The right focus
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 marketing instead of just working on the product. However, before deciding to do that I gave the list another shot. I tried to completely change the messaging to be about “testing WordPress” instead of “CI/CD for WordPress”. Apparently this was something that resonated with a new group of people. The email got me 13 new people who were interested in trying out Branch and I’ve already set up onboarding calls with a few of them. This felt like a big win.
I also worked with the developer who’s turning my design for the landing page into code. This has been a great lesson in delegation and it’s been working out really well. The site is now live in a very early version on BranchCI.com, so check it out! (I’m tired of people calling it “Use Branch”).
Finally I did a lot of admin stuff, signed an important document and hired a bookkeeping service to run the books.
What did the Maker do #
Last week I worked a lot on the landing page and I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out. Shoutout to Ena for the illustrations!
This week I started working on a lot of different testing case studies. This is basically preparing me to onboard the folks that were interested primarily in testing. I think this will be a very big selling point for Branch. I spent the past 50 hours trying to make WordPress run inside of Branch and finally made it work this morning. That’s very exciting because I can basically just spin up WordPress sites up on the fly if they are needed in tests etc. Very cool!
Oh, and it’s Garfish (“hornfisk” in Danish) season here in Denmark, so I’m trying to finish work as soon as possible every day so I can go fishing - and for the past few days I’ve eaten fried Garfish for dinner! 🎣