This is part of a series of monthly updates I write for friends, family, and anyone else that’s interested in following along. For the previous installment, check out my February 2022 Update.

Welp, I’m doing the dumb thing that engineers-turned-entrepreneurs do and avoiding talking to people by building more features. I keep telling myself that I’m in a competitive space so the app needs to be super polished before anyone would want use it, but I think I’m just afraid of failing. And ironically, that fear is keeping me from having any chance at succeeding right now.

My motivation is also starting to wane a bit, which ties back to not talking to people since I’m not getting any feedback or validation on what I’m doing. I’m going to remedy that ASAP by scheduling some more demos, but without the pressure of trying to do sales or reaching out to dozens of people this time.

This Month

I did manage to move the ball forward, and when I write it all up, it actually doesn’t look like motivation was as much of an issue as it felt like:

• I shipped the ability to subscribe to Jira projects and automatically create pointings when new issues are created.
• I migrated the marketing site from Hugo to Jekyll.
• I got CI setup with GitHub Actions and wrote some integration tests.
• I added a dashboard page that shows how your team is performing.
• As part of the dashboard work, I added some rudimentary sentiment analysis.
• Instead of talking to people, I got ready to talk to people by setting up a CRM in Airtable with all my LinkedIn contacts, plus some other companies I want to reach out to.
• I added a bunch of SEO pages, but they’re basically just stubs right now.
• I started designing feature pages, but haven’t released them yet.
• I also started designing an integrations page.

Honestly, I did half that stuff as a means of procrastinating work on the Jira webhooks. For whatever reason it just really felt like a slog. I guess it was productive procrastination, though!

Next Month

Most of my to do list from February didn’t make the cut, so I’m hoping to tackle it soon:

• Publish the Slack app and Jira app to their respective directories.
• Stripe integration. I think I can just create Stripe customers on signup, then use the customer portal to let users manage their plan, but there will be some callbacks and stuff I have to set up.
• User roles. Right now everyone is effectively an admin, which isn’t great.
• Clean up some known issues with SAML SSO.

I’m trying to manage motivation by tackling quick/easy stuff first, since last month the Jira webhooks work ended up taking the better part of the month, so I might pick out some other stuff before these, but I think I should be able to get to them.

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