Busy month.

Campfire

This January marked a significant turning point for me. We shipped the Clerk migration and associated backend changes at Campfire, just in time before our access to the deprecated MongoDB App Services API was cut. With this release (and the week or two of bugfixing and customer support that followed) I can finally relax and breathe a bit on the Campfire side of things. The software is now stable, there are no urgent updates we need to ship, and the business is on solid financial footing.

There is of course plenty to do for Campfire this year to get it growing again, but the urgent development work is over at least.

After the release I was able to ship some long-awaited fixes and quality-of-life improvements, and I'll do more of those throughout February. I'll also start thinking about the designs for our Q2 releases, which will focus on inspiring and motivating writers, turning a somewhat lonely software into more of a community.

Trophy

In January I worked on a bunch of miscellaneous dev stuff like a user preferences API and improving our analytics dashboards. Aside from that, I spent some time trying to help Charlie with sales, which is our current bottleneck. I improved the automated Play Store scraper that Charlie made last year, connecting it to our Apollo account and turning it into an automated prospector that finds product managers at successful consumer apps that have high potential to be gamified, and adds them to email sequences automatically for Charlie to polish and then send.

The prospector has worked well, but the sales process in general has been too slow and isn't getting us revenue as fast as we need it. So I'll continue to focus some time here trying to figure out how to get Trophy in front of the right people at the right times.

Distractions

I didn't spend any time on the worldbuilding MMO that I started fiddling with in December, but I'll likely take another look at it in February. This month was quite work-focused, though I did distract myself by playing some video games here and there. It's been a nice break and way to zone out from time to time.

Next Month

The Campfire goal for February is to ship a bunch of high-impact bugfixes, quality-of-life changes and performance improvements to Campfire. For Trophy the goal is to ship new features that can help us acquire customers and help out with sales as much as possible. And then I'd like to play around with the MMO project again as well, so that it doesn't die on the vine.