April 23, 2019
Alrighty, fifteen minutes on the clock...
I got a couple big PRs out the door in the past 24 hours, with the most externally visible being a change to allow slugs as archive links rather than just PKs. This means that the URLs just look nicer (newsletter.buttondown.email/archive/may-updates instead of newsletter.buttondown.email/archive/6647a42a-0d52-45ac-8eda-c1a5d836dbec.)
This was also a huge headache to get across the line. I tried to merge it last week and it promptly exploded a couple things. It, like so many things I'm doing recently, acts as a reminder of places where my testing/QA harness is lacking:
- I don't have any custom domains set up in staging, and of course there was an issue with custom domains.
- I don't have a large enough corpus of data to reveal issues like "slugs aren't guaranteed to be globally unique."
- Migrations are still slow!!
I'm also almost done with my migration to Postmark for transactional emails, which I'm really excited about. This has been a much more painless process, thanks to some clever abstractions I have kicking around for transactional vs. non-transactional emails. (The entire PR is just like, twenty lines of code, and a whole lot of testing.)
This past week felt bad, and I think I know how to attribute that — when master is red (which it was, just due to transient issues) and when I have psychic friction around merging / deploying things, it saps my energy and my confidence. This seeps into even small things like customer service requests (which again are still too voluminous) and marketing efforts.
Still, got two new customers. The hypergrowth from February and March has dropped off a bit, but MRR is growing at a clip of around $100 a month, which is honestly thrilling to me. If I'm getting a non-trivial chunk of new paying customers every month without doing any marketing or outreach, I'm fascinated by what will happen if I put in even a token effort.
It feels good to have this semi-private space to rant about things that are going poorly, so two others:
- I'm still behind on operational tasks. My Things to-do list is too large, and I think I'm coping by finding make-work to do rather than dig myself out of the hole.
- Paid subscription beta has gone fine, but I'm not finding as much inbound interest as I had hoped.
I wrote last week about three things I wanted to do. I did....one point five of them. Not awful, but not great either; but it was a productive week through other lenses (I shipped UTM source imbuing, which I haven't even talked about yet — not even in the body of this newsletter — which is a sign that I was more excited to implement it than to have it implemented!)
This week is going to be a little busy, but the weekend should be free. Again, my three things:
- Launch weeknotes in earnest. (I'll define 'earnest' as hooking it up to Connect, blogging / tweeting about it, and adding a link to somewhere in marketing material.)
- Finish Postmark onboarding. (If I don't get this done today, it's because I'm a lazy coward.)
- Get to Inbox Zero.