The 80-Day Startup

80daystartup.com · American English

rss2 wordpress content atom dc sy

Open the feed

https://80daystartup.com/feed/

Last post: Apr 28, 2022
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 0 · 0
Our last check: Answering
Served from: United States
Text score at discovery: 4,874
Format: rss2
Features in the feed: content, atom, dc, sy
Community: wordpress

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

Work/new-life balance
Apr 28, 2022 · original
Earlier this month we wrote about the importance of taking breaks so we can keep running these rollercoaster marathons, which is what running a startup is in many ways. You might have noticed we’ve started another break, this time because of some happy personal news: I became a father a few days ago! I’m happy, proud, and as to be expected, exhausted ;). So it’s time for me to take a break and enjoy time with our little addition to the family (the 18-year startup!). Whenever one of us takes a break we’ll just pause the project/blogging here, as we’re also running our existing business in parallel with this project. We’ll be back soon to continue with daily updates on the work towards finishing the MVP and the launch for Thymer!
Durable tech
Apr 22, 2022 · original
I pay hardly any attention to anything that can be considered the “tech du jour”. When it comes to tech I’m a late adopter (if not a laggard), and unapologetically so. Sometimes I miss out on really cool tech that works amazingly well, but most of the time new tech is a dead end. Either it doesn’t catch on, or it does but it doesn’t work well, and even then it’s likely to get displaced by the new hotness in just a few years. Take smart devices. Are smart home devices here to stay? I don’t doubt it. Do I want to have my house filled with the kind of smart devices that are for sale today? Absolutely not[1]. Smart devices are still hobbyist devices. For people who enjoy tinkering and the never-ending process of making different brands and protocols work together. Do I want a wifi-enabled garage door opener that breaks when some cloud service goes down? I don’t. Nor do I have the patience to
Dogfooding
Apr 20, 2022 · original
Just like it’s easiest to come up with a product idea by solving your own problem, the best way of figuring out how it should work is by dogfooding , i.e. using your own product. For some of the problems we want to fix with Thymer it’s very clear how the app should work and solve them. These are things we’re currently trying to do with a plain text editor but don’t work well. In a way, the workarounds we’re using now because the app doesn’t exist yet are a sort of pre-MVP prototype, giving us plenty of ideas to work with. For some elements of the app, we know what problem it should solve, but we don’t know yet if a solution we came up with on paper (literally, as a paper sketch is usually the first step) works really well. That’s where it’s helpful to build small prototypes to bring the idea to to life. It doesn’t need to be complete yet, but just enough so we can actually start using th
Early user feedback
Apr 20, 2022 · original
When you launch the first version of your product it’s likely to have serious flaws. If you want to discover what these flaws are you’ve got to figure out (a) what your users use your software for and (b) what changes you need to make to make them happier. This sounds trivial, but it’s not. Especially when you’re busy building you can easily forget to pause and think in this critical phase and shred your chances for future product/market fit in the process. First, you want to know what your users are trying to accomplish. This tells you if your users are who you anticipated using your software. If you have the -right- kind of users you want to figure out if your product website is targeted at them, and if your marketing efforts are successful at reaching them. What do I mean by “right users”? Well, very early adopters tend to be different from the users you’ll get down the road. Early ad
Spending time to save time
Apr 15, 2022 · original
Sometimes you’ve thought a design over many times, made a bunch of sketches and think you have a clear idea about how everything works. But sketches and prototypes are very rough by design, so it’s easy to look at the same sketch in different ways, or discover some parts of the concept need more work when you start working on the nitty gritty details. Although everything about a startup and launching an MVP shouts “ship ASAP! ship yesterday!”, quite often taking the extra time to think things over a bit more helps making sure you take the right turn, which saves a lot of time down the road. Today we spent most of the day meeting and going back to the drawing board about some design decisions for Thymer’s core features. Having worked on the app a bit more by now, what features do we really find important? How do we keep the scope for V1 small? How do we balance the fine line between makin
Products want to be platforms
Apr 15, 2022 · original
Imagine two startups. One startup makes a business chat app similar to Slack. The other startup has a business wiki product. In principle, these are very different apps that solve different problems. In practice, both apps face constant pressure from their customers to become more like the other. Users of the chat app start demanding threaded discussions, archived discussions, pinned discussions, rich text options, and the ability to draft responses. Any individual feature might make customers happier and increase retention and conversion rates, but mindlessly adding all these features will turn a good product into an unfocussed mess. You end up with an ugly hybrid app that is half chat half wiki. It doesn’t have a clear audience anymore. You can see how a wiki app can end up in the same place by adding more and more messaging features. Different chimera, but equally bad. It’s a problem
Always be launching
Apr 13, 2022 · original
Every product has a number of major “launch moments”. For example, announcing the availability of a beta version. Or launching the full version to the public. Everyone working on web apps will be familiar with launch days on Product Hunt , Hacker News , and so on. Whatever industry your product is in, there will always be a small number of large publications, events or sites you want to be mentioned on. While these launches are a great way to make some waves, they’re just one-time events. If they are super relevant for your audience, they might result in some initial customers. That’s a great boost after all the work preparing the product and the launch. The one-time spike in traffic, and even the long tail of traffic that will follow over the course of weeks or even months, is not going to define your success however. [1] Rather than being a spark of a magical self-sustaining reaction,
Enjoying the journey
Apr 12, 2022 · original
I’m back from my holiday! We went on a simple road trip from Eindhoven to Marseille , at the Mediterranean sea, with plenty of stops along the way. We enjoyed some good food, hiked in nature, did some sightseeing, read some books. Now I’m well rested and excited to get back to work. Whenever I sit down at my desk after being away for a while I get the opportunity to look at my work with fresh eyes. We tend to work on our projects for a long time. Years on end, usually. It’s easy to lose focus of the big picture when you’re always heads-down working. Stepping back for a while can give you valuable new perspectives. Sometimes, when I return from a break I feel energized and ready to continue working right where I left off. This is the best case scenario. Other times, I ask myself why I’m working on this specific thing, when I could be working on any number of other things instead. In a con
Work-life balance
Apr 1, 2022 · original
We’re going to take a quick break and will be back with our daily updates on April 11th . In the meanwhile, you can find a preview of what we’re building at Thymer.com , or check out the list of all our posts or the recaps of the work so far. From the start on Day -1 , when we built this site, we added a note in our FAQ on how we would work on the 80-Day Startup. Rather than working for 80 days straight, we decided we would take breaks too. Some of the cliches about running a startup being a rollercoaster are really true, and there’s a lot of different tasks to juggle at the same time. For our 80-Day Startup project, on any given day we can work on a combination of code, graphics/UI design, marketing, growing an audience, writing blog posts (more work than we expected to be honest!), replying emails and DMs, configuring a server or anything else that needs doing. Next to that we’re runni
Recap @ Day 59
Mar 31, 2022 · original
Since the last recap, we’ve spent most of the time on the coding side of things again, making a lot of progress on the work on the app. All features we’re working on are the most important core features, which we really need to launch the MVP. Especially the editor itself has a lot of moving parts. As a good editing experience is part of the unique selling proposition for Thymer , a lot of time goes into making this work just the way we want. As we learn a lot about all the bottlenecks in the app as we go, sometimes that means having to throw out some earlier work and rewrite some parts ( Build one to throw away ). Not an easy decision, but it’s really starting to pay off. It’s starting to get really polished in the parts where this matters for the MVP. More and more features as well as performance are starting to get to where we want it to be. We also started work on other core features

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_80daystartup_com_81a6c8440ae332da. More from this site: 80daystartup.com in the Feeds tab.