2024 Q1 – Status Update

Hey friends,

It's crazy to think that the first Quarter of 2024 has already wrapped and is behind us. I genuinely don't know where the time has disappeared to. In any way, in the spirit of learning in public and accountability, it's time for a quick recap, seeing what worked, what didn't and the steps to move forward.

Mental Health

My first thought was that nothing changed, that depression still made it hard to function at all on certain days and on others it made it difficult to focus or get any work done. While that's in many ways true and there were multiple challenging periods over these months, I feel like I am taking steps in the right direction. Since March the sun has occasionally started to come out in Italy, and I've been using that as opportunity to do some mindfullness in nature, sit in the park nearby our house and just enjoy the moment. The rays of sunshine poking through the thick green leaves, the sounds of dogs playing fetch with their hoomans in the park and the smell of Spring. I'm starting to get back into the habbit of putting my phone away more often before bed, and instead reading something on my Kindle or paperback. It's small steps, but they compound. I have successfully avoided the gym 99% of the time since January, and with the plan to practice the art of showing up, I hope to manage to be there at least 1x a week.

Key Takeaway: small steps and actions can lead to great results, taking more time 'outside' to just be

TinyPaws

Back towards the end of March in Done is Better Than Perfect I said I hoped to have an MVP out by the middle of April. Unfortunately, as of the 7th of May, I didn't even start work on TinyPaws's implementation. I don't know where, but somehow the I lost track of time. There constantly were "fires" to put out, my attention needed on other things and I didn't find have the energy to start. I hope that I'll change this in the coming weeks through a good schedule and time-planning. I know that once I get the ball rolling, it'll be easier to get to the finish line.

The harsh reality here is that there may come a day when I'll have to evaluate if I have the time to build TinyPaws myself. I'd love to, I'm craving sitting down and coding again, creating a tangible product that can be used by so many people... .but there will come a moment where I'll have to sit down first with myself and then with Natalia to see whether possibly outsourcing the development may be a better idea. I know deep down it probably is, but I still have a shard of hope that I'll make the time and bring my "baby project" to launch.

Key Takeway: I want to do better time planning and task management, and just start with the worst possible, most minimum-minimum viable product and iterating from there. Just start will be the motto for this month. 

Recommended.by

My initial goal was to have recommended.by ready and out within a week or two of thinking of the idea back in January. Needless to say, that didn't work out as I had hoped or expected, but I've managed to do a lot of progress on this one. Firstly, Natalia created a wonderful logo and logotype for the project, and with the help of V0 (the generative AI Model that creates React Code), ShadcnUI and a lot of "You've used your daily limit" on ChatGPT, the first barebones version is very close to launch into beta. I'll be writing a seperate article about learning "Next.js" and refreshing React, and coming back to a terminal and code editor to code something after beeing out of the loop for so long. I hope that by the end of May recommended.by will be officially launched. I've also taken the advice echoed by the #buildInPublic twitter community, and removed all feature ideas I had except the very core service from the plan for now. I'll focus on getting "the one" feature that is needed for the site to work, and will then add other ideas as demands proofs itself. It's time to not build for the pleasure of building, but to start selling.

Here's a non-comprehensive list of things I wanted to include in v1, but decided to postpone. Let me know which one should take priority.

• AI Transcripts of Interviews to generate profiles for thought-leaders

• The possibility to integrate GENIUS or other affiliate links

• Pulling TV Shows, Movie Posters and ISBN Book covers automatically

• Email capture for changes of lists/updates

Key Takeaway: Just ship it and build on it later, do 1 thing and do it well, use your own products.

Nutrified

As Q1 closes in, Nutrified has had many wins this year, from returning customers who love the product, to the word being spread to new pawrents joining our ranks. We've migrated the site to Hetzner, making it much smoother and faster, while also cutting infrastructure cost. We've shipping our first package to the UK and have just introduced Europewide shipping with DHL E-commerce. There have been tons of small wins, but the truth is Nutrified didn't get all the time it deserved this quarter.

