Monthly Update #1: Shipped products, takeaways

I wanted to give a quick update on my progress of building 10 products this year.

I intend to show you exactly how things happen, how I tackle my ups and downs and share all the things I learn about myself and shipping products.

Since 8.3% of the year is already gone 😱, here is the first update.

Product(s) shipped

Foods Dogs Can Eat: an app that checks if a given human food is good or bad for your dog. You can check it on PH, it was the 4th product of the day.

Revenue generated: $0

It’s not the most crucial goal in the short term; instead, it’s more important for me to take action and ship products. I see increased traffic on Foods Dogs Can Eat, let's see how it goes and I might place ads there sometime in the future.

Building products

I have incredible fun building products. I can easily spend 4-5 hours coding/checking StackOverflow/reading guides/pimping my apps without noticing the time.

I’m in the flow! 🌊

But here is the downside. I fell in love building Dog Food Checker which means I spent way more time tweaking the app.

And it’s not just fixing bugs and adding some features users requested.

I always come up with new ideas to take the app to the next level. These are minor tweaks that could take hours to implement but have a low impact on the product.

The reason I spent time on these is the tempting technological challenge.

But at a certain point, I had to stop working on the app since I need to focus my attention on the next one.

On the other hand, this could be limiting. Maybe I don’t spend sufficient time on improving my products so all of them will be just a bunch of half-ready, incomplete MVPs. 🤔

I’m still trying to figure out the balance.

Marketing products

Since I’m a marketer, I spent way to much time on promoting the app. I lost focus a bit, tried to do everything on my list and wasting time on activities with low potential impact.

That’s why I started working on an MPP (Minimal Promotion Plan) for my products, and I will share the details once I get this done.

The intention is pretty clear, create a simple, minimal plan for promoting different products across multiple channels without spending too much time and resources on it.

The thing is, if you have a great product, marketing should be smooth like driving a ball down the hill, instead of kicking it up the hill trying to beat gravitation.

And you will see that from the reaction of the people. People share your stuff, write a blog post about it, feature in a newsletter, receives a lot of upvotes on Reddit.

These are all excellent indicators which make your product spread since people do the heavy lifting by talking. The goal: ship GREAT products.

Health and energy

Since I’m working full-time, doing some consulting on the side while building products I play this game in hard mode.

The remaining time dedicated to shipping products, relaxing, doing sports and spending time with my wife.

I should never stop doing sports. If I did that, I would be depressed. I also want to spend quality time with my family, watch my favorite series, read some books and go to the cinema. Relaxation is essential.

These pillars keep the whole thing together, but I'm not sure if these will be enough to keep me mentally balanced for the whole year.

I already often feel exhausted after a long day.

Time and energy focus:

There are some things I stopped doing partly or entirely a few months ago:

• Social media: I used to spend around 1.5 hours on Facebook per day, now I’m spending around 5-10 minutes, mostly due to my work.
• Watching TV (I actually stopped this 5 years ago, but this opens up free time
• Other projects: I had to let other side projects and activities go.
• Consulting: I had to say no to some new requests.
• Reading a large number of books: I love reading, and I still read books, but I think if you force yourself reading 2-3, 300-page books every month then you spend more time on consuming content then creating things. There should be a balance that allows you to feed your mind with new ideas while still allowing time to take action and make things happen.
• Doing the dishes: we bought a dishwasher, which probably saved our marriage and also 1-2 hours per week!

Motivation level: On a 1 - 10 scale, my motivation is around 9.

I just got started! But I’m sure dips are coming.

How do you keep yourself mentally balanced?

Coming up:

• 2 new products in February
• MPP plan for makers
• Some techie hacks to save time