I woke up this morning wanting to write for whatever reason. June and July came and went without me writing much and I feel out of practice. It’s not that I haven’t written PER SE - what has been going on has been too heavy and I didn’t really have an opinion I thought was worth rehashing to the world. In June, there were the Black Lives Matter protests. NYC was pretty intense - storefronts were boarded and there was a lot of “fuck 12” anti-police graffiti. Then in July, work picked up.
The news has just been so heavy recently. There is election talk, talk of the pandemic and inequality in America - all this without sports to give us pointless banter. It often feels overwhelming to me to think about all these issues, because I feel helpless. So many of these issues are so far beyond my control that I often feel out of control of what’s going on. To some extent that’s ok - it’s just led me not to want to write. Also, I think I’m wildly uninformed on any of these issues and my writing on them would be misguided.
The city (New York City, for those of you who don’t believe that NYC is “The City”) is an odd place to spend the summer. It is hot and concrete and there is not a lot to do outside. For the most part, you stay in the air-conditioning or at the same parks. But for whatever reason, I haven’t been in a rush to getaway. I went up to the Cape for a week and down to the Shore for a few days, but it’s kind of nice when there is so much going on externally to be in a routine and with some sense of control. Plus, getting up and moving without much of a plan feels like the reactionary step I took last year.
So I’ve been thinking - slowly - about where to go next - my team has gone fully remote, so I think my time in New York will be rather brief. It has been nice being closer to family, but as the winter comes and the restaurants close their outdoor seating, it probably will be nicer to be somewhere I can ski or surf on the weekends. If anyone has some suggestions let me know.
Most of my time has been spent building for the past few months. I haven’t written too much about what we’ve built, but I have shown it to some of my friends. For anyone with dietary restrictions, storing that information in one place can be a massive pain in the ass. Our goal is to create one place to keep that information to make shopping, eating, and meal planning easier - your “FoodPrint”*. You can check out the first tool we’ve been building here - Chrome Extension that helps you shop for groceries and recipes online. Here are a few examples of how it works.
It’s been a really cool learning experience building a product from scratch. Probably my most important takeaway so far has been that you can have a lot of really good ideas, but packaging them into a single tool that solves a problem for a customer is really hard. There is a huge difference between a demo and a product.
On top of that convincing people to use additional tools is expensive. This is what makes startups so hard and frustrating. It’s not that they are not a lot of work - they are. But the hardest part is that a lot of the work doesn’t pay off. Choosing to do the right thing for product development often feels like finding a needle in a haystack. Customers are often counter-intuitive and it is way easier to design for yourself than for a customer nee
The other challenge is while you are trying to find product-market fit, you don’t really get feedback on how you are doing. Revenue and user growth are the obvious numbers that you want to drive as a performance indicator, but before you have either of those, you spend a lot of time floating trying to find signs of products that fit. It’s a lot of big ideas needing to turn into specific solutions - and all of it sounds great until you actually build it and it turns out to be less than perfect.
That said, it’s an incredibly fun experience. Even remotely, the highlight of the past few months has been work. It’s hard to be bored when you constantly have problems to solve with a great team. On any given day I could be thinking about 10 different things which I previously knew nothing about. The rate of learning is so high that it’s pretty hard to spend time learning - or thinking - about anything else. Unfortunately, this means I spend much less time reading for pleasure (and writing), but I don’t think I would trade that experience for anything.
I’d love to get your feedback on the tool as you use it! and if you know anyone who would find it useful - particularly anyone with IBS or stomach issues - please feel free to forward it along to them. I’d love to talk with them too and get their feedback. I’m sure I’ll write more about the product as it develops too, but if you have any ideas feel free to shoot me a text or give me a call - I’d love to talk!
* Brand name pending :)