April 2024: Pushing Boulders Uphill

Entrepreneurship is sometimes a vicious pendulum between feeling like you're kicking ass and feeling like you're struggling to push a massive boulder uphill, and it just won't budge.

That's how April was for me.

Campfire

In April we launched a pretty big update to our manuscript (the key feature!) and also keystrokes across the website. That wasn't all perfectly smooth; we ran into some issues with the new manuscript and were fixing those in the days and weeks post-launch. But basically everything was fixed up within two weeks—even the niche issues like bugs around Chinese character inputting using the Pinyin keyboard.

On the side of the reading app, things are still moving slower than I'd like. Marketing is harder than it used to be, but we're getting consistent installs and book sales. We've just started posting at scale on TikTok, though, so we'll see if that speeds up growth at all. Regardless, I think I'll need to re-read Hit Makers again, since it looks like marketing, not engineering, will be the roadblock for the foreseeable future.

My current game plan is to mostly stop coding and redirect that time toward helping key authors who are published on Campfire (or are open to publishing on Campfire) create awesome, hand-crafted Extended Edition eBooks with character profiles, artworks, maps, and so on, and then helping them launch those bundles on Campfire and promoting them via TikTok, Reddit and other socials. If Campfire can build up a muscle for effectively creating and launching those products, we can flex that muscle up to bigger and bigger authors with time. It's something that Wraithmarked has gotten excellent at with their luxury hardcovers.

To that end, I got us all set up with a CRM this April (went with Attio) and am finishing up organizing the complete list of contacts we have at our disposal, so I can figure out the most promising authors to work with and help find success on our platform. In the process, I also found the perfect candidate for our first Extended Edition: Charlotte E. English's Faerie Fruit, which has been quite successful on Amazon and has been a joy to read! I created a proposal for the project and have sent if off to Charlotte, and she accepted it. So we are all systems go for this plan.

Rehance

We launched our new-and-improved landing page:

And then I spent quite a lot of time going down the LLM rabbit hole, building out a system that can take user requests, a set of available functions, and data types, and fetch the data it needs to write code that, when executed, will resolve the user's request. This will form the backbone of Rehance's product which, I hope, will soon be powering some SaaS apps' copilots so users can simply type what they want to do when they're stuck or need to automate something that would take forever to do by hand.

This project is forcing me to stay up to date on the latest technology and approaches to working with LLMs, which I appreciate. Feels good to be working at the cutting edge.

On the marketing & sales side of Rehance, I remain extremely bummed at how hard it is to cheaply find leads. However, I learned this month that I never properly configured DKIM or DMARC on our domain, which was almost certainly causing large numbers of our automated cold emails to go straight to spam. I fixed that, and we'll see if anything changes.

After some improvements to the chat UI itself, we'll do a ProductHunt launch (finally) and then I'll start doing cold outreach to very specific target customers with videos demonstrating exactly how Rehance would look integrated in their product and how it would help their users get more done and be more efficient. I think that's really the next step. I've already done the work to make it relatively easy to embed our UI on top of another site in Chrome to then record a video, but haven't hade to film more than one so far.

I'll try to make more time for this soon. We'll see how far it gets us!

Startup Poznań

I updated the website to a much prettier implementation and moved the community to the subdomain join.startuppoznan.pl (powered by Circle). Also wrote Business Types & Ideas to Make Your First Dollar Online.

I haven't started promoting this yet because I don't actually live in Poznań yet—I'll be moving there in July, but it won't be until August that I'm actually properly living there. I'm quite happy with how the site & community look, but again, I will have to overcome the hurdle of getting people to care about the thing I've created, which seems to be the recurring theme lately between the reading app at Campfire, my startup Rehance, and soon, Startup Poznań.

Luckily, the bar for success is low. If I get five customers from Rehance and five startup & drinking buddies from Startup Poznań, I'll be thrilled.

My Book: Lost to the Wolfhounds

I decided to re-read the ~60,000-word partial first draft of a novel that I wrote three years ago (crazy that it's been so long). It's about half of what the full novel would be, and to be honest, the quality is OK. With a bit of work I can still see myself finishing it and publishing it one day—on Campfire, of course. Here's the first paragraph:

I moved my arm back and forth, gradually sanding the piece of wood in front of me so that it was smooth to the touch. I was making a side table - the kind you'd put at your bedside. My father's workshop, as always, was dusty and rustic. It smelled of wood and oil and fire.

Not so bad! I'm not sure when I'll force myself to work on it, but it's nice to know it still feels like something I want to eventually revisit and take over the finish line.

Wrap-Up

That's it for April. No traveling this month, though in May I'll be visiting Bulgaria for the first time with my girlfriend, which I expect to be a fun trip. Looking back on everything I did in April, it feels like it was a productive month. In May I expect significant progress on the Audiobooks feature that's coming to Campfire, a price increase (finally, nearly four years after we launched our web app), a smattering of other Campfire features and improvements, and a Rehance ProductHunt launch that we hope will land us our first customer.