My March 2019 Retrospective

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Introduction

I've started a digital product development agency to earn a living, get better at product design & development and to create space to develop my own products. (Working title: "Happy Path Studios")

As of this writing I have two clients and both are interested in improving existing offline processes through the development of software. German-speakers like to refer to this as "Digitalisation" and it seems this would be a good focus for an agency.

This month I focused most of my time designing and developing the first version of an app for one of my clients, axova.ch, a solar-panel installation service provider.

March Goals

Even though I missed quite a few of my goals, I think it's more a reflection of my difficulties in predicting what I want to be doing in the month to come. I'm very happy with my focus on the Axova (opens in a new tab) app as well as with the progress I've made there. I wouldn't want to sacrifice that for any gains in the above categories. What I'm taking from this is that I need to be more careful when setting my monthly goals. I've overestimated in the past, but this month I also set goals I lost interest in.

Kaizen: Account for your tendency to overestimate what you can get done. Provoking Question: How might I set goals at the beginning of the month I still support at the end of the month?

Time Distribution

Project Distribution Axova App 39.9% Learning 19.9% German 14.1% General (Business/Productivity/Alignment) 12.5% Reading / Summarizing 4.7% Personal (Administration, Bills, Chores, etc.) 2.7% Language Learning Logistics / Research 1.8% My Basel Startup 1.6% RBR 0.9% Product Discovery 0.8% Following My Curiosity 0.6% Pingcoin 0.5%

Total: 155:56:47 (~35 per week)

Most of the Learning was spent learning Ionic using Maximilian Schwarzmueller's Ionic course (opens in a new tab) on Udemy (which is great). This is the second developer course I'm taking on Udemy and I find myself surprised again how good the quality is. It seems like there's stronger competition between course authors on Udemy vs. subscription platforms such as Pluralsight which results in higher quality courses. It's also worth noting that you can find some courses on Pluralsight or on Oreilly's learning platform that are also avaialble on Udemy. You're just missing out on the super valuable reviews on Udemy.

I also spent some hours figuring out how to best learn German (Language Learning Logistics / Research) and then 14% of my time (1 hour every morning) learning German. I'm not sure if my approach is worth writing about yet, though.

Updates by indie product

Rapid Breakup Recovery

Spent almost no time on RBR (opens in a new tab) this month, because I wanted to focus on the work for my client. This also means that I still haven't filled the vacuum left by removing drip. In other words I haven't had an automatic email sequence for my subscribers in a while.

Key accomplishments

Revenue

Pingcoin

Spent almost no time on Pingcoin (opens in a new tab) this month. I fixed one bug that caused the app to crash for users.

Key accomplishments

Revenue

- $0

Total Indie Revenue March

What went well

What did not go well?

What should I do differently

Kaizen

Provoking Questions