Get A Slow Tempo — Towards Becoming A Long-Running Product
I’m building a Markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop alone. Fortunately, I succeeded to make it a profitable product generating over 2,000 USD. I’ve written about how I did from idea to first sales and growth strategies in this article.
Now, I need a strategy kind of different from the launch phase to keep this product growing. That is — to protect the paid users. Because the longer you use it, the app can provide more value since the core value is to manage your knowledge. I’ve been focusing on sustainability and now I would make sure it further in terms of operations and maintenances.
In this article, I’d like to talk about a strategy towards sustainability for personal products/side hustles after their successful launches, that I’ve been thinking of recently.
Overspeed Will Not Keep Working
I’ve focused on making a momentum of the development and the community. I kept releasing new versions frequently, wrote blog articles, and showed the app is like a living creature. In the development, I didn’t write any tests. Instead, I asked users to have smoke tests. You may think it’s a terrible approach. But I just followed Mark Zuckerberg’s “Done is better than perfect.” and it worked for me. (Refer to this article for detail)
On the other hand, this strategy requires a lot of physical strength and energy because of the speed supremacy. It will not be sustainable even if you take moderate rests. Like you are ignoring curves while stepping on the accelerator. You will eventually get sick and burnout syndrome. In this January, Coincheck, a cryptocurrency exchange service in Japan, was hacked into and approximately 500 million NEM tokens were exfiltrated. I can’t think of it as not related to me because it also can happen to my service if I didn’t take care anything except for growth.
People currently paying for the app can be called patrons who have supported its launch. Thanks to their support, now I can afford to concentrate working carefully and diligently. To evolve the app more, I’d like to slow my pace down for the long-running development.
Get Over Pressures That Is Coming As The Service Grows
Before I begin to talk about a strategy, I’d like to share what is happening to my mind.
As number of users increases, number of feature requests has also got increased. It is great but would be also a fact that it’s becoming a pressure that I have to finish implementing them as soon as possible. Besides, personal development basically doesn’t have deadlines and that would cause a problem. No deadlines means it’s always better to release it as soon as possible. But there’re countless number of things to do even after having finished some requests, and because of the impatience, you will tend to go your pace wrong. Moreover, there’re competitors. I noticed that I am spending everyday while pressed with work.
This is nonsense. I started this project because I like it. You have to stop and take a breath when you opened a console and thought “Ah, I don’t feel like doing it.” It’s strange to be pressed to do what you like. You need to notice something important went wrong.
Since I am generally hasty, I often consider that I have to get everything done as soon as possible. That causes me to be easy to be stressed out. I have to face this pressure and impatience, or I will be broken.
I guess it is an ordinary problem not only for a particular job, isn’t it?
Such problem would happen regardless of particular jobs. Apparently, I am no exception and I can’t say “I’m always comfortable because I’m a freelancer and it is a personal project.”
Reduce The Stress By Working Slowly and Carefully
As I mentioned above, it appears that I’m under a lot of pressure because of following reasons:
- The feeling that I wouldn’t like to disappoint users
- Schedules with no deadlines
- Competitors
- My impatience personality
By these stresses, the development that should be fun is becoming painful. At this rate I will be burnout. As I mentioned earlier, it is essential to keep providing this service, and sustainability is crucial. So I made a strategy called “Slow Tempo Strategy” to reduce my stress.
This slow tempo strategy would slow down the work pace and would focus on solving issues without hurry. I have to quit the past strategy because it focuses on speed and requires a lot of energy. Instead, I would like to work carefully on making the users more happy without hustling the end result. For example:
- Have a long-term development roadmap with less frequent releases
- Have a loose schedule
- Ignore competitors
- Keep slow behavior as possible
I will describe each in detail below.
Have A Long-term Development Roadmap With Less Frequent Releases
I fixed bugs and added features as soon as possible when I got bug reports and feature requests from users. It was done sometimes within a few hours. The speedy support was a great appeal of the app but I won’t do this anymore. It’d be too much to resolve issues at an emergency level at the current phase. Besides, I heard that some users felt that the update is too often and annoying.
Hurrying to resolve many issues has some side effects. That is, the codebase will get ugly and lose its maintainability little by little. After that, it will become hard to make any change to the old code. And you get stuck at development. You can see it in the big companies.
