My Bootstrapping Journey
Week 3 — Retrospective
Read last week’s article here.
When sitting down for these weekly write-ups, I always feel lost. I have the worst imaginable memory when it comes to telling people about my last couple of days. I always need my calendar for that.
My Look Into This Week’s Calendar
To get an overview of what to write about, I check the reminders I ticked off in Google Calendar.
My calendar as of writing this
How I Shouldn’t Plan My Day
I always add reminders into my calendar. I can’t always predict how long a task will take, so I end up feeling completely unstructured at the end of the day. I might for example add twelve reminders throughout my day. Sometimes, I finish them quicker than expected, but too often, I end up being behind schedule. I then have the problem of not wanting to reschedule my day after every task. That’s why I just leave things where they are. At the end of the day I feel disappointed and guilty because I didn’t finish everything that I initially planned.
Project-Lists vs Calendar
That’s why I try to put as few tasks as possible into my calendar. A calendar isn’t the place for keeping tasks anyway. Google’s integration of their reminder system into the calendar just makes it very easy to get an overview of what’s going on.
As a solopreneur we might initially enjoy the thought of doing what we want to do all the time. That’s a really cool thing. Doing what you feel the most motivation for at any given time makes it easier to, well, be motivated, and you actually have to plan less, which saves time.
The problem I had with this absolute freedom is that I often just ended up doing nothing. I’d ask myself what I’d accomplished at the end of the day, and felt really bad for it being so little. Shouldn’t I have been able to do that in four hours? Couldn’t I have achieved more?
Be Your Own Boss — Why I need some guidance
If you can’t be your own boss, you’ll have to get a job. But that’s not what I want.
“If you can’t follow your own plans, you’ll have to follow someone else’s.”
If I had a boss, would she be satisfied by my work? If I want to work for myself, I have to hold my own commitments. Freedom means that I have the choice to do what I want to do, so why would I not follow through with my own goals and plans? I really want Find Better Questions to be a success, so why would I not give my best to achieve that? Am I limiting my own freedom by not doing what I want to do?
I know that I’m not always capable of choosing what to work on, so I try to plan my time when I have the energy for that. Committing myself to certain tasks can take more energy than completing them, so being spontaneous about my day isn’t the best idea.
What My Calendar Actually Looks Like
Product work is called “Hackathon” in my calendar because Google’s Calendar has a cover image for that.
I just have to toggle the visibility of one of my calendars to see how I try to schedule my day.
Planning chunks of time for certain activities helps me fight procrastination.Let me illustrate my schedule with my current projects. Find Better Questions deserves most of my time. 10:15–16:00 is devoted to that. I always know what the top priority for marketing is. I also know what the top priority for the product is, without thinking too much about it.
With my current plan I make sure to split my time effectively between working on the product and marketing it. It also forces me to make progress on both sides on every day. Sticking to this schedule turned out to be relatively easy for me.
Tools I Use for Planning
I really like the ideas behind Focuster, but it lacks features at many points. I mostly use Dynalist for keeping track of everything. I still want to build my own task / project / life management system at some point. I actually already started.
So, What Did I Do This Week?
Writing
I started writing a just for fun article on decentralized businesses. Decentralizing ownership over a business is something quite many people work on in the blockchain industry, but distributing the decision making and the work on a business is something that’s pretty much impossible.
I answered two questions on Quora.One of them only received 7 views so far …
I also published How to Push out SaaS as Quick as Possible on Medium. It tries to answer how to best build a SaaS and which tech to use therefor.
Product
I don’t like admitting it, but Find Better Questions still has some bugs. I resolved some of them this week. One I didn’t fix is that the tool doesn’t create any lists for some people. It’s terrible, and I couldn’t solve it yet.
I took some of the new landing page’s design and added it to the app. So now the pricing table is the same on both versions.
Marketing
- I talked to some people via email.
- I’ve written some comments on Indie Hackers.
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I started writing some email campaigns.I currently have some emails in place, but I guess I should leverage that channel a little more. Especially for those who already downloaded the app. They currently only receive one or two emails after that automatically. Which actually isn’t too bad. It allows me to manually write them something, but I can be forgetful.
- I hunted my other project’s Beta on Product Hunt. Go ahead and upvote it. And use it of course. Don’t forget to write me an essay with your feedback.
I decided on not using this Unsplash credit text anymore. Who cares about that? The reader doesn’t. Nor does the photographer. At least I don’t when it comes to my pictures.
That’s about it for the week. Could have been more, couldn’t it?