May & June 2024: Focus

Having forgotten to write a post specifically for May, I now find myself writing a retrospective on May & June together. They were busy months, but then again, they all are.

Startup Poznan

By a mixture of initiative and dumb luck, I've met Piotr, a startup founder based in Poznan who's interested in helping me get Startup Poznan up and running, with the help of IndieBeers, the community we met through.

Travel

I visited Bulgaria with my girlfriend and I enjoyed it quite a lot! I found it to be a beautiful country, with nice people and great food and drink. Incredibly, they drink their hard liquor rakia not after a meal, but before, often with a salad.

We spent some time in Sofia and also had the luck of visiting Plovdiv during a wine festival, which is of course right up my alley.

Campfire

We experienced a rocky period at Campfire over the last two months. Revenue fell markedly for about a month as we fiddled with the optimal discount scheme for our lifetime purchase options, but should now be corrected going forward. Due to the business's finances and the direction it was headed, we also had to say goodbye to a couple of team members. This was really difficult, probably the most emotionally difficult aspect of running a business. There are things that I think we handled well and things that we should handle better if we're in the same situation in the future. But it was our first layoff in Campfire history, nearly six years into the business.

On the positive side, we increased our monthly and annual subscription prices without a hitch, launched an update, and got off to a great start on our next Extended Edition, a companion book for the Tea Princess Chronicles by Casey Blair. And, of course, our finances are now back in order.

I feel very good about where we are going directionally—focusing on helping authors create beautiful extended editions for their novels or companion books for their series that come with awesome artwork and show off the uniqueness of the Campfire platform. So starting in July, that will be the focus.

And we've got some really awesome artwork being made so far.

Rehance

We launched on ProductHunt and surprisingly pulled off 8th place for the day, and a solid amount of traffic. But, still no customers.

I also built an Autocomplete feature that lets you add smart autocomplete to any text field or text editor on your website in just a couple of minutes, that will go out soon as well.

Aside from that, my focus is on SEO as a means of driving traffic eventually when the popularity of AI copilots in SaaS increases—and I am convinced that it will increase. I don't see a future in which all software doesn't have smart suggestions and automations powered by AI, exactly like GitHub Copilot works for programmers.

When that popularity boom arrives, Rehance will be ready.

In May, I also wrote Why I'm Building Two Things At Once.

Wrap-Up

That's about it–a busy & productive couple of months. Looking forward to July, I'll be spending much of the month in Portugal with family and friends, working a bit less than usual. My focus work-wise will be on the Extended Editions and making sure we launch some incredible eBooks out into the world through that initiative.

When I get back to Poland in August, it'll be time for Startup Poznan to take flight.