Instead of hurrying frequent updates, I would like to have a long-term development roadmap. For example, I’d like to adopt Flow, the static type checker for JavaScript, into the codebase. And I will write some tests but won’t focus on its code coverage because it has been already working on production. The purpose of the test and Flow is to suppress regressions. I won’t aim for perfect. In addition, I’d like to dedup the codebase between the desktop and the mobile by refactoring them into common modules carefully. I’ve already published some modules on GitHub. I’m also planning to improve the security like supporting End-to-end encryption.
These changes are not visible to users as functionalities, but it would certainly help the service evolve. By slowing down the update frequency, some users may say “is the issue not fixed yet?” then I would answer and describe what I’m working on honestly. You don’t need to feel guilty about letting them wait for a long time. Because it is all for users.
Have A Loose Schedule
In a freelance work, it always has a deadline. I could draw a schedule towards it, so I won’t be stressed out too much unless the deadline is very tight.
In this project, I would draw a schedule loosely. Inkdrop has a public roadmap, and I would set deadlines for each features. The problem is to set the deadlines too tightly. I am an impatience man as I described, so I have to be aware of having a loose schedule for them.
Furthermore, I would be careful not to fill in spare time with a bunch of tasks when I finished tasks early. It will be used for learning new things or something that would broaden my horizons.
Ignore Competitors
Note-taking app for programmers would depend a lot on personal preferences. New apps are coming on a daily basis. Some belligerent projects seem to try to take users from Inkdrop. I can’t pay no attention to the competitors because of that during providing the service.
But as DHH says, paying attention too much to competitors will limit the way you think:
Overanalyze other products and you’ll start to limit the way you think. — “Getting Real” by DHH
This project is a collection of my preferences. Current users are those who have similar preferences with me. If I kept a lookout for competitors, unnecessary features will be added and it will become similar with other apps. It will look like yet another ordinary app that doesn’t appeal even to me.
I don’t think my app is the best in the world. Which app to use depends on your preference. Killing each other in a niche market doesn’t really make sense. Rather than that, I’d think it’s better to foster the market. So I decided not to fight against competitors.
Keep Slow Behavior As Possible
I think it would be good to keep in mind my behavior to be calmed down and slow so that I can fix my impatience habit. Because my impatient personality is acquired. I guess it may be hard to fix your personality after becoming an adult though, I believe it’s not impossible.
There is a word that someone said: “A shallow river flows quietly and a deep river slowly flows” — Hustling too much to get results would not be sustainable because it requires heavy load. To make a high and deep quality result, it is essential to have a process that progresses slowly over time.
Slow behavior would require even more difficult technique than doing fast. I was playing drums in a band when I was teens or twenties. When I was a beginner, I tend to play too fast on a stage since I got nervous. It is more difficult to play if a song has a slow tempo. I heard that it is same for other instruments.
In mountain climbing, they say that small breaks are very important. They walk for 1 hour, then take a break for 10 minutes. They will stand on the top of a mountain earlier than climbing without short breaks.
In business, speed always wins. Today’s economics has been grown up by making transactions extremely fast and efficient. Such as fast foods and fast fashions, we are surrounded with many things that will be consumed very fast in quantity. So we often think everything should be fast anyway. But on the other hand, like vines and cheeses, there are things that would be better to take long time for their productions. The aging of leather goods is also a good example. Things that were taken over time have depth quality, and they are attractive that can’t be made in only one night.
I’ve been pursuing speed to my work, but in thirties, maybe it’s time to focus on the depth of work. Seems like I’ve got an idea where to go next in my professional career. First of all I’d like to fix my bad habits.. :)
Just Enjoy Making
In this article, I’ve talked about a strategy to continue doing what you like. Lastly, I would like to share this word by DHH:
Optimize for Happiness
A happy programmer is a productive programmer. We optimize for happiness and you should too. — DHH
To continue making great things, I think that it is important to put yourself in a good environment to enjoy making. Thoughts that “if I could finish this work…” or “if I could get over this mountain…” would break yourself. Don’t be obsessed with the end result, let’s enjoy it.
I hope it’s helpful for your side hustles!
- Follow me on twitter: inkdrop_app.
