logs

I’ve missed a number of weeks of logs as our morning standups cut into the time I normally set aside for my morning routine. We’re continuing our efforts to develop conviction in our idea, as well as determine what to do with Orchard in both the short and long term.

Day 364: Monday, April 17, 2023

It’s been a few weeks since we stopped working on developing Orchard full-time and instead shifted our priorities to building up conviction in whatever we’re working on in the future.

To briefly summarize, I’m focused on exploring some threads with the immediate version of Orchard. While ultimately monetizing Orchard will probably have to come through enterprise deals, I want to validate whether a prosumer approach will work in the short term. To start, I’m running an experiment to see if Orchard will be a good fit for students.

There are a number of threads that my co-founders are focused on. These primarily consist of AI applications to certain spaces—we’ve developed a strong understanding of the technology, and it makes sense to leverage that as we’re in the middle of the technological tailwind spurred by generative AI.

Day 365: Tuesday, April 18, 2023

I’m back to doing dev work, which makes it seem like the type of work we’re doing hasn’t changed much from a couple weeks ago, but I swear it’s quite fundamentally different.

I’ve set a personal deadline of finishing all the coding by tomorrow night, which might be highly ambitious—I’ll see how I feel after today in terms of whether this is a realistic goal.

Today was a significant day for us as it marked exactly one year from incorporation.

Day 366: Wednesday, April 19, 2023

I set a goal for myself to finish up all my engineering tasks by the end of the day so that I can focus on non-engineering related tasks tomorrow. At this rate, I’m not sure if this is doable, but fingers crossed.

We talked to our mentor, Ben, today just to give a few updates and bounce a couple ideas off of him—it’s always nice to talk to people from the Neo accelerator. I do miss the accelerator experience quite a bit—part of me wishes that there was a followup experience every year just to see everyone again, but I know that’s definitely unsustainable from Neo’s perspective (I’d imagine they spent a mini fortune on our cohort alone).

Day 367: Thursday, April 20, 2023

Engineering tasks did not get finished yesterday, unfortunately. I’m hoping that I can catch up today, but that is rather optimistic.

We’re concurrently diving pretty deep into a new thread, which centers around the idea of using LLMs to source prospects (similar to what expert networking services do).

Day 368: Friday, April 21, 2023

Today, we read a founder’s postmortem learnings regarding his startup—I felt like there were a lot of relevant takeaways to even our startup, so I will be spending some time extracting changes that we can implement for our own team. There’s no way to know what the right things to do are, but starting from other people’s insights/experiences rather than blindly walking into the same mistakes is probably more efficient.

Apart from that, it’s business as usual. I’m still doing a lot of dev work. Kevin is also coding, but on an unrelated project. John and Tae are still doing a lot of research on various threads/industries in pursuit of any promising new ideas.