S01E06

Procrastinating is hard.

There’s always something else to do

Hello and welcome to Season 01, Episode 06 of Tessallate 👋

If you forgot who I am, that’s OK. I’m the guy that set out to build two products in Q1 - a product every 6 weeks.

In the first half of the quarter, I designed, built, and launched Dime - a lightweight free invoicing tool for freelancers.

Three weeks ago I started working on jobwatchr.com - a live feed of jobs opened in the last 24 hours. I had tens of thousands of people visit the site after going, dare I say “viral”, on Reddit.

Pondering what to do with this new-found attention, two weeks ago I decided I would continue building it if I would get 100 people on the waiting list for the “private feed” feature — the ability to set up your own private Job Watchr feed with companies you follow and keywords you’re interested in.

And as of today, the list has… 🥁

105 sign-ups.

So let’s dive into last week’s problems and progress, as well as my upcoming plans ⬇️

Problems ☠️

Let’s get it out of the way: the last two weeks were slow 🐢.

A complete lack of goal-setting and planning really killed my productivity. I procrastinated hard.

It’s curious to see how motivation ebbs and wanes. I keep needing to re-learn this lesson: you can start projects with lots of motivation, but motivation alone won’t get you to the finish line.

The new shine will inevitably wear off, and when it does, all you’re left with is a vague notion of excitement.

Probably the best thing you can do to overcome this is to have a clear goal and timeline in mind. I, unfortunately, had neither.

Finally, thankfully, luckily, the fog is starting to lift and I’m starting to feel better and re-energized now. Case in point: finally being able to write this newsletter.

Progress 🌱

However! Not all was lost in these last two abysmal weeks.

Something I did do is send emails to everyone who signed up for the Job Watchr “private feed” waiting list. I wanted to get talking to people and find out what they’re looking for and why they signed up.

After talking to about 20 people, I walked away with one big learning: people are looking for an edge when applying for jobs, and Job Watchr provides them the ability to be one of the first people to apply.

The killer feature and real job-searching hack for these people is to receive an email within 10 minutes of a job going live so they can be the first.

With this in mind, I feel like I have enough information I need to launch Job Watchr — for real.

Plans 🔥

I’ve learned my lesson and I’m now going to finish these last two weeks strong. My goal is to launch Job Watchr on Product hunt by next week Friday, March 17.

Here’s the list of things I need to do:

1. Build login/signup flow

2. Let users select companies to follow

3. Let users filter on select keywords

4. Ability for users to create a private feed on their own URL, e.g: jobwatchr.com/list/<unique_id>

5. Send job alert emails to a user as soon as a new job is opened up that matches their keywords

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

- Toon