logs

Last week, we saw a couple of huge changes in the form of text-DaVinci-003 and ChatGPT. Our main goal for this week is to get Orchard ready for a public launch.

Day 229: December 5, 2022

Today, the goal was to finish “Orchard 2.0.” The main changes for this include:

• better passive autocomplete

• a complete overhaul of the command bar/templates to a chatbot interface (this was in response to the mainstream success of ChatGPT)
• better default templates/prompts
• outlines
• general UI/UX improvements
• overhaul of dark mode
• lots of backend changes corresponding to our chatbot interface overhaul

Beyond that, I focused a lot on writing about what our Go To Market strategy will look like. I think having a great product will help a lot, but there’s still a lot of hard work that we need to do surrounding launch that requires careful planning/thought.

I saw this random TikTok ad for a super shitty-looking game, and idk why but I found these comments hilarious.

Day 230: December 6, 2022

The changes for Orchard 2.0 are taking a lot longer than anticipated. The goal for today was to finish the MVP to the point where we can show a demo for our VC call the next day. While we managed to finish most of the core technical functionality by the end of the day, there are still a lot of bugs in the new version (we are keeping it in staging for now). Once we achieve a certain degree of polish, we’ll start looking to push it out to close friends to try.

I’ve been seeing a lot of ChatGPT content on TikTok, so I’m going to start thinking a lot about how to leverage TikTok for marketing/user growth.

Day 231: December 7, 2022

Adding pictures/links for these logs are taking a lot effort—I’m starting to get lazy. I know that the moment I stop including photos for one log, I’ll just forget to do it for all the days. I think pictures are nice because it’s how I depict my daily life outside of startups (logs are more startup centric). It also forces me to take more pictures.

Today, we took a short call with a VC, which isn’t something we normally do. However, this VC was particularly persistent, and, since I already had delayed calling him for so long, I decided to finally take the call. The issue with taking VC calls too early is that there’s no real immediate benefit—I think a common misconception is that raising is this super important process that you need to game. In my opinion, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is your product/users. No amount of money can patch over a bad product or lack of users—yes, raising money is important to grow aggressively, but it’s definitely not the hard part. That’s why when I see funds revolving around giving people money to finally quit their jobs/drop out of school for a startup, or hear individuals talk about how they’ll do a startup only if they can raise enough money to pay themselves a solid salary, I’m dubious of the success of their startup. If your willingness to do a startup is predicated on the amount of salary you receive, you definitely should not be doing startups—you’ll be miserable and ultimately end up fucking over the other people who are working with you on your company.

As expected, this call wasn’t the most useful. Even though it was only 20 minutes, it is still a 20 minutes that I’d rather have spent coding (especially because context switching is so detrimental to coding flow). We also didn’t really finish the demo in time, but that’s fine because he didn’t ask for one either.

Found an old photo of my dogs.

Day 231: December 8, 2022

Today, Kevin and I are flying out for winter vacation. The timing is quite unfortunate since we’re about to launch—figuring out how to do work while on vacation will be quite interesting. Anyways, we’re still pumping out a lot of code—there’s quite a few design questions to answer.

Another thing that I need to figure out is our GTM strategy. There’s a lot of logistical stuff to figure out, but, with the recent hype surrounding ChatGPT, I think we can be quite creative with this.

Kevin and sometimes I normally cook for the four of us—this was the first dinner after both of us left.

Day 232: December 9, 2022

It’s getting hard to find the motivation to write daily logs, especially while I’m in New York on “vacation.” Since we’re planning to launch on Tuesday (12/13), I’m probably going to have to work most days while I’m here. It’ll still be really nice to see some people I know in NYC—I really miss this place. Palo Alto doesn’t really cut it for me sometimes.

Today, I hung out with my friend during the day, and, while he went to go do something, I just sat in a cafe and worked for a few hours on writing copy for our various launches—I’m DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) for our launch. I’m thinking that we need to launch on Twitter, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, and possibly subreddits/other places—I need to write copies for messages for each of these platforms. This sort of work is actually quite painful to do—it reminds me of painstakingly writing essays back when I was in school. There’s a lot of other logistical things that I need to think about: who/what to message, best tactics to increase visibility when we launch, creating materials/messaging around our product, and a lot of random stuff. Definitely interesting as these are problems that are quite different from the sort of highly technical/mathematical problems that I’ve grown up solving, but I’m actually quite enjoying the challenge/learning new things.

The rest of my team is focused on building out the product itself/getting it ready for launch. There’s a lot of random bugs that we need to iron out, but the primary objective is to get the AI chat interface into something usable/easy to work with.

New York at night is super pretty.