My Q1 2024 in Review

I did a lot of stuff in the last three months.

Flying Back to Poland

After a long stay in the US with family for Christmas and New Year's, I got on a plane back to Poland, which is now home. If I stick strictly to the calendar year, I suppose the only thing of note that I did in 2024 before coming back to Poland was pay something like $80 for overweight luggage on the trip back over the pond.

But Kasia and I made it back to our flat in one piece.

January

The first Campfire-related task I do in January of every year is publish The State of the Campfire, and this year was no different. The post outlines the roadmap for the coming year, which is often quite ambitious. If you're interested, here's the 2024 State of the Campfire.

If you're not so interested, the short of it is that we're focused on performance & stability in our writing software and releasing our reading app, which at the time of publishing The State of the Campfire was still very much in development.

My January at Campfire was jam-packed with polishing up our January Update and preparing the reading app for beta testing at the start of February. I did a lot of coding. But both of these things got done.

Also, since January was the first month of the year, I had to do the full Q4 '23 quarterly reports, which involved closing the books, analyzing a bunch of data, reviewing OKRs and setting OKRs for Q1.

January was also the month that Ernesto and I launched rehance.ai, after pulling a joint all-nighter to get the site to a publishable state. The rest of the month was tough for us, as we hit a lot of brick walls: failing to get a post on Hacker News (shadowbanned both times), failing to get any traction on Twitter or Reddit, failing to get any Google Ads generating leads, and other such failures.

February

Back to Campfire. As with January, my attention was split between the month's website update (which included a complete redesign of all of our sexy marketing pages) and the reading app. The beta was underway, and there were plenty of bugs to squash and things to improve. Launch was scheduled for March 6th, so the app had to be finalized and approved some days in advance—essentially the end of February.

On the Rehance side, we tried tons of stuff, but failed to get any traction. Only a handful of free signups and no conversions or promising usage. We tried lots of cold email, newsletter ads, Twitter ads, affiliate programs and directories, more Reddit, SEO, and still basically got nowhere in terms of traffic and leads.

We did make a couple of product improvements and workshopped the landing page, but the real problem was, and is, acquiring leads and traffic without spending too much money.

March

Ah, March. The craziest of the three.

I kicked off the month with a ton of coding over the couple of days before the reading app launch. Then there were two weeks of craziness: a Tuesday Talks day (our day of meetings that we do bi-weekly at Campfire) followed by the app launch day, followed by a trip to Lisbon for our two-night engineering team get-together, followed by some family time in Portugal for me, my sister, and my parents.

While I was in Portugal I was only able to work on the essentials: customer support, urgent bugfixes, and keeping on top of meetings, code reviews, design reviews, and other such things that I'm needed for.

When I got back to Poland it was back to the grind again, wrapping up the month's update which goes out tomorrow morning (I guess today, since it's 1:30AM as I write this), and monitoring the app launch. Unfortunately, we struggled to drive many installs, as our email list of hundreds of thousands of authors were less interested in our reading app than we'd hoped, and our YouTube influencer campaigns, Google ad campaigns, and TikTok sponsorships did not bear much fruit.

On the Rehance side, we kept up the cold emailing, added a Use Cases page for programmatic SEO, updated our pricing to be far simpler (and include a low-powered free tier), and did some manual outreach on Twitter to no effect.

March concluded with a very nice Easter with Kasia's family, and a nice couple of days with only 2-3 hours of work instead of the usual 10-11. I also took some leisure time in the second half of the month to do a bit of work creating this website (nice) and doing some research and planning for the startup community I'm planning to build in Poznań when we move there in the summer, Startup Poznań. Specifically, I tried out Circle as a community management platform, and I think that will work great for what I'm trying to do.

Onwards

That's about it for Q1. I think I'll do these monthly from now on. It's good to get some words on paper.