I wanted to do more, much more, but got stuck on three fronts:

• Perfectionism

• Shiny New Object

• External Events

I wanted to have a bustling social media presence across both Nutrified and the Ampawssadors channels. Professionally produced content, user generated content, highlighting our ampawssadors from previous events and building a community.
Instead, I have not yet made a long-term post on either of our platforms, and instead of just starting, iterating and improving along the way, it's gotten stuck.

I also got so focused on fairly unimportant but incredibly hard to achieve side-tasks. These at the moment seemed super important, but in fact weren't important at all if I had just been posting. Before I could realize that, it got "personal" and I spent way more time and energy trying to make it happen instead of just letting go. I was dragged. Long live my ADHD brain.

This also ties into the shiny new object syndrome, whereby I had so many wonderful ideas (and so many great domains), that instead of doing work which wasn't as stimulating (e.g optimizing the checkout flow) but incredibly needed, I work-crastinated on things which were more stimulating. I'm aware of it now and moving forward I'll try to do both micro and macro plans, on a daily and weekly level, to be able to stay on track and focused on not only what's important on one day, but what's needed to move things forward.

The last part was external events. I knew the start of the year would have some other commitments that needed to be taken care of before I would be able to fully focus on what I wanted to - Nutrified, but they ended up taking considerably more time than planned. That, added to the fact that I was going up against automated systems at big corporations (yes, I am looking at you Meta), just sucked time and energy out of the day. The majority of things is now finally closed, and for the few things that are open, I will make blocks every other day.

Nonetheless, I look at everything we did at Nutrified this quarter as a success and steps in the right direction.

Key Takeaways: Done is better than perfect, learn as you go, let go that which you can't control, look at the bigger picture, don't get stuck in a ditch - try something else and come back to it later

Domain Lookup Info

This free tool, available at domainlookup.info, came out more out of necessity than wanting to build a free tool. In our ongoing dispute against a domain registered by a cyber-squatter (separate article on all of that once the case is resolved).
To be able to quickly be able to stay on top of domain statuses, I made a simple Telegram bot which when given the domain, will return the WHOIS information. This worked really well, until the WHOIS server of the sketchy registrar went offline and never recovered (4+ weeks now). Doing a deep dive on other options, I found out that ICANN (the non-profit that runs the internet) have implemented a sunset date for WHOIS in January 2025, and that RDAP will take it's place. Having never heard of the new tool, I found out that the registrars publish data in a machine-readable JSON format. This allows the end user to cut out any middleman database which may not have the most up to date info on it. I quickly built a react app which first gets the RDAP list from ICANN, and then queries both the Registry (for most up-to-date data) and then the Registrar, for any contact information of privacy services that will allow one to contact the user. After a full day of coding this, I realized that the domain I was after was scooped up by the very same sketchy registar. I thought that I'd wasted a whole day making a tool I won't ever need again, but have shared access to it on a few online communities. It turned out that people took a lot of value in it and appreciated the work, so I hammered in some better error-handling, more functionality to track things others would be interested in, and for the first time ever used Cloudflare Pages to deploy the app. It looks terrible (forgive my design choices), but it works and will be able to stay online forever. (The majority of the heavy lifting is done in-browser not requiring a server.

I'll see in the future if I can monetize this, introduce a 'premium' subscription with daily, weekly or monthly tracking, or access to a telegram interface. Those are all great ideas I'd love to have time to explore, but will likely never get to. Or I'll find some time when I will need any of those concepts in another project, and will use domainlookup to learn how to. For now though, I am just happy the tool is helping people and that my day wasn't lost. I will definitely update the design though next week, forgive me for that.

Key Takeaway: Open Source & sharing things for free can have a great impact and help keep us motivated, simple & dumb are the best ideas to quickly implement to scratch your own itch. 

The Next Few Months

These months were incredibly intensive, challenging and at times overwhelming. A lot has not yet gone to plan the way I wanted to, but I'm focused on the small things that went right and the little victories.

The biggest goals for the next quarter are:

• Gym + Walk/Run at least 1x a week

• 1 hour of nature/mindfullness a day

• Launch recommended.by

• Launch TinyPaws

• Ship a package to customers in each of the 28 countries DHL E-comerce operates in.

• Be active on all company socials at least 1x per 2 days.

Thanks for joining me on this recap and helping keep me accountable.

Love from Limassol,

Julian