Building in public – ISSUE N.04
Sensive.xyz is getting closer to launch. How we failed at building it in public.
Hello there.
Another week already, can’t believe it. Last week I struggled with finding my rhythm, so I’m hoping this week will turn out better. I’m happy I got my in-house editor/proofreader Jennie Dalgren around. Extra shout-out to her this week. She is so talented at everything that she does, and the most amazing partner and mother.
Okay, let’s see if we can get started. This week I want to talk to you about my side project, Sensive. Then touch on Business ideas that could never work. I also got some curated open design positions to share, and like every week I compiled a shortlist of things I felt worth mentioning.
Sensive – Mood Tracking, Part 1.
In January 2020, just months before Sky Lou was supposed to arrive, I started fiddling with this mood-tracking idea. That quickly turned into a Google Sheet. A sheet is a great tool for prototyping anything with data, numbers, and expected output (if you are like me and don’t code stuff quickly). I had researched a lot of different scientific ways to track my mood and got stuck on this one thing called Profiling of Mood States (POMS). The only problem? The paper version of this takes 5-15 min to complete. I wanted something that I could do daily in just a couple of minutes, and do repeatedly every day.
Another problem with POMS is that it’s quite negative in its tone, the mood states you are getting asked about are mainly negative (there is a reason to why this is) but this made it feel quite jarring to keep up with daily.
I kept measuring my mood in that Google Sheet over a couple of weeks. Nothing fancy but I started to get a helicopter perspective on my mood, based on science, yay. I felt it was opening up something about myself I had previously maybe just had a hunch about but now I had it on paper. I wanted to see if I could take that further.
Now. Enter. Figma. After a couple of hours, I had a draft of something that, when prototyped, felt quite nice. I could complete all the 65 moods in just under 2 minutes and get really nice and accurate results.
I knew I had to take this to Brian and see if we could do something with this.
Short back story, Brian and I (and some more amazing folks) were building and designing the micro-investment platform GetBamboo and have been fiddling with things steadily ever since we got aquired. Now back to the story.
After seeing my designs and prototype, Brian had some suggestions and was eager to start prototyping something we could get onto an actual mobile phone. We are both working full-time jobs and have no real intention to quit. So we did not move very quickly, weekends and some evenings were what we had at our disposal. (up until I got Sky Lou, then my time allocation basically dropped close to zero).
At this point it was very clear, this was our thing now. Brian is such a talented engineer & tinkerer, and if anyone could make this better it would be him. Achievement unlocked - dream team setup.
Let’s rewind a bit. I wanted to do this for myself, as a way to keep tabs on my mood over time and learn more about, how what I think about my mood might differ from what I can measure around my mood. At this point I had no intention of making it for others.
After a while that slightly changed, I started asking people about their moods. How they felt, and it became apparent that I was not the only one feeling overwhelmed or confused at times. But just like me, they had no way of measuring it consistently over time.
We managed to get something working, had it up on TestFlight quite quickly. And started to use it ourselves. At this point, I’m not sure what made us not launch this publically. Instead, we took a painful route of getting people downloading via TestFlight. That just made it harder to access, and honestly, we had a hard time collecting enough feedback as well.
I’ve always advocated building in public/co-build with your intended audience. But here we were, not really doing what we preach, I think at the time I wanted to believe we were. But as with anything that you feel a bit extra about you get second thoughts. Is this good enough? Will, I put myself on the line in front of all these people watching? Have I overhyped something that essentially is a glorified survey? All these questions just kept bombarding me. It was not easy, and since we were dogfooding our own app, the results of this uncertainty in my mood were not great.
After a couple of months, we had well over 250 installs of the app. We managed to work a couple of hours on weekends on addressing bugs, UI mistakes, UX patterns that we felt were good that people had a hard time grasping.
Then we lost our momentum, and we had problems with retention. And we could not figure out what it was that made it hard for people to come back to the app. Maybe we were focusing on the wrong things. Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. At this point, Sky Lou also decided to be born. Let’s just say it was not easy to find time on the weekend to focus on Sensive…
To be continued next week…
Business ideas that could never work
This week was the first Jacuzzi Club official room on Clubhouse. The theme was “Business ideas that could never work”. It was an absolute blast listening in and chiming in. This way of free-form pitching and jamming businesses is one of my favorite thing to do. There are no bad ideas, just ideas.
One of the things that got mentioned, a toaster that burns in ads on each slice & randomly throws the toasts high up in the air when they are ready. BladderBuddy, combining the toilet with the walking beer taps on festivals, because when the walking beer taps run low on beer, there is an opportunity to carry urine. And people would probably spend more money on beer. Since it would be easier to buy a beer and use the restroom at the same time. A bike lock made of gold so that thieves would leave your bike alone and steal the lock instead. I had the opportunity to speak about Fizzy Horse, an energy drink for stallions. A business idea Maarten Hoogland and I cooked up a couple of years back. It’s such a stupid idea that it kind of makes sense. You just need to target the right racehorses and jockeys, and you are golden.
There were a tonne worse (great) business ideas thrown around. Join in next time if this stuff floats your boat; Jacuzzi Club on Clubhouse.
Sky Lou turned 10 months
I don’t know how many times I heard before becoming a parent that time would start flying by even faster. It’s true. It’s not a cliché, it’s real. Even though we got a pandemic going on, with pretty much all of our normal travel plans being reduced to negative. Meaning we got all the time in the world to just be home and enjoy ourselves as a family, time is passing by extremely fast.
So to all you other parents (and future parents) out there, enjoy this time as much as you possibly can. You’ll never get it back, never ever.
Curated Design jobs
I’m getting a lot of questions on where to find good senior design jobs, so I thought I’d share some with you. If you don’t directly are interested you might have a designer in your network that might be. Share this with them.
UX Researcher, ProductHunt, Remote
(Salary $70k – $120k • Equity 0.04% – 0.14%)
Senior Product Designer, Clutter, Los Angeles
Senior Product Designer, Parsley Health, New York City
Head of Product Design, LightStep, Remote
Senior Product Designer, ProductBoard, San Francisco
Senior Product Designer, Drift, Remote
Head of Design & User Experience, Glossier, New York
This week’s tidbits
Beeple NFT sells for $69 million dollars at Christie’s. NYT writes about it.
Canoo launches its electric pickup truck [video]. I’m bullish.
Casey Neistats brother Van Neistat, starts a Youtube channel.
I got reminded of how extremely talented Rafael Conde is.
Jack Cohen minted his first NFT
I saw an insane flythrough FPV drone video of a Minnesota cine complex.
Apple discontinues the HomePod, [grab one while they are still in stock].
The internet has come full circle, chat room apps are now using characters again to control how we interact with each other remotely.
Any feedback or ideas on how I can make this better is most welcome.
Thank you for reading.
If you missed my previous newsletters you’ll find them here n.01, n.02, n.03.
Written by Linus Ekenstam, a troublemaker at sensive.xyz – You can find me on Twitter & Instagram