logs

We will hopefully get our experiment up and running this week. Other than that, it is full send on exploring new threads/fleshing out early conviction.

Day 371: Monday, April 24, 2023

I finally finished all of our dev tasks today—a publicly shareable workspace is finally viable. The next step is to figure out all the remaining nontechnical tasks in order to launch this experiment among students. I’m pretty apprehensive at approaching the professor to help advertise our product within his class—however, I’ve read a good amount on rejection therapy and it applies here. I do think that if I become more comfortable with the feeling of rejection, it’ll unlock me to do a lot more things in the context of the startup.

The rest of my team is continuing their exploration of various threads, primarily focused on B2B ideas. There should be plenty of opportunity for learning no matter which idea we pick, but it is a bit of a grind. On the side, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to optimize our idea search process—there are lots of good frameworks written by founders out there, so I’m drawing heavy inspiration from a lot of those. I think the best bet is to consciously try to adhere to any framework, and over time figure out what sticks/is most effective. There’s only so much time/mental runway in a startup, and the best thing to do for basically anything when it comes to startups is to just continually learn as much as possible (and take temporal shortcuts in learning when you can). In my opinion, copying from other people’s experiences/insights is a good way to achieve that.

There’s a lot of work that is directly related to startups. For me these days, it is thinking about what to do with Orchard in the immediate future, and then actually going out and doing those tasks (often engineering work). However, there are also a lot of tangential things that I feel like are important to the long term startup success, but feel secondary to the primary work I have to do. This includes keeping up with AI research literature, reading/writing, hacking on various projects, and increasing social media visibility/presence. For my team and I, figuring out a balance for these sorts of things is hard. I know personally, if I have the mental bandwidth to do this sort of work, I have so many other direct tasks that I need to accomplish that it feels wrong to devote mental power to tasks that don’t directly move forward my immediate startup work.

Day 372: Tuesday, April 25, 2023

It was a slower day for me because I didn’t manage to get much sleep the previous night (was cramming some random work). Typically, I compensate for this if needed by taking a short post-lunch nap in the afternoon, or else I notice my productivity and motivation drop immensely. I tried a second coffee instead today, which kinda killed me because I was simultaneously exhausted but also too jittery to feel like napping. Nowadays, I spend a good amount of time thinking about how to boost personal productivity. I used to have a phase back in undergrad where I was similarly obsessed with this (hence the name of this blog)—I slowly got tired of it, but now I’m revisiting a lot of my old tactics as well as trying out new ones.

Day 373: Wednesday, April 26, 2023

I sent out an email to the professor of the class that I want to run the experiment for, which is an interesting thought exercise. Since I cannot post directly, there seems to be a multi-sided market in a sense here, where I need to be able to convince the professor that my product is useful (in order to gain permission to post it in his course page) but I also need to have the messaging be direct enough for students so that they will be incentivized to click on it/use it.

However, being able to send out this email means that I have more unstructured time to catch up on all the secondary learnings that I’ve been pushing off for a while. I’m especially looking forward to diving deep into many of the readings that my teammates have been sharing in our Slack channel—at the end of the day, feeling like I’m learning quickly makes me happy. In contrast, being productive/accomplishing tasks is nice, but doing it for too long makes me feel like I’m behind in terms of knowledge/skills learned. There’s definitely a balance to be struck here, which will vary per individual and situation.

Day 374: Thursday, April 27, 2023

I spent today doing a lot of reading to learn more about the business side of companies. Since I’ve been running the experiment, this is useful for me to catch up and start thinking about the type of customer that we’d ideally want to understand. We’re undergoing a shift in focus on a specific customer segment rather than building out the technology/product—the advantage of this is that even if we end up scrapping one of our ideas, we can reuse a lot of our learnings about the customer for the next idea. Conversely, if we’re simply focused on the product/technology itself, a lot of those learnings will not carry over to our next customer.

Day 375: Friday, April 28, 2023

Honestly, a slower day for myself as I often feel quite burnt out by the time Friday rolls around. Especially now, there’s a lot of unstructured work to be done for the startup, and Friday is a weird block because it feels like there’s only a small time chunk left to accomplish those things (weekends tend to be a lot more unstructured work time for me personally).