Mo’ money, less problems, mo’ focus
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:
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 startup community and he asked me “What answer is it you are looking for? You have talked to so many people. You know what to build, so just build it.” This was pretty much repeated on a recent TinySeed cohort call and I think it’s true. I have so much knowledge that I carry on from WP Pusher in addition to all the people I’ve spoken to in the past few months. I know where to focus to build a killer product! The version of Branch I have now is cool, but it’s not as awesome as it needs to be - and I feel like I know what to build to make it super awesome.
Speaking of… My focus from a product perspective is to simplify the way Branch works and support my new vision for how testing and deployments should work. The short version is that everything, including testing and deployments, are going to be “steps” - just as build steps. This will allow me to offer a big menu of “predefined/template” steps to pick and choose from. I’m super pumped about this vision for the product and I know it’s going to be killer. There’s nothing like that available for WordPress at the moment. There’s just a liiittle refactoring that I need to do to make this possible… So that’s my focus right now.
I’m also attending WordCamp Europe next week - If you are going to be there in Berlin, hit me up. I’d love to meet up!
What did the Manager do #
The Manager has been busy with the TinySeed announcement and loads of planning. The new vision for the product was not something I came to in 5 minutes… The basic idea started forming in my head a few months ago when I was in Arizona. Since then I’ve done a lot of research, testing and talked to a lot of people. Last week I really sat down and started drawing out how this would look.
I have also been working with a company to do the books for Branch, which will hopefully free up more of my time. That’s the less glamorous side of running a business… But it’s needs to happen!
What did the Maker do #
Something I’ve spent a lot of time doing in the past few weeks is playing around with Branch. I’ve done a ton of experimentation to see what I could push the product to do. I also wanted to know which limitations I would face with the new way I want testing and deployments to work. I learned a lot of important stuff in the process.
One really cool thing I did was spinning up a WordPress test site in the background of the build process. In addition to that, I managed to get the Codeception testing framework to run against that WordPress test site. I can’t wait to build this as “predefined/template” steps, so anyone can just add that to their build flows and have an easy way to write acceptance tests for their WordPress sites. Again, this is currently not something that anyone else offers, so it’s very exciting.
Another cool thing I did today was to refactor the current way deployments work and turn it into a build step. There’s still work to do, but basically I was able to delete of bunch of Branch code and add that as a simple build step as well - this is something that’ll need to be a “predefined/template” step as well. It’s kinda mind blowing to me that I’m able to remove parts of the source code and let Branch do the work itself… It’s like one time when I used WP Pusher to update WP Pusher. Mind blowing! In the future Branch will have a whole bunch of different “predefined/template” steps that can deploy to different platforms etc.
Gotta run! I got code to write! 😉🤓⌨️