video on Safari is straight up not possible, so I'd have to have it be mandatory on chrome, ff, and edge but not on safari, which is weird. But still, I think I'll bring it back.

Grateful to live in a period and place where I can have the freedom to do crazy things and to have the luxury of not being accountable to anyone. Obviously I see the downside in that and that's what I'm trying to solve, but it comes from a pretty sweet place of priviledge.

I didn't do exactly what I said I was going to do yesterday. I didn't get email notifications set up for member mentions. But I DID get a whole shit ton of other stuff done that I wasn't planning on, like profiles, editing profiles, single update pages, etc. And a very rudimentary version of replies, which I'll make more streamlined down the road.

This morning I switched the video format from webm to mp4 because I just learned that webm isn't supported on mobile safari. I want to work on email notifications the rest of the day. That includes not only sending emails upon new mentions and reminders to check-in, but it also - in order to not be hated - means building a smart notification preferences system.

Still struggling with what step I should take first to try to get this in front of people.

It’s all becoming a blur.

I made my first $650 sale on day 6, but imma keep goin’.

I’m not used to working this hard. I did the whole hustle thing about 7 years ago for a different startup, but not since. Working 16 hour days for the past 7 days has been more tiring than I imagined, but I’m still being epicly productive.

That said, it’s all becoming a blur. I woke up this morning not remembering what I did yesterday. Then I looked at my git history and realized that I did a ton. I got the check-in process, including the “good morning” video, completely working, and also added some nice onboarding stuff to make the experience great for first-time users (holds their hand for first time through). And I integrated At.js so members can now @ tag other members and get notifications when other members @ tag them.

The check-in process is broken on mobile and it broke for one of the members, so today’s #1 mission to figure out and fix those two things. If I have extra time I’ll start working on a member settings page where people can upload a profile pic, set their profiles to public or private, and do a few other things.

OMG FIRST SALE!!!!!

Yesterday I added the whole payment flow, plus other pages like terms of service and privacy policy, and installed Stripe and Intercom.

And then within two hours of installing Stripe I made my first $650 sale! I did a little dance. Obviously a single customer could be a fluke, but damn, given that only about 20 people saw the site yesterday - and given that I don't know this customer - I'm feeling pretty validated.

Today is back to the in-app work. I want to perfect the daily check-in process today so that it’s beautiful and fun to complete.

Launched a new, pretty version! So now it's a page that people might actually read instead of a CSS-less mess.

I hope to implement Stripe payments by the end of the day. That’ll give me more than a week to make a sale while simultaneously finishing up the app side of things

This is where I start tensing up. Because this is when it’s time to start thinking about selling, and I have zero selling skills. Right now I’m leaning toward 1-on-1 outreach, 'cuz I feel like I’m a pretty personable guy and I realllllly believe in what I’m selling… just gotta figure out how to find people to talk to.

Maybe some podcasts? But I’m a nobody, so noone with an audience would want me on their podcast. Maybe that’s not true, though. Maybe I just have to find podcasters who think this idea is as cool as I do, and then that’ll serve as all the street cred I need.

Yesterday I designed the logged-in app pages. Then, since that didn’t take long, I started implementing a bunch of the HTML and CSS.

Today I’m going to go surfing with my brother. And then I’ll keep coding the design stuff. Hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow all of the Sketch designs will be completely coded. And then I’ll have one day from there to tweak things, and then I’ll have a week to sell!

Goal is to get something that I can sell by the end of the 7th day so I have an entire week to try to make a sale.

In theory I want to be a function-first maker. Someone who does the coding first, gets everything working, and THEN tackles the design. But my brain won’t have it. All I can think about is design until that’s done. Probs because I’d rather use a beautiful (where speed and UX choices also count toward overall beauty) website than one with cool features. I assume that since I’m my own ideal customer that my actual customers think the same thoughts.

Yesterday I got soooooo much design work done. The home page as well as a few other screens now look beautiful IMO. My opinion will change as I get closer to launch and I’ll start thinking that these pages are ugly pieces of garbage, so I’ll refer back to this to prove to myself that I once thought they were pretty.

Today I’m doing more design work. This time designing the app itself. Pretty stoked.