Closing the first wave, I feel the need of a sort of retrospective, pointing out what went well, what didn't and action items for the next iteration.
TL;DR is that I've probably set ambitious goals for myself (maybe too much), there are two driving forces competing for my limited time, the content creation side and the product development side, and I have to find a way to balance my time budget.
Continue reading for the gory details.
From the start of the wave
This is a mixed bag, on one hand I've received some feedback that the cheat sheet is a good idea, but in the current form is not that useful. I've started working on a generic one but it is not an easy task but now it is clear that I can try to create some default templates and let people customize their own.
Baby steps, I have added a brief description of how Unrefined works; next step should be to get a pricing page proposing "Pro" features and measure engagement.
In this wave I've published two (1, 2) short articles on Clojure which performed quite well given my small network. One lesson is that this kind of posts do not perform well on Linkedin, on the other hand Reddit and Twitter convert pretty well. Also timing is crucial, better to post early or mid week.
Nothing done yet, plus I wanted to record a screen cast but I've spent too much time learning OBS and I was not happy with the final result. I have the video still in my todo list and I want to release it soon!
No work done here as well. I'm still figuring out the scope of the project which at this time looks way too big for a single person. I've got other ideas that I'd like to validate. The biggest blockers are:
It was planned to record a video session of how it works, create a landing page and push it to the wild. None of this happened.
Currently I am spending most of my time on content creating and not enough on current projects, adding meaningful features or potential projects that require some research.
On content creation, I am still finding my way to it and it is time consuming but I suspect there is a lot of potential there, to drive traffic to products or possibly becoming a product itself. The general suggestion is to try to find verticals, and this is a whole big topic to explore.
Looking at the broader picture I think I have to:
It is important to remind to my(your)self that building something new is hard but also exciting! There are a lot of unknowns and we learn as we go, so please try to find the time to look back at what you did, where you want to be and look forward the next steps.