Hey hey,

HAPPY TUESDAY 🤛 .

I met with two potential technical co founders which is great! Sitting here at a Jeep dealership eating a CLIF bar. Y’know… I really need these carbs right now for all the intense activities I do (ie writing a substack article).

Before we get into it, a huge thank you to everyone who is subscribed! We got 4 new subscribers in just the last week :).

Look at them stats! I’d love if you gave this publication a heart.

⚡ I’m also in the process of trying to place an engineering manager for Noah Kagan’s company, App Sumo. The gig pays $250k-$300k, it’s remote, and you’d manage a team of 12 engineers. ⚡

Why am I trying to place someone? I respect Noah. He bootstrapped his company to nearly $100M in revenue and the company operates at ~60% gross profit according to My First Million podcast. He’s very well respected in the startup community and was dubbed the “Kevin Bacon of Silicon Valley” by Tim Ferris and Andrew Chen. If I can bring him value, then maybe I can become friends with him! So if you know anyone looking for an engineering manager gig, let me know by hitting me on twitter.

How We Ship 2 Apps Every Week

It’s all about putting systems in place for your team. You need the right tools and processes to make it work.

As far as tools go:

• Notion (the map)

• Slack (the walkie talkie)

• Google hangouts (the public forum to talk)

As far as processes:

• Monday kickoffs (15 min meeting)

  • Cover what we did last week

  • Cover what were doing this week

  • Mention any blockers

• Friday retros (45 min meeting)

  • We cover what went well, what are we looking forward to, and what sucked

  • Cover roadmap updates

  • Cover whats up next

Only one hour of meetings a week — the rest done asynchronously with lots of notion and slack :).

We have 3 sections in our Notion

• User feedback (think of this as your top of funnel for product dev)

• UX Tasks (this is where I live, to get the design tickets done)

• Rapture tasks (this is where engineering lives, to get dev done)

DESIGN PROBLEMS. HOW TO HANDLE????!!@!#$

Design for the biggest problems. Make them non issues and make customers happy!

I’m in the midst of redesigning some screens for rapture. Right now if you want to book an entertainer, you pick a date and time on a scrolling popup window… and if you’re an entertainer you set your schedule of availability Monday through Sunday.

This causes a lot of issues. 

1. Entertainers can’t account for exceptions

2. Customers cant book out in advance easily

3. Customers cant see individual entertainers availability

4. Entertainers can’t customize by week

What will we do?

1. Give entertainers better tooling so they can use a google-calendar-like product to manage their schedule

2. Add a calendar element on the profile of the entertainer so customers can view individual availability

This set of scribbles is where it all starts. From here, I’ll make a few iterations and send them out to cofounders via iMessage and to the discord community to get feedback from entertainers. Once I feel good about that I’ll jump in Figma and make it pretty.

MAKE IT FUNCTIONAL AND FOCUS ON UX FIRST NOT UI.

No one gives a sh*t about how great your drop shadow is if their problem doesn’t get solved.

Another form of communication I’m using to get the word out to our users is Twitter. Trying the whole “build in public” thing. I use Twitter to post the updates each week since we’re doing weekly. Builds. Also building a discord community for our entertainers.

🎧 Links and Listens 🎧

• Great conversation between Sam Parr (founder of the Hustle) and Noah Kagan (founder of App sumo). He gets into his time hanging out with Peter Thiel.

• If you’re not a fan of Calendly, check out Cal. I set my account up and I really like the product so far.

Favorite Engineering Resources this week: 

• Fireship on YouTube

• Udemy React Course

Didn’t quite get your fix? Check out my latest YouTube video:

Thats all I’ve got for this week. TELL YO FRANNDSSSSS.