Week 7 Retrospective

M-V-P! M-V-P!

MVP

Only an idiot developer would use a name from a fantasy series for a wedding product, says my mean alter-ego

I finally got the MVP out. It’s got a few bugs and some of the styles are broken on mobile. But that’s why it’s an MVP. Feels good to have shipped something that (mostly) works.

Goal Report Card

# Goal Grade
1 Ship placecard MVP and get someone to use it A-
2 Ship idea validation blog C
3 Talk to one or two brides C
4 New batch of possible projects B

Comments

  1. MVP is out and people have used it, though mostly just my friends. Will work on changing that this week.
  2. Idea validation is my white whale. I’ve written 1,500 words already and I feel like it’s only half done. Might have to break it up.
  3. Didn’t talk to any brides this week but have setup some calls for the coming weeks.
  4. Am starting to gel around some new things to explore, and I’m optimistic that some are more viable than the first batch.

Time

Week 7 time breakdown

Week 7 time breakdown

27 hours on placecards, about 20 of which was on the MVP. In total I’ve now spent almost two full work-weeks (74 hours) on placecards, and the MVP has been about half that, or about twice what I originally estimated in the pitch post.

Here’s the complete breakdown of my time on placecards so far:

placecards time

Looking at this zoomed out view it’s really apparent how much I’ve erred on the side of building rather than validating and talking to people, a classic dev-as-entrepreneur trap that I knew about going in and still managed to fall into. Those 8 hours of outreach probably felt as long as the 40 hours of building which is probably why I didn’t spend more time on it.

Life

Another week, another cave. This one is Tartarus, also in the mountains around Muizenburg and Kalk bay. Another great hike that makes a great and manageable extension to the Boomslang Cave route.

A post shared by Cory Zue (@czue13) on

As you can see in the video above, it’s literally just a big hole on the side of the trail that opens up into a massive cavern.

We wandered in pretty deep until we got to a long narrow crevasse with a 3 meter drop that we agreed we could probably get down and back up… but didn’t really want to.