April Review

After two years working on growing startups non-stop, I decided last month to take a break from making and perform a digital declutter. 

I believe it was the right time to take a step back and think about where I want to take things. 

I kept on writing and coding from time to time, but I’m not nearly as productive as I used to be. I’ve been stuck in Budapest for four months now, and my plane keeps getting canceled. The pandemic didn’t disturb my routine much, but I still felt less energetic than I used to.

Fortunately, I had the chance to meet fellow travelers right before the country’s lockdown, and we ended up going through this together. Dining and partying our nights away definitely helped me unwind and take my mind off the difficult situation we are facing. I also started dating someone new, so even though I haven’t been working as much as I should have, I’ve been very well on an emotional level.

I now feel ready to take on my maker mantle once again.

My plan for the next months rests on two observations: 1) I spend too much time by myself working crazy hours, and 2) I have too many projects.

First, I want to focus on learning how to stick to a sustainable work schedule to leave more time for extra offline activities and people I care about. That means limiting myself to 6 hours of deep work every workday spent on growing my business and forcing myself to one day off per week. I like to think I’m a consistent maker, but I still can improve the intensity displayed during my work hours to do more in less time.

Second, working on Bouquin, I understood I will never be able to juggle more than one full-time project at once. This is why I decided to give Cowriters top priority and stop Bouquin’s development as a standalone product. Instead, I’ve decided to integrate Bouquin’s main features to Cowriters’ roadmap.

I’m currently working on redesigning Cowriters in its entirety: new design, new rendering engine, improved core features. I am aware I let down the community for the past few months, but I think I needed this time to decide what’s best for everyone. In my opinion, marketing and community management isn’t what I need to work on today: what we need is a better core product that will truly help you grow as writers. 

The way Cowriters is at the moment is too limiting, I had to rethink how to take everyone from a daily writing habit to a profitable lifestyle. This link, going from a micro-habit to a macro-project, is key: this is what will make sure you’ll fall in love with writing. 

I’ll go more in detail about the specific features I plan to add in a future post, but what I can say for now is that it will involve Bouquin’s engine, without giving up on the community features.

The only side-project I’m keeping at the moment is Sipreads, because it just started generating revenues, only involves a few hours per month, and is a collaborative project with another creator.

I’ll also be gradually leaving technical writing as a freelancer to try providing web development services for content creators in my umbrella company Writelier. The idea will be to test out what I learned building Bouquin to work on custom websites for writers, bloggers, and book authors. More on that later, but the idea is to launch a productized service alternative to Bouquin instead of growing a full-blown SaaS and test the waters.

Glad to be back and excited to help everyone with their writing projects.