Quick introduction: I am Juls! I am the founder, product lead, head of marketing & designer behind Tenstars. I'd like to start sharing weekly updates, milestones, as well as findings and details of the journey. I like to think as a way of debugging. This is somehow a rollercoaster and sometimes we don't even have time to enjoy the landscape.
Writing forces me to reflect on a weekly basis. It is a therapeutic activity that I've been doing for some time and have decided to write more publicly. Other awesome indie developers and small teams do it consistently and it is a great way for people to know more about the creators behind the products they use.
Some of this week updates
- Working on improving our onboarding process. Not completely happy with the actual flow, there are some obvious improvements (and some product magic that is not so obvious but will blow some users mind). It is such a key part of our experience that I want to nail it down.
- We decided to switch to Mailgun for our transactional emails. We will use from now on their service for the notifications you receive when a customer triggers a cancellation
- We want those to be as useful as possible, so now they include data about the impact that specific customer has for your business. If we have been able to recover it or not, as well as different actions you can take directly from that very same email
- We added Sentry to our Firebase backend too as part of our efforts to monitor and ensure the quality of the service. Before we were using only to track bugs and problems in our react based front-end. I wanted to be able to monitor the health of our Firebase functions and operations. Pretty satisfied with the results so far
- I've given some love to the way we build the emails. I want to ensure deliverability but also to have beautiful emails that work. I'll write a post about our process. From designing the email, to ensure they look perfectly fine in most clients, and they do not trigger any filter
Some learnings
- After some annoying issues with Webstorm when committing to the main repo, I decided to compile a set of good practices about what should be included in the .gitignore files
- I gave it a try to some of the advanced features that Netlify offers. After playing a bit with that I discovered that messing with some of the settings in Netlify preprocess messes up the redirect for this blog's instance. I had to end up switching them off and having to rebuild it for it to work. Their JAM stack has a lot of attractive features I'd like to take advantage of but will have to postpone it
- I wanted to improve how we measure some parts of the experience. For that, I needed to learn how to do some custom event tracking with React and GTM. Nothing extremely fancy, but solid work and pretty useful to understand the impact of the different improvements we are doing in the product
- I always "design" the metrics and data I need. I do it at the same time that I am shaping the UX/UI of the product. This week some guys shipped Juno, a Figma plugin that helps create and document your tracking plan.
Half of the world is quarantined in their houses these days. We too. Some of the things we have read/watched/listened this week:
- The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT - Cake. A great recollection of the events that lead to Apple buying NEXT, from Chris MacAskill, Director of Developer Relations at General Magic and NeXT during that time.
- had a good reading about the too real, six stages of debugging
- Learnt about the narcissism of small differences. A thesis that states that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation. At the very least an interesting concept that forces a reflection around how identities are formed and sustained.
- read this article, debunking the story about Henry Ford's $5 a Day Wages. A good reminder of how paramount is to fully understand the real motivations and incentives, beyond popular belief.
We are living in times of uncertainty. I am happy to be able to focus on adding value and improving the lives of our clients. Let's be grateful for being healthy and sane in times like this. If you need something or just feel like talking with someone, just reach out. Take care!
