Traveling and working is stressing me out

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 I have to be working on Branch - stressing out about it doesn’t really help. And who knows when I have 6 weeks to just bum around with my fiancé the next time? Better enjoy that as much as possible.

We just spent 12 full days in Tucson, AZ and it was great to have a routine and a “permanent” base during that time. I found a great coffee shop I went to almost every day while she went to the University (that’s the main purpose of her trip) and we found a lot of time to explore the surroundings as well. I actually got quite a lot of stuff done, including calls with customers and other interesting people. I also spent some time rethinking a lot of the conceptual parts of Branch which was great (but talk about stressful, when you begin throwing every assumption up in the air).

What did the Maker do #

First of all, I had a big “revelation” about how deployments should work in Branch. I’m going to talk more about this when I have something more to show. The short version is that deployments should be “flows”, just like build flows. That will allow me to add a bunch of different predefined steps to supports all kinds of random deployment workflows. I’ve been wire framing and taking a lot of notes about this. Also, I immediately presented the idea to a bunch of potential users - see next section.

I also realized that it’s time to spend some time on the conceptual parts of building Branch, including terminology, structure and hierarchy. I prefer working on these things while it’s still relatively easy for me to shake things up without worrying too much about breaking changes etc.

Finally, I began work on an actual landing page for Branch. I want to be spending more time on marketing and build up my launch list. It’s time to move on from the Manifesto I currently have that doesn’t do a great job of showing what Branch is and does. Here’s an early preview:

Still working on the copy ;-)

What did the Manager do #

When I had my realization about deployments, I didn’t immediately jump into build-mode. I was actually pretty proud that instead I reached out to a few potential users and scheduled calls with them. It gave me some good insights and was a great excuse to catch up and hear how things are working out for the.

I also spend some time internally debating if it’s worth spending time on rebuilding deployments at this point in time. My conclusion was that it’s okay to spend some time on it, but definitely not all my time. I’m all for moving fast and being agile. I’m also all for solving 1 specific problem for a small niche and then expand from there. However, I’ve realized that by rebuilding deployments I’ll actually be 10 times more agile. I can still focus on a small niche, but if it doesn’t work out, I can focus on another one with a very small effort. I’m basically turning deployments into a very basic “programming language” that I can tweak based on the user I’m trying to help.

The above was part of working out my overall priorities, which is something I also spent some time on in the past couple of weeks.

I’m using Laravel Nova for my backend and it’s been great to get an overview of who is actually using Branch. I have a bout 20 beta testers at the moment, so it’s not an overwhelming amount of data. However, I didn’t have a great overview of how far each user had gone on their “user journey”. Now that’s all visualized in a basic CRM in Notion and I know exactly where each of them are. That helped me reach out to them individually and try to understand how I could help them.

Finally I had a few exciting calls with interesting people in the WordPress community. I can’t share too much from these calls, but it’s great to feel that I have support for Branch within the “core” of the WordPress community!

Over and out 📞