Focus is a requirement to success. On the other side, putting all your eggs in the same basket is a risky choice. But what about having an small side project to feel the pain of using your main side project ?
Let me introduce you Textashop
Initially I planned to revisit Sendrules and see if there were any work in progress tasks, close them to have the project in a clean state and start collecting feedback on the idea.
That would be the right approach to build a bussiness: first validate the idea, find someone that would pay for it, and then start building it.
However I refrained from doing that just for one reason: I am currently working on building the habit of working on my side projects. I don’t want to start asking people for feedback, and then fail at keeping up working on the project. My priorities are to keep performing at the maximum level at my current job, and to keep exercising regularly. This side project thing is an “extra” effort I want to do without compromising on what I am already doing.
With Sendrules I am targeting companies that want to have a well tested notification system, so they do not need to worry about building and maintaining it themselves.
The product should work for two types of product:
-
Those companies that have their own users, and want to easily manage the messaging preferences, translation templates, while they remain independent of third party service providers. For example a food delivery company: they might have riders, restaurants, customers and internal backoffice users. Each of them might want to receive different kind of notifications: emails, push notifications, SMS .. whatever. But all of those users “belong” to the food delivery company.
-
Those companies that have other businesses as clients, and each of their those businesses have their own users. That means have different sets of users, templates and message preferences. I would call this case a “multi-tenant system for notifications”. So, it might need to support different “accounts” in the same system. An example of company with those needs would be a project management app, that have different customers, and each customers enroll their own workers.
Obviously, a company might combine both cases.
Having worked on both type of companies I really believe I can build a good product covering both cases. But having a simple product that makes use of sendrules, is a good way to discover issues, or corner cases that should be covered. I would like to experience what are the frictions that might appear when using it.
That’s why I decided to create a small Shopify app, that uses send rules to send marketing, news, or shipment updates to customers.
Taking a look at Shopify apps, I’ve seen that most apps share a “brand”: A single company builds several useful apps under a shared name. I guess is a good way to cross promote apps, or build a good brand that can get revenue from multiple apps. So, I did the same, and made a small webpage for the shopify apps:
First week progress
This week I’ve made a few very very small steps, but I am kind of happy I’ve started working on it. Being the first week of “sideprojecting”, I am not going to be too harsh on myself, .. actually I am not going to put much pressure on me on the progress, because this is a about “showing up” every day and enjoying the process.
So this week I’ve updated and put online a webpage for www.textashop.com. This is nothing fancy, just a bunch of static html files (yes, it is not rendered markdown I’ve just wrote the html). I’ve just checked there are no broken links, and have put a small description for a couple of apps: “Send Rules For Shopify” that is the one that I am going to build as a testbed for sendrules.com , and “Catalog Sync” that is just a nice idea, that I am not going to implement, but I might add content to help me be “relevant” for people searching for shopify apps.
You might notice that there is also a “subscribe to an email newsletter” that is not working yet. I know that an approach that could work is using and embedded google forms to collect emails. However I spent sometime programming an endpoint to collect emails (so at some point I can evolve it to filter spam requests, etc). However, it is not finished, and I am not able to collect emails yet.
I also contracted an email provider to have a custom domain email. I want the small steps I take to be “professional”, and having a gmail account is not goint to give confidence to anyone (if you are not able to spend a few bucks and some time to have your branded email, how can I trust you to provide a decent product ?). There are several options to choose from, and I took a look at these: proton mail, zoho, mailbox.org, tuta. I thought that for what I needed mailboc and tuta where perfect valid options, and decided to just give mailbox a try (but I could use tuta for some other project).
Well, those are not big achievements, and still there is some work to do to say prepare it for “marketing”: the custom domain for the email is not set up, there are no good descriptions for the product, i need to actually collect emails, put some analytics in place to check if I have some traffic, create a robots.txt and try to have it indexed by google, etc, etc .. a lot of non-technical things to help discover the shopify app.
Lets keep it up
There is a common believe that it takes at least 21 days to form an habit, but I am not going to consider an achievement working on this for a couple more weeks.
Perhaps in a month or two I might start writting down actual goals, and deadlines.
For now, .. the show must go on !