Heads down in India

Week 58 Retrospective

I’m writing a slightly abbreviated retro this week as I’m in the middle of a rather-intense and full week of management offsite meetings for Dimagi.

The meetings themselves have been overall quite interesting. It’s amazing how different the problems faced by a complex organization of 150 people are when compared to the little self-driven projects from my own life. Every issue is harder than you would expect because the scalable answer to any question is never “figure it out and get it done”. It’s org charts and RACI matrices, business models and budgets, hiring decisions and—above all else—meta-discussions on how to effectively design and plan for long term work.

While these things aren’t necessarily my favorite things in the world, they are obviously important and hard and so I find myself naturally drawn to them nonetheless. Also, it’s fun being surrounded by people who are smarter and more thoughtful than I am and being able to learn from them.

Am I happy with how I spent my time?

Mostly, though was a bit Dimagi-heavy.

Week 58 time breakdown

Week 58 time breakdown

Outside of the Dimagi push I spent most of my time building a new feature for Chat Stats—a data visualization that shows how likely people are to like someone else’s messages. I put this feature in the “pro” plan, and added a call to action to upgrade to it.

And I made a few more sales!

Chat stats is now up to $80 in revenue since I opened up payments on April 11—$50 of which comes from strangers. It’s enough that I am starting to think about how to switch over to a traction mindset and try to drive more traffic to it (as well as starting to think about targeting a new platform).

What’s up next?

This week I’m fully heads down on the Dimagi meetings so am not planning on making any proactive progress on any of my side-projects.

Next week I’m on vacation so will also probably not make much progress.

When I get back to Cape Town in two weeks I’ll do a reset and figure out what to do next.

cheers,

—Cory