I’ve been on family vacation for the past week, but managed to squeeze in a few calls and a pretty interesting “side project”. Next week I’m headed to the US to meet with TinySeed Batch 1 in Minnesota. I can’t wait to get to hang out with everyone!

What did the Maker do

The most exciting thing I worked on this week is my integration with Pantheon, the hosting company. For now, it’s primarily a side project or maybe an R&D project. They don’t offer an API, but they do offer a command line interface (CLI). I’ve managed to do some pretty cool stuff with their CLI, like present you with a list of sites to set up CI/CD for on Branch:

I’m pretty excited about that one.

I also started to add some stuff around usage enforcement in the app. I added a progress bar to the app sidebar that shows how many free builds you have left in your trial. I’m curious to see how this will help convert...

A few months ago, I wrote about how I need to “blow people’s minds” with Branch. My thesis was that adding “predefined steps” or templates would be the killer feature for Branch. The barrier of entry for many of the other CI/CD tools is sky high. One way that Branch can be significantly different is by making a lot of WordPress specific assumptions that other tools simply can’t. By assuming that a project is WordPress based, I can present the user with a menu of pick-and-choose steps to add to their build pipeline. This week I took the first baby steps towards this.

The other day I added the concept of “templates” to Branch. It’s a poor man’s version with just a drop down menu, but I actually kinda blew my own mind. Here’s how templates currently looks in Branch:

It probably took me an hour to add this, but the benefit to the user is really high. I knew it would be an important...

Last week was mostly spent in Berlin attending 2 conferences: HostCamp and WordCamp Europe. HostCamp is a small invite-only event for leaders in the WordPress hosting space that I was lucky enough to be invited to. WordCamp Europe is the largest gathering of WordPress developers in the World - 3000 of them!

On Tuesday afternoon, when I was ready to board my flight, I got a note from one of the HostCamp organizers, who had a question about my lightening talk. Oops! I was not aware that I was scheduled to do that… Fortunately, it was only 5 minutes and I was going to talk about some of the topics from the Branch Manifesto. Not too difficult, and it actually went pretty alright. The conference was a great opportunity to connect with some of the hosting companies in the WordPress space and their partner agencies.

The next 3 days were all about WordCamp Europe. It was an intense week of...

Since my last update, Branch has been announced as one of the startups chosen for the TinySeed startup accelerator. If you didn’t already, you can read the different announcements here:

• My blog
• The TinySeed website
• The WP Tavern

Being a part of TinySeed feels like exactly the right thing for Branch. There hasn’t been a single second where I’ve had second thoughts about it. We are only about a month in and the community is already proving to be really valuable. We share our goals, challenges and have weekly calls with the TinySeed team, founders and mentors. It’s awesome to have access to this community whenever a problem arise. I can already tell that it’s helping me stay on track and not get too lost.

In my last update, I mentioned that I was struggling a bit with finding the right focus, or balance, in my day to day work. I had a conversation recently with a friend in the Danish...

Finding the right focus is difficult in a startup - especially when only 1 person has to do most things. This has materialized in a few different ways in the past weeks, both in terms of product direction and managing my own time.

In personal news I’ve made it to Denmark, where I split my time between my parents house and my little cabin that I bought last year. My fiancé is still in the US, but is returning soon as well. I’m finding it much easier to get a lot of work done now that I’m no longer on the road. I even manage to find time to go fishing and walk around in the woods when I need a break from work.

What did the Manager do

Something I’ve been struggling with recently is making sure I get enough feedback on the product. I kinda felt like I had burnt through my initial list of people who were interested in trying Branch. I was starting to think I should spend more time on...

I’m writing this update from Oakland airport on my last day in the US before heading to Denmark for the summer. It’s been a crazy 6 weeks, beginning with MicroConf in Vegas and then traveling through 8 states with my fiancé. It’s been a challenge to work from the road, but looking back a lot of things have been put in motion in the past few weeks.

I had a great call a few days ago with an agency owner. The reason of the call was a comment he slipped at MicroConf, which I’m going to try to paraphrase here:

We pay pretty much nothing for Buddy. I mean, it’s like a hundred bucks a month or something.

For context, Buddy is a CI/CD tool and basically a competitor to Branch. This comment was so fascinating to me. WordPress developers are known to be pretty price sensitive, but this guy thought that $100/month was cheap. I needed to know more!

I straight up told him “Hey, I’m not going to...

For almost 4 weeks, my fiancé and I have been driving around the US visiting friends and family and doing touristy tourist stuff. It’s been a great trip so far, but it is also stressing me out a little bit - and it really shouldn’t…

WP Pusher was founded while traveling around in SE Asia in 2014, so it’s kind of built into the DNA of the business to be remote. However, in the past few years I’ve had a pretty stable base in Glasgow, going to my co-working space almost every day. I’m no longer used to working from coffee shops and hour here and there. That makes it really hard to travel around while working on a new business. On the one hand, I feel bad if I’m not present and taking in all the great experiences we get to have here. On the other hand, I feel stressed out if I don’t move forward as fast as I’d like on Branch. I really need to remind myself how silly this is. I have the time...

If this post ends somewhere mid-sentence it’s because I have literally melted while typing it. I’m currently in Tucson, Arizona, after a few weeks of traveling around the US 🇺🇸. Let’s just say it was a warm welcome!

My biggest realization in the past few weeks has been this: I need to blow some minds. Context:

WP Pusher (my other product) has a magic feel to it. It’s very easy to get started with and it does a lot of “secret” stuff behind the scenes which feels kind of magical. It’s happened a few times that people have gone on Twitter and used the hashtag mindblown after trying it for the first time. Heck, Justin Jackson even recorded a YouTube video after tweeting about it.

The current, and very early, version of Branch is pretty good. It does some really cool stuff, but it’s not blowing any minds yet. Now that I have a pretty basic version, it’s time to start working on something...

This update is going to be a short one. Most of what I’ve been up to isn’t really visible from the outside - mainly talking to users, fixing bugs, administrative work and so on. All the not-so-glamorous parts of building a software business.

This weekend I’m flying from Copenhagen to Vegas to attend my first MicroConf (growth). I’m super pumped about going, except for the 13 hours of flying… If you are attending too, please say hi on Twitter! After MicroConf I’ll be in the States for about 6-7 weeks in: New York, The Berkshires (MA), Cleveland (OH) and Tucson (AZ). I’d love to meet other developers and makers along my way if I happen to cross your path.

What did the Maker do

Primarily 3 things: improve the on-boarding flow, fix bugs and frantically add new features to try to get a user from 0 to 1. The app is still in it’s early days, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel...