Weekly Check-in: 10/18

Last Week's Update

Really big week this week, I'll jump right in since it's getting late.

Daybird - Two weeks since I felt stuck with ListNote, I have a new vision and branding for the product, and am more excited than ever. If you haven't, please check out daybird.app and tell me what you think.

It's not all branding either. I've implemented the brand new design from Bernat focused on Today as the center of the workflow, with a calendar to navigate to past daily journals. I've added a menu to insert specific tasks into a project.

Polyglot - Made some good progress today and wrote the framework for the test runner. I got my first successfully passing multi-language test! It feels great.

Truthfully, I forced myself to focus on Polyglot after I introduced an accidental regression where Daybird task creation was broken on Safari. I thought this was totally avoidable if I had Polyglot, and so decided to put some hours into it and write an actual test suite for Daybird.

Wins of the Week

• Daybird rebrand and focus on planning has been really cool, I am happy with that. Also shipped four features.

• First passing tests on Polyglot!

• I turned 38 - it's been a crazy year by any measure, and it was nice to reflect on that a bit

• We survived our first weekend with two kids and no help!

Learnings of the Week

I've been using Daybird almost daily for a month and it's been great. I've used it for planning, journaling, coordinating with Sharon, and writing features and marketing copy for Daybird. I think I'm on to something, and if I stick with it, other people will see that too.

I also now have a pretty good workflow for generating product names with domains.

1. I start with Namelix, a free naming tool attached to a logo-generating service called Brandmark. You can put in some keywords and it spits out a ton of names and logos. It's a good starting point to generate a list of interesting names.

2. From there, I put a bunch of names into Namecheap Beast Mode, where you can search for up to 5000 keywords x as many TLDs as you want. It's easy to see what names are available quickly.

3. That lets me narrow down your list to a few options with available domains, which I can get feedback on.

Goals

• Q4: Polyglot released with 3 active users

  • I think I'll have a working prototype by the end of this week.

• Q4: Daybird released with 10 active users

  • Two core features left - calendar and tutorial. Will try to build them this week.

• Q4: Ride 270 miles

  • Unfortunately only went out once last week - mornings are chaotic and Zoe doesn't sleep much during the day. Let's get it this week.

Until next week,

-Tim