Recap @ Day 33

A bit later than usual this time, but time for a new recap!

Last time we wrote about how we launched the landing page for Thymer.com. The last 10 days since then we’ve mostly spent on coding for the app.

Code

The two largest chunks of code so far are the editor and data layer, which we’ve started with because they are at the core of everything else in the app. We’ve been writing all those parts from scratch, so we can truly design the app from the group up to work exactly as we want. That’s a bit of a risk in terms of scope and complexity, but it’s also what we think will be at the core of the USP for Thymer in this crowded space.

For example, for the editor that means building everything from unicode support to selections to keyboard shortcuts and line wrapping. The alternative would be using an existing solution (or the browser’s contenteditable), but then Thymer could not be the app we want it to be. We’d have to adjust our vision instead of building what’s necessary to get our vision to work. The same applies to the data layer. We’re not exactly editing just flat text, and it all needs to be synced and allow for real-time collaboration. To do that, we’re building our own API based on CRDTs, or Conflict-free replicated data types. It’s a type of data structure that we can use so multiple people can type at the same time in the same document. Another problem is that all these parts need to work together such that the app is fast, which is another challenge in the browser.

We also wrote some more about our coding in An update on the coding work, Typescript without Typescript and Thinking different about technical debt. All in all, our week pretty much looked like the screen below πŸ™‚

All the rest

It’s been quite a challenge to balance all of the coding work with writing, tweeting and marketing work. Switching between the two when you’re really focused on one or the other becomes difficult at times, but we’re trying to keep up the pace here as well.

We wrote a number of blog articles again like You need a moat, Competing with (very) large companies, Single miracle startup, Work on what you need to and Text-based user interfaces in 2022.

We also got the first signups for the private beta waiting list. It doesn’t prove anything yet, but it’s fun to see some first people interested in giving it a try! We haven’t done much marketing to promote the landing page yet though, other than sharing what we’re working on. We’re planning to also look into mentioning Thymer in other relevant communities and conversations online where people might be looking for something like this.

A quick update on the stats so far:
40 signups for the private beta waiting list
104 email newsletter subscribers
18.6K blog unique visitors
58 blog posts
~10K lines of code
159 and 129 twitter followers
Nothing spent but 33 days of time… and obviously 0 customers and $0 revenue yet πŸ˜‰

Thanks again for following our story! You can see our daily updates on Twitter (@wcoolsΒ andΒ @jdvhouten). Or drop us a line atΒ [email protected]Β for any reason. We’re always excited to hear from people πŸ™‚

State of the Startup (20%)

Yesterday was day 16, which means that we’re at 20% of our our 80 day journey. Time flies. We’ve made some good progress, but building traffic takes a lot of effort and patience. Let’s get to the stats, and I’ll then add some observations.

The stats

Traffic for the blog is at about 150 visitors/day, up from 50/day at the last update. We had a big spike in traffic on the 24th when one of our blog posts hit hackernews. This was probably the blogpost I spent the least time on. I wrote it in a hurry and didn’t make my case very carefully. No predicting which post gets popular out of nowhere, sometimes this is just how it works out. Still, part of me wishes one of my better posts got all the traffic. Oh, well.

On twitter our following count is ticking up, slowly but steadily. Wim is at 85 (was 38),Β Diederik at 91 (was 19). I also discovered that on analytics.twitter.com you can see some charts.

We’ve written 38 blogposts in total now (up from 20). Blogging still takes an immense amount of time, although I’m already getting a bit faster. It will take a long time for us to get actually good at writing, but we have we have some good insights to share. I think that there are many people interested in what we have to say, it’s just that practically nobody knows this blog and our 80daystartup project exist. Our goal is still to write the blog we wanted to read when we started doing software startups.

Our mailing list is now at 95 subscribers, up from 29. We email a weekly summary of our blog to the mailing list, and hopefully that will keep people engaged with our project even when they don’t use Twitter or RSS.

Stray observations

I don’t know if the kind of traction we’re getting on social media is good, ok, or bad. I don’t know if we should be writing fewer super high quality blog posts or stick to our daily blogging schedule that is more hit-or-miss.

Combining focused programming sessions with social media presence is difficult. Social media is a big and constant distraction, which is why I’ve stubbornly avoided social media for my entire life. Maybe I’ll get the hang of it and find a good balance, but I’m not sure.

Thank you!

Thanks for reading and for following us in our 80 day project. We’re always excited to hear from people, and we’ve gotten some super nice messages! Just shoot us an email at [email protected] or contact us on twitter for any reason. We reply to everybody, usually within hours.

Next update at 30%!

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 πŸ™‚

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.