Nathan Barry, a fellow Boise resident and founder of ConvertKit, has a few mantras that really resonate with me. Most have become values that are listed on ConvertKit’s mission page. Though it’s been a slow journey, I’ve gradually learned to “Create Every Day”. I’m also trying to get better at teaching what I know. But todays email is about working in public. From their mission page:
“Work in public – We publicly share everything from our soaring successes to our epic failures and everything in between because it helps us learn (share those learnings with you). Besides, if you aren’t willing to sign your name to your work and put it into the world, you’ll never truly reach your potential.”
Pride
This is something I’ve struggled with more than I like to admit. Fact is, I’m prideful, and it’s scary to share my failures. It’s also scary to share my plans and hopes for the future. Those could easily turn into failures. Hell, it’s scary to share my successes, because who knows if I’ll live up to them. Maybe they’re already the high points.
Anyway, all that is to say that I’m going to be doing regular “work in public” emails going forward. Some of them will be more technical, or interesting to others who are also trying to build SaaS apps. Others will be more introspective.
And yes, I’ll be sharing my failures, my successes, and even those crazy hopes and dreams for Cue that sometimes feel like my adult version of the monster under the bed.
So, let’s start today with a recent failure, a recent success, and my current short term vision.
Failure
First up, Cue exists. There is actually an app, I use it every day to plan.
But.
I sold a friend on trying it out, and it bombed. Badly. He couldn’t use it. Bugs prevented him from planning a single day.
Then I got him to try it out again.
Different bugs kept him from using it.
So, I have work to do, on the product side.
Heck, even if it worked, the feature set is pretty limited at this point.
Another failure: I haven’t sent a Cue email in a week. My goal is daily emails. This is important for a few reasons: keeps me going, to help all you awesome subscribers keep planning, share tips, ideas, tools, habits, to define and get feedback on Cue, etc.
And I lost my momentum. Time to rebuild it.
Success
I already mentioned the real success, even if it’s small.
Cue has one user – me. And I use it every day, without fail.
It works.
One big limitation of Cue as it currently exists is the lack of synchronization. So, if you use it on one device/browser and open it in another, they won’t automatically synchronize changes unless you refresh the browser.
Fine for me, but not really something that anybody else is going to want to use.
Part of that is a limitation based on the underlying platform I used to prototype it out (Blockstack). So I’m working to replace that. The two big things it provides are identity and storage.
I’m currently exploring a few ways to meet those needs. One path of investigation involves Okta for identity, and Digital Ocean for storage. And I got them both working, reasonably well, in my local development setup.
Success!
But still not synchronization, which I’m figuring would involve something like Gun.js on top of those two services.
Another route I’m investigating is Firebase. It can handle the identity and storage, and synchronization would be relatively easy because it’s a reactive/realtime database. Which means that the clients would get updates when information changes.
Vision
I could outline my vision for sync here, since that would follow the narrative I built up by talking about my failure and my success.
But I’m going to switch gears. Right now, Cue is great for planning your day, and then planning the next.
But to really take it beyond a pretty simple (maybe even silly) todo app, it needs the tickler stuff I outlined in my vision posts.
And so, once I’ve got the new backend in place, and probably before I really try to solve the sync issue, I’m going to add daily ticklers. That automatically rotate as you plan each day. That properly handle when you forget to plan for a few days. That are easy to use when you are in daily planning mode. That are easy to add items to.
That’s what I really want to be doing.
In the meantime, I get to “embrace the suck” as I learn new tools and figure out how to configure them, and solve these “cost of entry” type problems along the way.
And really, that’s all part of the journey, just as much as the exciting stuff.
So I invite you to come along, learn with me, correct me, and enjoy the ride.