Hi all,

Lately, I’ve been getting things like payment and pricing set up. In terms of technical work, I’ve had to build a pricing / payment page (done) and test the Stripe integration (in progress).

The launch list never seems to shrink either:

• Bug bashing
• Deployment infrastructure
• Beta / UAT testing
• Deploy infrastructure

At this point here in April, I’m well beyond my “launch by January” goal, and as Vonnegut wrote, “So it goes.” I’ve always been a fan of “move fast and break things” but I’d rather get a full night’s of rest and build something “good enough and working” versus rush through another prototype that won’t make sense launch.

Coding and testing the payment page has provided some much needed momentum to the project. Working on an application by myself and without anyone actively using it, I find these small moments worthy of celebration. For me, it’s the intrinsic satisfaction of knowing I have built something, nearly from the ground up, into a functioning application that people will use.

This momentum is really important because I have plenty of evenings (and early mornings) where I ask myself, “Is this even worth it?” My fear and anxiety isn’t about how much money I will hopefully make but whether people will actually find it useful. My original hypothesis says yes, but that’s merely the outcome I want.

I have to keep this fear and anxiety in-check though – I know if I succumb to those pieces of negativity, this will merely become a fancy side-project that never sees the light of day or actual users.

I have fairly strong convictions (and good data) that this is a value-adding product, so I will keep building. And hopefully soon, I’ll be deploying as well.

Have a great week!

• Jonathan