Tag: Indie development

Posted on

Mistakes and challenges, shipping an MVP in 90 days

Mistakes launching a product in less than 90 days

It’s been a bit more than two months since I decided to create something around a problem I care about. I deeply hate meetings. Inefficient meetings are a plague. I am building a solution to help you improve your meetings. What final shape that will have, I am still not sure, it will definitely change along the way, but it is something I want to tackle…. #buildinpublic

Speed is key. I know, it is not as fast as developing and testing in a week as @shl process (I have a couple of ideas I’ll test his process with, but not this one). I had a few domains saved for side projects and that’s the one better fitted for the project…

My goals these past months have been a) validate if there if it is a problem want to have solved (can it get traction?) b) if I can deliver the technical parts, c) can I deliver value by solving the most annoying parts of meetings…

So far it is going great, but I am gonna review some of the mistakes I have made this time. I think it is also important to review your errors. They are not the only ones, but the more painful ones.

Diving fast into developing something you do not know…

Launching the Chrome Calendar Extension. I had zero experience with extensions. I have learned a lot about it during this time. Something that is kinda tricky when developing extensions is there is no easy way to declare environment variables.

Why is that important?

The first time I submitted the extension to the Chrome Store, I forgot to change the (hardcoded) API endpoints! It was approved, but was making the calls to… localhost ?‍♂️. Another important learning there.

Every submission to the Chrome Store goes through a cycle of up to 10 days to be re-approved. Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes more. Insight from all this?

  • Run an exhaustive checklist, making sure that all that could be broken is not broken…
  • Regressive tests are your friends. Not at this stage though, many things will change. But eventually will have a set of regressive tests to run before submitting. Testing chrome extension is a different beast. Will probably write about it at some point…

Mistake number 2, not checking my requirements when picking my stack

Without going into much detail, I found out, when I was already committed with a stack (having developed a substantial part of what I had planned), that some of the things I wanted to be able to do, were…

complicated. NextJs comes with a couple of great advantages, like having an API out of the box. Well, that was not easily deployed on my platform of choice. Also generating dynamic pages had some complexities.

In the end, I was able to overcome those hurdles, but I had at least a couple of stressful days.

Insight?

  • Listing the critical needs of your project. Going through them, and checking they are available in your stack… can save you a lot of headaches.

I think the main lesson is it is okay to make mistakes. Shipping fast, finding insights sooner, make up for the mistakes.

Posted on

Make your Calendar experience 10X better

? Announcement, I am launching Becar.io, Calendar Extension  (meaning “intern” in Spanish). A better experience for people that have lots of meetings and are looking for ways to make their meetings harder to ignore, more impactful and effective. It allows users to add an interactive agenda for every meeting. Asking attendees to prepare, contribute and provide feedback. All without leaving your favourite Calendar.

Becar.io, supercharge your Google Calendar, make your meetings experience 10x better
Supercharge your Google Calendar meetings without leaving the calendar

Why am I launching it? 

I decided two months ago to make a personal commitment to develop solutions to a couple of problems that seem interesting. The first one? meetings. I do hate having unproductive meetings. My theory is that I am not the only one.

How bad is that as a problem?

The Harvard Business review returns a staggering number of 16K documents related to meetings. From why meetings go wrong, to how to design an agenda or how to run a meeting. I am fairly sure the problem is there.

Think about the last time you attend a poorly organized meeting. Have you ever had people attending meetings with no idea of what’s going on or any homework done? Tons of meetings that should never have taken place to start with. Thousands of wasted man-hours

The overall experience of having meetings is pretty much sub-optimal. There is a general assumption that some negative aspects are impossible to change, a form of learned helplessness. My bet is there are a few powerful opportunities in that problem space. At different stages, pre, during and post-meeting. Becar.io is the first iteration of a solution to the problem.

What it does do for you?

It reduces friction when organizing a meeting by making it easier structuring them with templates. You can ask attendees to do stuff and hold them accountable. Every meeting has a page where all attendees can see what is expected from them and who has done their homework before the meeting. All without leaving your Calendar, using a browser extension.

Make sure all your meetings are PERFECT.
Enforce best practices and accountability.
Having unstructured, wild meetings is a choice

To be honest, it is still rough around the edges and only the key features work. But hey, launch fast, get feedback quickly and iterate your way until it is something people love.

Check it out, sign up or ping me to get access and I’ll send an invite. If you have meetings back to back on a daily basis and you are up for a quick chat about your problems I’s be SUPER grateful if you let me know.

Calendar stats, find out how much of your precious time goes to meetings and show how much all those meetings cost
Get insights on your time allocation and associated costs

P.s: something I decided to add last minute. You get stats on how you distribute your time, how much time you spend on meetings, and how much that costs. You can track if your time spent in meetings goes down over time with better-organized meetings.

Previously oorei dot com | Comments are disabled