S01E05
Closing the DIme chapter, new project, new ideas
Ah, Sunday night —
The perfect time to write a newsletter 🙃
Hello and welcome to week #7 of Tessellate.
The first 6 weeks of this year I spent building Dime. Now it’s time to turn a leaf and focus on the second half of Q1 with a new project (or projects?).
But first, let’s start by recapping what I did last week.
Progress 💯
My goal for this week was to:
Plan ahead:Make a plan for the next 6 weeks
Content: Write a detailed recap of the last 6 weeks
My plan failed before it even started.
Sunday night, right after sending the previous edition, I had an idea for a small website I could build. Monday morning, while working on my plans for the next 6 weeks, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
So, wouldn’t you know it, in the time span of 24 hours, I built and launched jobwatchr.com.
I've been following the recent layoffs and it made me curious how quickly companies would publish new job openings post-layoffs.
So I built Jobwatchr: a live feed of jobs opened by (big) tech companies in the last 24 hour and submitted it to r/internetIsBeautiful.
The post did really well there. After 24 hours it had 4.5k upvotes and I had 45k pageviews on the site. Then, mysteriously, the post was removed by the mods. I reached out to the mods but got no response. So I don’t know why it was deleted, even though at that point it was the top-rated post of the month. All in all a somewhat unsatisfying ending.
Regardless, this was still a big win. It went in a different direction than I thought it would go, but people really just liked the idea of a jobs feed. Seeing the comments gave me a few new ideas to build on, but I’ll talk about my plans for what’s next for jobwatchr at the end of the post.
As for the content I was supposed to write: because of this little sidetrack, I’m only halfway done writing my 6-week recap post. I’ll hopefully hit publish this week. I do this mainly just
Problems 🤔
Focus: My biggest problem now is not having clarity on what I want to achieve by the end of the quarter. Remember that my goal was to build 2 products in Q1.
I need to decide: what project do I want to work on next? For some reason, I’m having a lot of difficulty choosing. I feel pressure to get it together and start working on something. I have just 5 weeks left to build at least one other product.
Plans 💭
jobwatchr: I want to validate a feature that I could potentially monetize: private job feeds.
Right now everyone can view the site and see a collection of jobs that went live from a pre-selected group of companies, curated by me.
With a private feed, users can cherry-pick companies they’re interested in, and more importantly, create a bunch of keywords, and get notified when new jobs go live that match those keywords. I’m interested to learn whether people will pay for this feature.
To validate this idea, I’m going to run a Reddit ad campaign. I’ll use the same copy as I used for the original post since that did so well. If I can get 100 people to sign up for the “private feed” waitlist, I’m going to build it. So far, we’re at 20.
content: Finish writing my 6-week recap of building Dime. It’s not that exciting, but I want to finish it regardless so I can really close that chapter and move on.
New project?: Hopefully, by the end of next week I’ll be able to report I have started on a new project. I have some ideas, I just need to pick one and get going.
Alright, that’s it for this week.
Thanks for reading!
Toon