I’m calling March 2021 “the lost month” because very little happened on
my personal project roadmap.
What did happen was a Pegasus consulting gig got a little out of control.
That said, I did manage to get to a better place with my “building in public”
ruminations and—despite doing nothing—profits
are back on the upswing!
Last Month’s Profit
A good month after a bad month—once again not really tied to anything I did.
This further reinforces the beauty (and pain) of passive income:
decoupling my direct actions from my income.
Thoughts
Two quick takes on the month past:
A whirlwind contracting engagement
Last month I mentioned I had taken on a rare Pegasus accelerator package,
citing “an impressive founder, a fun and interesting product,
and lots of tech that I hope will be useful to bring back into Pegasus itself afterwards.”
Anyways—as these things sometimes do—the plans and scope evolved as we dug in,
and I found myself spending a lot more time than I expected on this project.
As a result I got barely anything else done.
I have learned a lot, a lot of which is going to be useful for Pegasus eventually.
And at the same time I’m also looking forward to wrapping things up and setting
my own terms again.
Building in public, revisited
Last month I also mentioned some recent hesitations I’d been having with building in public.
Part of those hesitations were driven by working on my own Twitter analytics app.
Basically, while “dogfooding” my
app I tried to tweet regularly and started paying attention to stuff like likes, engagement,
and follower growth.
And it kind of made me miserable.
My tweets that did well were little dopamine hits, but the (much larger number of) tweets that did
poorly made me feel shitty.
And I started tweeting things just for the engagement, instead of actually saying
what I wanted to say—which also made me feel icky about myself.
So this past month I…stopped.
I just tweeted when I felt like it, which was closer
to weekly than daily. And I stopped looking at engagement. And I was much happier.
My drop off in twitter use and engagement this month. Not shown is the soaring “happiness” metric.
Unfortunately, this now has me wondering whether building a Twitter analytics product
is actually opposed to my moral philosophy in some way, or—being less preachy and
more practical about it—bad
for my own happiness.
So I’m also uncertain about the future of that little project.
But that’s ok, I’ve got a lot on my plate.
Last Month’s Goals
| # |
Goal |
Grade |
| 1 |
Come up with the next big-ticket Pegasus item and start working on it. |
F |
| 2 |
Start at least one new marketing effort. |
C |
Choosing the Next Big Thing
The loss in time killed most of my progress on the Pegasus front, though I am
continuing to find parts of it to change and improve as I use it to build a new
(and substantial) codebase.
Also in some ways working to someone else’s requirements may be
more representative of my customers’ experience than working on my own projects.
So it isn’t all bad, just not manifesting as a “next big thing” so much as
“making the existing thing way better in lots of small ways”.
Start at least one new marketing effort
I spent very little time on marketing, but I did manage to book
a podcast appearance on Django Chat and submit a
“Modern JavaScript for Django Developers”
talk to a few more conferences. So far I’ve been rejected from PyCon US,
and am waiting to hear back from DjangoCon EU.
These fit nicely into “things that don’t take a lot of time but might grow my/Pegasus’s
audience substantially”—which is all I’ve had time for at the moment.
Time
Time breakdown for Month 2021
Very similar to last month—though the Pegasus bucket includes much more contract work.
Weekly surfing is going well, and I think after 2+ years of stagnation after my first son
was born, I may actually be improving again, albeit very, very slowly.
This Month’s Goals
- Wrap up the Pegasus contracting gig—with everyone involved happy
- Create the Pegasus roadmap for Q2 (April-June)
Hoping to wrap all my external commitments and get back to some high-level plans
for my own projects again!