GitJournal November Update
The last month has been a month full of Ios bug fixes, some task management and a few breaks (More on this below).
For November, financially my goal was a revenue of 800€. This is one of the first months that I’ve crossed my revenue target by earning 998.78€.
This indicates a 45.3% increase in revenue from October.
Task Management
One of the other things I started doing in November is making Github be the one place for all the tasks, and making rough roadmaps for each month. Development has always been prioritized based on the number of upvotes (and requests by pro members), however it wasn’t clear what features users could expect on a monthly basis.
Though on a practical basis, the roadmap was far too optimistic and November was spent trying to fix mysterious iOS problems - mostly regarding payments and analytics. This was exhausting, stressful and ended with me just throwing out Firebase Analytics and releasing GitJournal for iOS without any analytics.
I was hoping to have finished the account management by now, but I haven’t managed to make myself do it and it’s stressing me out, so I’m now going to put it on hold.
Pushing Myself
I see developing GitJournal split into roughly 3 parts -
- Product Development - This includes design, coding, testing and documentation.
- Customer Development - This includes talking to the users as support and on whatever medium (HackerNews, Twitter) in order to understand them and accordingly drive Product Development.
- Marketing - The main goal is to promote GitJournal is various channels - Website, SEO, ASO, Twitter, HackerNews - in order for more people to learn about GitJournal and hopefully get converted into paying users.
This is a lot to juggle as one person. The coding part of Product Development comes to me naturally, but there are still these other parts where I need to concentrate in order for GitJournal to be sustainable. These parts require more motivation, learning and pushing myself into new areas and newer ways of thinking.
However, I need to slow down.
Over the last month, a chronic condition I’ve had for a long time has flared up, and has sadly affected my hands. I now need to take frequent breaks between sessions of using the keyboard. I’m hoping this will heal, but in the meantime, I need to adapt.
I’m going to slow down and prioritize my health. This effectively means for December (and maybe even January), I’m going to focus less on Marketing and Customer Development, and focus on the parts that give me the most joy - building GitJournal as a product.
I’ve started experimenting with (and building) voice coding solutions, foot pedals, and teaching my left hand to use the mouse, in order to be able to code longer. It’s an exhausting journey, but fortunately - as a programmer - I’m able to configure my tools and environment quite a bit. This might even result in more open source tools to help accessibility in general.
So, no goals for December. Let me just get accustomed to this new stage of my life.
