This is a place to share what you accomplished this week for your business. Feel free to brag a little, and don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice!
This is a place to share what you accomplished this week for your business. Feel free to brag a little, and don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice!
Got a meeting with a potential client by sending them a old fashioned letter (since I couldn’t find an email address) and they signed up!
Large customer who was evaluating with 80 users is going live in May.
Lost a customer who was evaluating, their priorities changed.
Wrote and upgraded a few minor features to the site.
Wrote a couple of tech blog posts.
Oh, and worked a 40 hour week at my regular job.
Nice work! Got any links to those tech blog posts?
Here is my blog, just a few posts on a recent upgrade and codenarc. Also have another in the hopper for this weekend.
https://erichelgeson.github.io
How do you balance between your regular job and your side-job?
Having a set schedule to work on the side project. I have a long commute where I can use my laptop so i get an hour in/out there. Feed the kids put them to bed, get an hour or two at night. So thats 15 hours a week I’d otherwise be doing nothing. I do take breaks for a few days. The hardest part was getting to MVP then getting the first customer (worked many long weekends). I’m fine if I get 1 customer every few months and letting the business come by word of mouth. Maybe some day I’ll try to put more time into marketing but not yet.
Had a bunch of good Skype calls with folks I met at MicroConf who are doing similar things in developer education, which helped a lot for understanding the tradeoffs of various potential products. I’ve got a good plan for what I’m going to build, so I’m planning that out and starting over the next week.
Matthias, thanks for starting a weekly thread. :)
1) Got fired from my day job. Blessing in disguise?! I sure hope so. 2) Sent out a couple of issues of my futurism newsletter: http://exolymph.com/newsletter-archives/ 3) Launched v0.1 of Product Comms Club: https://productcomms.club/
Several releases to two small web apps I run.
Finally finished the sales/optin page for a productized version of one of the services I provide, and setup a small Facebook ad campaign running to it. No results yet, but I’m hopeful.
Made a lot of progress in learning Angular 2. Ready to use it for the next small app I’m building.
Started work on a new contract with a past client.
How is Angular 2? I haven’t been able to jump into it because I’ve been enamored with Redux + React.
Still early, but liking it so far. I’m not much of a front end dev, so the early going was rough since I was trying to figure out all the new syntax from Typescript, the module loading system, and all of Angular’s own lingo. After that initial hump it starts making a whole lot of sense.
Posted a comment on hacker news about how successful I’ve been with channel sales programs and offered to help if they emailed me using hn (at) strapr (dot) com. That got 160 companies to sign up for a free sales training in less than a week. I’m going to enjoy helping other B2B companies grow!
Released this weeks edition of my biotech newsletter, but that’s about it. I haven’t had a chance to make much progress on anything else because my full-time programming gig is taking up lots of time and energy recently. If only I could get Hadoop to cooperate with my dev environment, grrr…
Earlier this week I did some intense journaling. Wrote out a 6-month “dreamline” and one of my goals to work toward is a second income stream. So I’ve got some work to do.
Completed training for first, pilot customer – starting pilot next week.
Made some good progress on our new offering, neuralobjects.com, a SaaS based machine learning / analytics platform. Right now I’m working on the wizard for configuring and deploying new analytic environments. The basic framework is in place, and I’m at the “enter payment information” page. Next I need to flesh out that page, and then I need to code up the Stripe integration so we can actually, you know, bill people. :-)
It’s coming along nicely, but man is there a TON of work still to be done.
The site isn’t available for actual use yet, but if anybody wants to take a look, feel free. Any feedback / commentary is appreciated. There’s a default login of user123 with password “realitybomb40” (minus the quotes) that you can use to poke around.
When it’s all available, you’ll be able to spin up a custom cluster for doing machine learning / analytics and the like, and drive everything through our APIs - uploading data, training models, making predictions, etc.
https://www.neuralobjects.com
started 3d programming! something i’ve always wanted to do, but had to put off due to daytime duties.
All in all not a terrible week, but I wish my list had more items on it!
Wrote a short blog post. Did some outreach to mailing list members. Provided installation support for two new customers. That was it, unfortunately.
Implemented a bunch of new features for PartsBox.io (https://partsbox.io/), my bootstrapped project. Also, got closer to a pricing strategy (still no prices, but at least the major customer segments are outlined).
Got app aproved by Facebook.