I wanted to spend some time in January setting up some systems for both writing and working that would carry through the rest of the year: I succeeded (more about that in a second), but at the cost of being able to bang out these lovely little updates. Thank you for your patience!
So! What was I up to in January?
Well, first, I hit my monthly goals.
I’m stealing the concept of monthly goals from Michael Lynch, a bootstrapped founder who I’ve been following for a while and who has been kind enough to provide some high-level meta-direction.
These were — well, why don’t I just show you my fancy goals tracker (read: Google Doc typeset in Proxima Nova?)
(I went three for three!)
A couple things of note here:
- Out of the three most important things I could work on, I spent an aggregate 28 hours on them. (As context, I worked for 102 hours in January on ‘non-core’ stuff.) This is…much lower than I imagined. I worry a little bit both about my ability to carve out true proactive time; I rejoice a little bit about how useful that proactive time can be when I focus it on the right things.
- Burying the lede a little bit, perhaps, but Ben has spent the past month working on support and is amazing. I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner; both temporally and mentally, being able to reclaim some energy to work on net-new projects and meta-work has been a (cliche, but!) game-changer.
My goals for February are thematically similar:
- one scaling goal (hire a technical writer for around ten hours a week)
- one refactoring goal (rebuild paid subscriptions integration and unship a bunch of very bad, flaky code)
- one features goal (teams support!)
All of these are a little more ambitious than their predecessors, which feels right. I am in a constant state of re-evaluating what “the correct work” feels like: there are days where I think all I should be doing is sanding down the edges of things and reducing tech debt and working on a decades-long horizon, and then there are days where the best possible outcome feels like shipping and expanding ARPU.
January was filled with highs, really. I wrote a lot of code; I finally sent out an email blast; all-time high in net new MRR, all-time high in page views, all-time high in registrations. The worst complaint I can levy is that I did not allow myself much time to breathe.
(P.S. The goal behind these weeknotes is always meant to err on the side of candid over everything, so if there’s something you want me to write a few hundred words about — reply and let me know.)