Day 9

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We're building a startup in 80 days in public. Day 9 was on Jan 20 '22. You can find today's entry at Day 67.

Today's posts:

Mockups

Worked on a few mockups today, trying out different layouts, color themes and components in CSS and HTML. The goal is to eventually settle on a first version of the design for the app, which we can use as a preview for the landing/marketing page. While designing all the different components, we hopefully also get a better idea of the exact details of how the app should work, before we actually build all those parts.

All in all not too much to show today. When I try out different designs I usually delete more than I save, that’s part of the process (we’ll upload some more of the deleted parts later as well to get an idea of how the design has progressed).

Example of a very rough sketch to test out some layouts in HTML

State of the Startup

Ten days ago we announced we were going to do our 80 day startup. Except we didn’t have anybody to announce anything to. We knew getting any kind of audience wouldn’t be easy. We’re over 10% in, so what do we have?

The stats

Traffic for this blog is at about 50 visitors a day. But the visit duration is 6 minutes, which is suspiciously high. I’m pretty sure that half the traffic is just the two of us, reading each other’s posts :).

We use plausible.io. It’s GDPR compliant and we’re happy customers.

We don’t have any charts for Twitter followers. Wim has 38 followers, Diederik (that’s me) has 19. Yep, this is going to take a while 🙂

In the past week and a half we’ve written 20 blogposts. First time blogging for us. Hopefully we’ll be able to write more quickly as we get used to writing. As we get deeper into coding we won’t be able to spend two hours on a blogpost anymore. Instead we’ll just post about the technical issues we’re dealing with.

We also have a mailing list where we send a weekly summary of everything we’ve done. That mailing list has a grand total of 29 subscribers. That includes the two of us, naturally.

For completeness:
Users: 0
Customers: 0

That’s it. At about 20% of our 80 day journey I’ll do another stats update.



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You can follow us on Twitter @jdvhouten and @wcools and look for #80daystartup

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Durable tech
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Spending time to save time
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Perils of caching
Desktop-first
Making sense of contradictions
Trust signals
DIY javascript error logging
Taxes: an automation story
Magical thinking
Start small
High conviction, low conviction
Most deals fail

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