It’s been a month and a half since my last blog post. Personal illness got in the way of things for most of October and I have been slowly getting back into it over the past week. My pre-order deadline for Helthe has come and gone and I have gone back to working on the project daily. Now, I am building back my blogging habit.
Welcome to the hustle
Just before getting sick, I joined a community of bootstrappers called JFDI which is pretty great for people working alone in their basement like myself. We’re running an experiment this week called Week of Hustle where a group of us will try to build a small product in a week. You can also use this to finish a project that you have been stagnating on. That’s what I’ll be doing.
I had to answer some preliminary questions yesterday which I want to share.
- What is your personal goal? Get Helthe into user testable stages and accepting early adopters.
- Who is your audience? PHP Developers (like myself) who care about application errors and their impact on clients.
- What pain are you trying to solve? In PHP, it’s really hard to find errors when things are not working. Often, you just get a white screen. If I can save developers 1 hour of debugging a month, the product pays itself.
While things have been very good this past week, being sick and not working for a month is a pretty daunting hurdle to get over. This will get me back into the flow of things even more and help me get me over my #1 enemy.
Code is my enemy
The weakness is your love of creation. You love to write clean, tested, scalable, extensible, beautiful code.
I love coding. I think myself a craftsman more than anything else and I want to be proud of what I built. This is great, but it also causes some serious problem. I am not shipping in a timely manner. This is exacerbated by working alone and setting your own rules and timelines.
So because I have a limited timeframe, I will be forced to limit my scope heavily. I will have daily goals to meet and be accountable for to help me focus and not get sidetracked.
This isn’t a new weakness or something I have just come aware of. I would say I have struggled with it since I started a year and a half ago, but it’s one I keep working on (like my blogging habit).
Speaking of blogging habit
I’ll be blogging everyday during this. Shorter posts (like this one) and maybe multiple times a day about various Helthe topics (roadmap, ideal customer, design, etc) relevant to the work I am doing this week. So stay tuned!
Want to follow my progress? I’ll be sending daily updates of what is going on with the project to my mailing list. You can subscribe here !