A Wednesday
Today was exciting, because it involved a bit of everything that I now do.
I worked from Houndstooth in the morning and did some programming. I fixed some Ember deprecation warnings, which greatly improves the performance of the app. Those have been weighing on me for some time, so it was gratifying to finally get them taken care of.
I had a meeting over the phone with my sister. She's designing an infographic for us that sums of the instructions for the first week of our private coaching program, which covers meal frequency, meal timing, and food quality. We're planning on offering it as freemium content to build our email list, as well as hand it out to people at our corporate seminars. Hopefully those simple guidelines alone can make a difference for people.
Before heading home for lunch, I posted a great testimonial from one of our clients on social media.
During the afternoon, I took a break from work to clean the house (the house is much cleaner now that I'm working from home...I am slowly becoming a house elf I'm sure). I had a phone consult with a prospective client and my first meeting with an excited new client, and then took care of some emails.
In the evening I went to a Product Tank event at Bottle Rocket's office in Addison. It was a bit strange to rehearse my new intro with the people I met there; I'm no longer a programmer/designer at Dialexa, but a business owner.
The talks were on data collection and user testing, which is something currently absent from our process. The main point I came away with was to think critically about the metrics you're looking at - make sure they're not "vanity metrics" or things that aren't actually moving the needle.
In the evening I created an email in MailChimp to send out to our clients regarding the app updates I pushed. The updates include performance improvements, a redesigned meal plan layout, and food-specific serving sizes. It's always a bit nerve-wracking to push updates to production code, especially since I'm the sole developer - if something breaks, I better know how to fix it...!
Thank goodness things went smoothly. (This process shouldn't be as nerve-wracking as it is...we need to get some processes in place.) I got a few text messages from good friends the next day complimenting the new layout. It only took them a few seconds to message me, but it meant a lot that they reached out.