Cabin Fever Amidst a Stay-At-Home Order

I'm a person who normally does fine when confined for prolonged periods of time. However, I am also a person who does certain tricks to keep myself productive. One of the tricks I rely on heavily is to switch my environment I am working within. For those of you that don't know, Illinois has a Stay-At-Home order in place currently. It just got extended to the end of April. So now instead of being able to go to a library, coffee shop, co-working space - I just can't. One thing I did back in college was switch my physical space where I was working to keep myself engaged in my work. It really does help me. Back then it was easy to do this because you usually had at least a dozen or so buildings to choose as your workspace. I'd do this often and I've carried this little habit onward in life. However, this COVID-19 pandemic is a unique situation where I can't easily do this anymore.

One of the main ways I gauge my progress is to look at what has been output in a given week. This week I feel like the output was low. I find myself struggling to think about what to talk about in this weekly reflection. Last week was an interesting week because I actually had some feedback about my blog. Can you believe people actually read my entries? I know - I'm as shocked as you are (or aren't because you don't exist because you're an imagined reader. I have resorted to imaginary readers as a coping mechanism to this cabin fever.) The main recurring sentiment within that feedback was basically asking "how does this relate to what you're doing? and what exactly is it that you're working on?". I forget sometimes that people don't just regularly read my blog. I am working on a product research application for properly valuing items intended for resale in a quick & confident way at scale. That's the gist of it and I am working on getting the minimum viable product put together and out the door to do a soft launch next month. The value that someone would get from this application is that it would save time when using it, but also give a simple way for people to gauge how well an item sells. It's my opinion that solutions currently available do this poorly and expensively for the intended customer archetypes that I am targeting.

I think I'll spend some time writing about some of the side things I've been working on that help support what I'm working towards: getting a software company off-the-ground.

I've recently started hosting meetups for indiehackers to get to know more people who work on software products/services or are thinking about working on a product/service. It's a way for me to know more developers & entrepreneurs. This last meetup I've hosted was online. I used Jitsi.org to host it rather than Zoom. Everytime I've used Jitsi, it's worked well for me and it's free. Feel free to checkout the next couple meetups I have scheduled for April 15th, and April 29th.

There is an online course I've been taking that teaches me more about venture capital and gives me a better glimpse at how venture capitalism functions. Lots of practical advice inside the course. It is taught by VCs from Foundry Group. They have a book that they've written on the subject and they go over important information every entrepreneur should know about the fundraising process. It's helped me learn some new things but also allowed me to meet people I would have otherwise not met for group assignments. This course probably takes up 4-6 hours of my week. The course ends in early May.

When I write these reflections, I usually delete more words than I publish. It's something I think about too much. I mean, I just found myself deleting two paragraphs that I thought went off on too much of a tangent. I wonder about whether or not this is a good thing. I always find myself asking, "is this worth writing about?". I'll end this blog by listing some topics I was thinking about writing about. Let me know if you would be interested in reading those topics. It will help me gauge what's worth taking the time to write.

-3 Items I attempted to predict sales price on and compared predictions from similar software. Then I sold them. I wanted to write about those 3 items and the key difference between my software and other more burdensome solutions.

-My business/life philosophy about being people-centric and why I think that way. I may include examples from my life.

My blogs are increasingly free-form and don't follow a set template or structure. It's more stream of conscience and I don't plan on changing that soon. I do think I should try writing a little at the end of my day to better understand where the time has been spent. This past week has been spent mostly on technical issues and getting hung up on bugs/errors.