Part of the Process

During normal life finding time and energy for side projects can be tough, with the strange events caused by the Coronavirus it can be even harder. A short update on what we've done so far this year.  This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves, through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Adding remote jobs With more people working from home, and liking it, we thought it would be good to boost the links on our resources page to include more remote working options. This was a quick reaction to Coronavirus and the changes of the working world. It also prompted a bit of a look at the resources with some updates and tweaks. Job application tracker The next bit we tackled was a feature inspired by a tweet about using a spreadsheet to track j...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. I have already written about Venturing into the world of SEO where I setup the infrastructure on the site, like metadata and adding a sitemap. Then a little later When SEO meets the MVP process on Bashfully , where I revisited how search results appear and what I hoped for Bashfully. Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash This has been the hardest part of the project so far. As much as you can setup the structure and hint to search engines, if people aren't finding your site organically then they're unlikely to find it. So, how to get organic searches ? Taking a look in the search consoles the closest searches that appeared we...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Nathaniel Shuman  on  Unsplash New short term goal One of the bigger things to happen to the project in the past month is creating a new short term goa l to  “make it as easy as possible to get resume info in and a PDF out”. This came from engaging with a potential user on Twitter that really bought this use case out as a good hook. As a follow up to that we also got four new  users  organically . Finding our product/market fit has been very heavily influenced by a) how we show the complexity of the product and b) how opinionated we make the process of using it. Succeeding in this short term goal...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Etienne Boulanger  on  Unsplash Following on from my post on  Building an onboarding process for a green field product  we have building the experience. One of the lessons I pulled out previously was about launching something to get feedback . Even if you don't feel ready. It's easy to know the theory, but hard to put yourself out there! I'm really glad that we did as it allowed some feedback and integration issues to be tested while we polished. Background  One approach that we have taken is to slowly refactor the experience as we add functionality into the edit screens. To start with we had a l...

This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So after getting the SEO infrastructure sorted out we are back into an experiment and observe phase.  LinkedIn on Google  LinkedIn is the yard stick that we need to beat. The features that we are honing in on based on the MVP process are discoverability, customisation, and guidance. These allow us to add value as a David fighting the awesome network effect of the LinkedIn's Goliath. As an example to the left is a search result for me going to my LinkedIn profile. There are a couple of points that I like - my name, job title, location, and current employer are all easy to read. The thing that I don't like is that the description is very impersonal. Is ...

It has been a bit of a voyage into the unexpected in looking at SEO this month. For my side project Bashfully , which is to create an online profile for people early in their careers that has three guiding principles. That it should be: Discoverable - people need to be able to find the person based on their skills, experience, and aspirations. Personalised - the skills and experience need to have the ability to be tailored for specific job applications. Guiding - given the above, give enough structure that allows the profile builder to tell their story in the best way possible. Also a longer term goal here is to provide feedback based on other profiles that match their aspirations. The features that we develop tend to rotate around each of these goals to keep the product balanced. We hadn't done much in the discoverable area, apart from setting meta data required for creating the cards used in sharing to Facebook or Twitter. Since this came up in our user research we ...

I was going to write about SEO and Bashfully , but is usual on software projects other things cropped up. In tandem with my day job I have mainly been thinking about maintaining delivery momentum.One of the downsides of small projects teams is the lack of capacity and time. However, the upside is focus and alignment. We manage this by: Keeping a Small backlog , we're open to opportunity but don't fill a backlog for the sake of it. Each completed feature is usually an avenue to learn and build. Referring to the vision and remembering YAGNI , there have been times that we have rejected ideas as they aren't core to what we are trying to achieve. And others that just aren't right yet (which we immediately discard, no clogging up the backlog!) Talking before starting dev, really simple but not relying on story formats or mock-ups. We talk through what we are trying to achieve and what success looks like. That's the good things that I have learned in this pha...

Photo by  Jo Szczepanska  on  Unsplash Getting the correct tools in place for any initiative is important. For any product concentrating the core functionality is also key. Anything that isn't a core function should come off the shelf. Very few circumstances are that specialised to need to roll your own.  The number one example of this for me are passwords. Not only do you not want to spend the time writing authentication code. You also won't want to spend the time doing so securely. Most people already have a Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, or whatever log-in. Just use that.  I have already shared about infrastructure that we chose for Bashfully. Had the project been different we may have made different choices. For example, Python and R have brilliant support for statistics and machine learning. Java is great support for build, CI and distributed system tooling. In this post I am going to take a look at a couple of feedback tools, as this is...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Since writing about Public beta and starting the MVP process I have gained more insights about our Bashfully launch. These are around what we have got right vs wrong. Successes Having a pre-release landing page Having a baseline twitter campaign  Using the above to get a baseline conversion ratio The Twitter campaign had a segment list, budget, and set of content we could re-run. This allowed us to see that the Twitter engagements this time weren't being matched with similar conversion rates. Exactly what we got wrong is what are trying to prove. But one thing is that we inadvertently changed a variable on the landing page. This too...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So deciding to "go live" shouldn't be a difficult decision ... in fact getting people interested enough to use an early stage project is hard enough! This is the latest instalment talking about going through the MVP process with Bashfully  - my side project that hosts online profiles. Once we did though we got to see some real behaviour. So far this has lead to us: Cutting two stages from the on-boarding process Improving the layout and language in on-boarding Adding a page describing the profiles in Bashfully Made the "Call to actions" more prominent on the home page Prioritised some mobile layout fixes after seeing...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Riku Lu  on  Unsplash Onboarding is an important part of B2C and pure "pay to play" SaaS. With so many tools to use, why would any user put effort into getting up and running? With B2B SaaS platforms that include professional services to get up and running then this isn't important. The same impact comes through the service that accompanies the product. I have been lucky to experience a great onboarding experience when evaluating product management software for work. The best by a country mile was ProdPad. This had two elements, the first was the trial and flow to get up and running. The second was the emails the accompanie...