if you just woke up from a nap; you're a decel

dec(el)ember is almost over. i'm gonna go take a nap.

Hey kids. How’s it going?

This one’s going to be very whiny. First, some good news:

Time left till 1st Jan 2024: 7 days.

Goal: $5
Current: $10

Yeah, I made my first dollar on the internet. I’m grateful for this. This was a milestone I had been working towards for the last 3 months. I was really glad I hit this goal.

Buutt as I predicted, the joy faded pretty quickly.

I did previously say that;

In fact, from now on, I’m going to have to do even more stuff to make sure what I built gets feedback.
And I’m gonna have to fix things faster and on the fly.
It’s kind of broken obviously, but I’ll add small improvements every day.

This was over 10 days ago. Since then, I hit a slump and didn’t feel like doing anything. That broke my momentum and when momentum breaks it’s really hard to get stuff again.

Fixed some things.

Thankfully that didn’t last long. I slowly started fixing the bugs and adding tweaks here and there.
The biggest and most important thing to fix was the search architecture.

The combination of server-side rendering and my backend was bad because it took 4 steps for the request to reach the database.

• User types query; sends a request to render the page with `q=searchQuery`

• Vercel starts rendering the page, sees the search param, and then makes an API call to my FastAPI

• FastAPI server receives an API call and makes a request to the vector database.

• The response goes back to FastAPI → Vercel → User

This was bad for latency. It was also so annoying that I made this mistake in the first place. Only after it went to production, did I notice this.

So I went and made the search client side. It’s not the greatest still. But I know where else I can optimize for things.

Made a Discord Server

I wanted to be able to talk to the people who signed up directly, let them know what I was working on next, and take their opinion on what to build next.

I posted the link in two emails and even on the app, but haven’t gotten any traction. 111 people opened the first email and 73 opened the second one. Not a single person clicked on the Discord server invite.

feelsbadman.

Either people hate joining Discord servers, or they don’t use or care about Nous that much to get spammed by a random server. That is fair imo.

It sucks to see such little interest in this.

Time to figure out what’s going wrong.

Defining Metrics

I also started defining quantitative metrics. It’s easier to have a graph or a number and try to make it go up rather than just operate on **vibes**.

An active user is someone who initiates five search sessions a week.

A search session is when someone opens Nous to search and find a particular result. I’m assuming that it takes more than one search query to find a particular result so a series of queries made in succession count as a session.
The session is considered to be successful only when a result is found and clicked on.

A save event is when someone saves anything to Nous.

The results here aren’t great imo. People aren’t searching. I also identified that these users here do have ~some bookmarks saved too.

In general, people save more than they search.

Digging around the db a bit, I also found that there are only 15 people who have more than 50 bookmarks saved into Nous.

One user racked up 432 before the new update! They stopped using it when I placed the 250 limit. I’ve been trying to reach them but can’t seem to get a hold of them yet.

The numbers from the Chrome Web Store also don’t look so good. 30% of the users just up and disabled the extension lool

Graphs seem to be on a downward trend all over;

The takeaway here is: figure out why the people who signed up don’t use it anymore.
Before I start showing this to new people, I need to know where and why they drop off.

To be honest it is disheartening to see not even 3-4 users who want to stick around.

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Trying to Talk.

The best way to understand what’s going on is to talk to people right? Well, if only that too wasn’t so difficult.

Naturally seeing the metrics (or lack thereof) above, I sent out an email trying to talk to users and get their feedback. So far 70ish people have opened the email and none of them even clicked on the cal.com link to schedule a call.

People like free stuff right?

Now I’m coming up with ways to talk to people who have used Nous. I don’t know what to do next but ugh, it’s annoying.

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I’m gonna go nap🚶

I’m stuck with users who don’t use the tool and I can’t know why.

I can’t build new things because if I don’t figure out why someone might not use it then I’ll have built something no one wants to use.
I think this is the fallacy; you try to get users to stick, but you don’t; so you convince yourself that it’s because you didn’t build enough features.

I almost started working on new features too.

All of this along with the fact that I need to personally hit ramen profitability in a couple of months max started to weigh me down.

So I went to nap. I only nap when I’m decelerating and losing momentum (again).

After I woke up, I started looking for freelance gigs/side projects/jobs/whatever on random places, and wow it was kind of hilarious exploring these platforms.

Replit takes 15-25% of the bounty payouts (on top of the bank processing fee).
Upwork is just wilding too man.

wtf is this supposed to mean

All this made me realize that people don’t hire generalists. That’s a wake-up call for me to master one trade as I build Nous (and other random stuff). This is something I have to figure out. I started by just looking at what different startups are hiring for, and what kind of work I would like to do in them.

Tbh, I’m still not sure, but I’ve started looking actively now.

I know that I want to work on something cool, that potentially solves a problem I can well relate to or face myself. That gives me a lot of motivation to learn even faster.
The coolness-to-relatability of what problem is being solved has to be maintained for sure.

This is another thread I will keep updating here from now. I don’t have a lot to talk about yet, but I’m looking out for things for sure.

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So yeah, I guess that’s what I’ve been up to recently.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!