logs

Still trying to figure out what to do after the Microsoft announcement. In the short term, we’re moving forward with launch.

Day 336: Monday, March 20, 2023

This morning, we had a more serious team meeting discussing our current rate of progress as well as ways to improve as a team. Without getting too much into details, as we’ve been working together as a team for so many years, we’re very comfortable with each other as friends as well as teammates. However, we’ve wandered a little far from a focused, professional team environment—being explicit in what our primary objectives are every week should help center the team on working on what’s actually important. We’ve been working more as individuals rather than a team, and, although we’ll never truly work like a big corporation nor should we, there are still worthwhile elements of corporate culture to copy. We’re still experimenting with this project structure, but it should help bring clarity and focus to what everyone is working on.

To that end, we’re decidedly wrapping up all our work on Orchard 2.0 this week. We’ve broken down every task, put hard deadlines on everything, and made individuals responsible for specific tasks. There are a number of problems that I can think of regarding this system, namely that there are a lot of random things that could fall by the wayside if they’re not integral to our current sprint—my gut feeling is that collecting these things are important, although perhaps I’m wrong and working on only highest priority tasks will improve things.

Day 337: Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Today was the first day of working under this new system full-time. I felt like productivity and focus were up across the board, which felt good. Nothing crazy to update for today, but something cool is that Orchard can now do math.

Day 338: Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Today we focused on wrapping up all our various dev tasks in order to push the new version of Orchard to production. We’re almost done—the last things remaining are more on the polish side than anything.

More directionally, we’re going to narrow our focus for Orchard on a specific customer segment moving forward. What that means for our current iteration of product remains to be seen, but this sort of cultural/structural change will hopefully help us move faster and more effectively.

Day 339: Thursday, March 23, 2023

At this point, there are so many big days for us that I don’t even know what to call a big day. The AI space is moving so rapidly, and the incumbents/competition is magnitudes fiercer than I previously ever imagined. Today, OpenAI announced their plugin system, which essentially negates a lot of the advantages that we were hoping to provide with a powerful LLM agent, capable of utilizing multiple tools (whatever integration we build can just be replicated by the open source community).

Our short term work for the next day does not change, although it does impact our future directions.

Day 340: Friday, March 24, 2023

Today, we finally pushed Orchard 2.0 to production. There were still quite a few bugs, but by forcing ourselves to do it, we finally capped off a spring that honestly took many more months than we had initially expected it to take. There’s a sense of relief, but also a sense of urgency as we figure out what to do next, both with our current product as well as a general awareness that we may need to pivot to a new direction.

This weekend, we’ll spend more time squashing any remaining bugs (of which there are a ton of minor ones)—next week will begin a new chapter in our startup, one where we’re going to be hyper focused on customer discovery and building a narrative.