Small team, big ideas
💡 ⏱️
Too many ideas. Too little time.
Dear diary, here is a brain dump on motivation, project management and business philosophy.
Our new platform launched in BETA recently. That was a big milestone for us. But there is still a mountain of work ahead before we can drop the BETA label. We are competing with giants. No VC money to burn. We are just 5 developers. How do we even cope?
# Irrationality
They didn't knew it was impossible. So they dit it.
It might not be as simple as Mark Twain puts it. But spinning up a reality distortion field and ignoring the odds helps. Maintain a childlike naivety to keep going. Don't get overwhelmed.
# Planning
Plans are useless. But planning is everything.
Humans are bad at planning. Let's embrace that. We plan for the known knowns. We anticipate the known unknowns. And we expect the unknown unknowns to hit us hard anyhow.
# Ideas
Good ideas are fragile and easy to miss. I file each new idea, keep it around, and revisit it after a while. A little distance often helps to see things more clearly. The best ones will stick.
We prioritize together using a simplified RICE model (impact, confidence, effort). Good gut feeling (learned a lot from my co-founder Oli) and domain knowledge are helpful too. Customer support driven development helps separate signal from noise. Saying "no" is still hard.
I got better over the years at turning fuzzy ideas into actionable tasks.
# Iterations
Sometimes we have a good implementation plan, but it's too large or blocked by dependencies. Sometimes, we don't even know what the solution should look like yet. Project management helps breaking big ideas down into small tasks.
We aim to get a first iteration out quickly. Then we can dogfood it, show it to customers, learn, and iterate.
# Time
We are fortunate to have a stable financial situation. This buys us time, which is one reason we ship slowly. We are not a high velocity team and that is ok. But we need to be careful. Time is still our most precious resource. Our roadmap, projects, and features need to survive reality.
# Distraction
Keep calm and carry on coding.
Don't look at the scary news in the world. Don't try to figure if AI will kill your industry. Don't compare yourself against competitors (just steal the best ideas).
# Lifestyle entrepreneurship
fortrabbit is driven by our aim to create a good cloud hosting solution. We focus on engineering and product. We don't care about world domination or profit optimization.
# Staying healthy
We try to avoid burnout and maintain a healthy relationship to our work. Our business should support not consume our lives. Work smarter, not harder.