These are mostly written for me to keep track of things so expect low quality. I probably will knock this down to monthly since a draft for the month then followed by a publish probably will be more impactful and feel less like noise.

The goal for these updates is to list:

• What I’ve built (shipped or otherwise)

• What I think I’ve fixed (shipped or otherwise)

• Any musings about the future.

• Any musings in general.

This week:

• I’ve written a proof of concept in go for monitoring the things that need monitoring. So I’m happy about that.

• I’ve signed up for the basic SaaS stuff I need to. I

• ’ll be transferring the payment methods and stuff once I setup a LLC but that is for later.

• I’ve posted a little on this blog to get things started. Nothing too important though, no one will care until the beta and I have no plans to promote this blog until it's time to promote a product.

The future:

Next week I will be moving on the 27th if all goes as planned. So that will disrupt my life for probably ~3 weeks. So I may (or may not) skip the retrospectives during that time. Even if the hours I spend on this stuff dips, I may have something to say to myself since that is the only audience right now.

I’m limiting myself to a planned 10 hours a week because that is about all the productivity I can expect. I work a full time job as a developer which limits my options. Going much over about 50 hours a week quickly hurts my productivity in general so that’s best avoided.

The timeline I have in mind is shipping 1 product a year with about 2 years of support. So that is theoretically 3 projects I could be maintaining at any given time. That seems a reasonable limit if I had more time, it is very ambitious on 10 hours a week.

Customer service is going to be a very clear and obvious problem with the limitations above. I’m not a very social person and burning even 5 hours a week on customer service will greatly reduce my productivity. I’m not sure how to solve that with a lean bootstrapped business with $0 in the budget for employees. Probably some sort of public community/feedback process that keeps people waiting for me to answer questions.

I could also bite the bullet and work myself harder than is wise for short periods but that is an emergency band aid and not a serious solution.

The other problem is as a solo founder, its really going to be a “customer tested” product which is rough on any business. I’ll test stuff but there is a reason businesses normally have a QA process beyond “Dev tests then pushes to production”.

Musings

I’ve silo’d my Developers Unchained identity in a world (fresh install of Google Chrome) without uBlock and pihole for as long as I can stand it. I need to see the ads and process them analytically if I am going to spend money on that sort of thing in the future. I only use this for “side project” work so its less intrusive than if I shut that stuff off everywhere.

So that’s it for this update. We’ll see how things go with the move 🙂