For most of March, I continued working at the startup I co-founded 4 years ago, with my last day being March 20th. My reasons for leaving are many, which I hope to share in a future blog post, but this work journal is not the place for it! Even with that time commitment, there’s been some good progress on my own projects.
Summary
- Dashify received 3 updates, including one new feature not previously available to WooCommerce merchants.
- I decided to only work on Dashify until it either succeeds (has at least a few users who are happy with it, and it’s growing) or fails (unable to get a few first users), and so put LinkQR on hold.
- Dashify received two 5-star reviews.
- Dashify’s website went live.
Metrics
| Project | Time spent (hours) | Metric | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dashify | 27.0 | active installs | <10 (+0) |
| revenue | $0 (+$0) | ||
| undo.studio | 6.8 | posts written | 6 (+2) |
| visitors | 537 (+454) | ||
| johnjago.com | 14.7* | posts written | 1 (+1) |
| visitors | 38,298 (+37,771) | ||
| Growing an audience | 0.4 | Twitter followers | 61 (+8) |
* Of course, I spent some of these hours redesigning things, and only about 8 of them writing. 😭
In total, I worked 48.9 “deep work” hours on these projects, which is 15 more hours than last month. I’m still a little short of the “regular work hours” comparison I made in my previous reflection, which I calculated allows for around 65 hours of deep work.
The spike in visitors to my website was the result an article I wrote and submitted to Hacker News about an unrelated topic. A few people visited Dashify’s website from that, but the chances of them being in market for something like Dashify were slim to none. 90% of those visits bounced, meaning they only viewed the one article and then exited. So, it goes to show that high numbers don’t really amount to anything if they’re not related to your actual goal. However, it also shows that putting in the hours is sometimes worth it. I think a post I put just 1 hour into wouldn’t have been received so well. I do also want to mention that it was immediately taken down in a subreddit I shared it in. You never know.
In April, I’m going full-time on these projects, hoping to find one that can have a few customers and eventually turn into a business. Maybe it’s Dashify, maybe something else. Let’s see!