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Hello, World!

I always hate when companies retcon their history to act as if the idea leapt from their head fully formed like Athena, so I wanted to write up the real story of how Teaminal came to be.

January 1, 2022 by Brad Simantel

Hi! I’m Brad Simantel, and for the past six weeks or so, I’ve been working on a new product called Teaminal.

Original Idea

I always hate when companies retcon their history to act as if the idea leapt from their head fully formed like Athena, so I wanted to write up the real story of how Teaminal came to be.

Back in October, I was kicking around the idea of building some sort of remote team social app. I was imagining something like Zoom (or really Jitsi, since it would be web-based) plus Jackbox, where you could drop into a room with friends or coworkers and play games together. I was really interested in playing with WebRTC-based video chat, and quickly got that working, but then I realized that building one compelling game, let alone several, was going to be really hard.

I started thinking about what else I could do with the code I had already written. I thought maybe I could reuse the video chat part of that project, but instead of combining it with a collection of games, I could combine it with an agile retro tool like the one I used at my day job, Retrium. Or I could build a little real-time pointing poker app, and use it for that! Maybe both!

Then… I kind of lost interest in the idea. I’d been working on some permutation of the same thing for a couple months at that point, with basically nothing to show for it, so I shelved the project.

Teaminal on Rails

In mid-December, a couple posts on Hacker News caught my interest. One was about the release of Rails 7, the other was from a Node developer about their experience trying Rails. Together, they got me interested in building something with Rails.

I’d dabbled in Rails development at past jobs, but it was always maintaining a crufty legacy app, so I never really gave Rails a fair shake for any greenfield projects. To pick up Rails 7, I started by running through the Getting Started with Rails guide, then I decided to port the agile retro/pointing idea over to Rails, which went super quick!

Getting Serious

As you may have noticed, up until this point I had basically been noodling with interesting technologies with learning as the primary goal and shipping a product as a nice-to-have.

Going into the new year and doing some reflecting, I’ve decided to swap those and really focus on shipping something small, talking to potential users, and iterating towards creating a real business.

Resolutions

My 2022 resolutions, as they pertain to Teaminal, are:

  1. Stop being afraid to share what I’m working on, even if it’s not perfect.
  2. Don’t build new features until someone asks for them.
  3. Get to $10k MRR by the end of the year.

I’ve made lots of mistakes in the past where I built in isolation and didn’t put myself out there because I was afraid. That’s the biggest thing I want to get over this year by building in public, and the revenue goal will hopefully follow.

We’ll see how it goes!

Update: The January 2022 Update is the next post in this series.

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