I'm writing this a bit late (May 14 to be exact) but it's been a hectic six weeks since my last post.

In mid-April, Kasia and I flew to Madeira, where we're spending 10 weeks. She's working at the hospital here, and I'm working from home as always. We've had a great time enjoying the sun, beautiful hikes, and good food (and drink).

Trophy

The headline news for Trophy in April is that the customer we've been chasing for a while has signed with us and are kicking off the pilot. Huge news!

As part of that I've been extending the platform to better suit their needs. Of course, everything I'm working on is also generally useful to our customers:

• Admin APIs so that Trophy primitives at the organization level can be manipulated programmatically
• Improved analytics infrastructure as our Postgres cluster was not suitable for the types of analytics queries our bigger customers needed

And some miscellaneous under-the-hood stuff that other customers needed.

If all goes well in May our MRR should be up substantially, so things are headed in the right direction! Lots to build as well.

Campfire

Our update that was meant to go out in April did not in fact go out in April and we're still working on it as of May 14th as I write this. But it should go out in March.

I did a lot of testing on the update, and also managed to reduce infrastructure costs by about $3k/month after some productive conversations with my senior engineer. Those conversations were brought about by the Campfire engineering meetup which I held here in Madeira! The four of us were here in Funchal for four days and did a bit of work and a lot of wandering around the island.

The TikTok campaign is set to turn profitable in a couple of months, but in the meantime our MRR growth has slowed and looks like it might reverse course again. This is because we haven't renewed the campaign yet. The promotion I ran to TikTok-sourced users this month was a failure, barely generating any revenue.

In the meantime I have some YouTuber plans that I'm working on, and should renew the TikTok campaign in a month or two as well.

Distractions & Personal Life

I lost the habit of gaming once a week for an hour, because who can play video games in their free time while living in Madeira?

I've been doing a lot of hiking, sightseeing, wandering around cobblestone streets, eating good food, and drinking wine and poncha. Can't complain at all.

Next Month

In May I will be (already am) working on environments in Trophy (to keep dev/staging/prod separated for our customers) and multi-tenancy. On the Campfire side of things it's about getting Update 42 over the line and some sustainable advertising working (YouTube hopefully, then TikTok again).