This Week:
- Getting back into a week of Denver urban van life working from coffee shops.
- Finishing the optimization of my software and adding user accounts/payments!
- An update on my ankle sprain from last week.
November 2024
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 11/1 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Where In The World Was I?
- 🌲 The mountains of Colorado, U.S.
- Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Metrics From The Week
Boy does it feel to get back into an actual gym again.
Business Progress Update
After finishing the database refactor last week and doing a lot of optimizing, the first part of this week I continued to optimize my code: speeding up jobs, parallelizing more processes, and I ended up upsizing my server to more CPUs and memory because I was running into some OOM errors.
Additionally, I made a lot of tweaks and fixed lots of little bugs. I removed a bunch of non-relevant videos and formats so that the non-niche results are more valuable for users.
This week I got my software back to a really good state: queries are quick (or at least manageable), jobs are speed-and-quota optimized, and everything just… works.
Ever since I started this big scaling refactor ~4 weeks ago, everything has more of less been in this half-working half-broken state and I continually worried about users running into things that used to work but now didn’t.
But this week I could essentially say that I’m finished. Sure, there’s always things to optimize and improve, but I’m starting to question what’s most valuable right now.
I’ve built most of the user feedback that I got from my first beta round of feedback back in early-mid August. As a recap, this is everything I’ve added since then:
- Added a script to find and continually analyze…
- Channels, looking for outlier channels and adding them to the Channel Explorer page.
- Videos, analyzing for outperforming and outlier videos and adding them to the Video Explorer page.
- Extended the timeframe for video collection and analysis from the last 60 days to up to 750 videos per channel.
- Overhauled the Video Explorer page…
- To show not only videos from a user’s Watchlist but also from their niche, from all relevant videos, and all videos analyzed.
- To have better searching, filtering, sorting.
- To have a button to search for similar videos to any video.
- To generate a new personalized video idea based on a video.
- To update the page display to show video titles, or title formats, or only thumbnails.
- Added a whole new page for Title Formats and added auto-generated title formats for all the outperforming videos.
- Created a basic thumbnail image generation for videos that a user clicks generate video idea on.
- Overhauled my entire software to move off of storing data in JSON files to using a real database.
- Sped up and optimized all the pages and jobs to only fetch and reanalyze videos based on conditions.
- Added user accounts and payment integration.
It’s been quite the couple of months…
So anyways, it’s been a while since I’ve focused on getting users and getting user feedback. I talked about having essentially 3 new “doors” to choose from in this video Fearing the next step for my software | 3 doors to choose.
- Get back to lead generation: reach outs, getting users and feedback
- Improve retention: making the results more relevant and valuable
- Monetization: set up user accounts and payment integration
Each had their arguments, but I ended up deciding to go for #3, adding user accounts and integrating a payment system. This work would essentially finish the foundational work that gets me from a “project” to a business. From then on, the next work ON the software would be making results more valuable and building from user feedback.
So towards the end of the week I added user accounts (registration, log in, email verification and password reset, and connecting the rest of the software to user accounts) and set up an integration with Stripe for payments.
FINALLY I have something new to show you!
I also tweaked my landing page based on all the new updates:
So, as this chapter of scaling and updating my software comes to a close, it just so happens to coincide with a big travel trip in my personal life as well.
What’s next? Back to lead generation. It’s been too long and I’ve done enough optimizing that it’s time to get back to building a real user base and getting more feedback. The only problem is that reaching out to people and marketing is the activity I DON’T like to do 😅 (I talked about this process in I won’t end up as another failed entrepreneur)
Back To Urban Van Life
After writing last week’s post, I headed back down to Denver.
And got back to some urban van life.
And my favorite thing, working from coffee shops
I stopped by Stanley Marketplace one evening to check it out. Really cool interior! And I ate at this great sushi place.
Ankle Update
Last Friday I sprained my ankle stepping out of my van onto this rock. I thought I was done for.
Well, it’s just gotten better and better since last week’s post. I haven’t run on it yet, but I’d say I’m up in the range of 95% healed. There’s still a bit of soreness when I twist in the same way, but I’ve largely been fully back to walking normally. I feel like I dodged a bullet there!
Thoughts From The Week
YouTube Use
I feel like I’ve been watching more YouTube lately, particularly when I’m back in Denver compared to up in the mountains. And fortunately I don’t have to only feel like it’s been more. I can just look at the data.
I think my lunch time use is decently dialed in, just while I eat, but I still struggle to make the time during and after anything more productive. In some ways I wonder if this is a counter-result to pushing my focus harder these last couple weeks.
Would pushing less hard give me more residual focus to do something more productive like shallow work or reading?
Who knows…
Socializing
I hung out with some extended family this week and had some great socializing and conversations.
It was kind of a weird feeling as the last handful of weeks have been largely isolated, up in the mountains, just me and the birds 🤷♂️.
It reminded me of all the great conversations I had abroad last year and got me excited for these next upcoming chapters of my life.
The Mindset Shift
I wrote about this in the Business Progress Update section above, but I’ll just highlight again that I feel like I’ve been starting to come back up for air from the last handful of weeks so focused on coding, building, and scaling.
It has felt great to see my software in a good state (and better state) now than before.
However, the flipside of this coin is that I’ve felt this need to pry myself away from the “optimization” mindset and back to focusing on what’s most important: users.
At the end of the day, this is all nothing without actual users. The thing I’m trying to realize is that all of this work was done to make my software more valuable for users and to be able to actually handle more users.
Well, now’s the time to actually USE the work and do the thing: getting users.
What’s Next?
🛫 Off to Europe 👀