At the beginning of the year, I defined as a goal to deliver one product each month of the year… And now, at Jan 31st, I can say that I’ve accomplished the goal for the first month.

Whilst the previous sentence is true, I still don’t feel it as a success at all.

It’s been a long process and I’ve found points where I lack both experience and motivation in the process of delivering the product.

The product itself is the bingo app that I mentioned in a previous post. You can either find it on the website https://quinto.cat or in the Google Play Store.

The best part I take away from this product is that in less than a week I had a product that worked and that was deployed in a domain, so that anyone could use.

However, at this point I didn’t know how to “market” it or attract users, so I started to work on improvements… This brought me to create not only a website but also a mobile application, what caused me to spend one more week on it.

I had 2 working products, but when I showed it to friends and family, it was not looking as good as it could.

So I ended up trying to contract a designer from Fiverr to redesign it before marketing it.

The experience with the designer, was far from good.

She didn’t deliver the results on time and after some excuses she delivered me almost the same I had provided but just changing a couple of colors.

The lessons there, were two:

1. I don’t know how to negotiate.
2. Bargains are hard to find, most of the times, cheap gigs are cheap for a reason, and is that are not that good.

After having a redesign, I just ended up changing a couple of elements of the screen and using a palette similar to the provided by the designer, but the core usage was nearly identical as it was 2 weeks from that moment.

So there I was, trying to publish the application in the Google Play Store on Jan 31st after work.

I can say that I delivered both the website and the application by the end of the first month. However, the results will have to be checked on Februrary as the month is already over…

What I will try to improve on Februray is to have a product that at least has one user that is not a known person (not friends nor family) using it. Not yet sure on how to do it… but I hope I find out during the first days of the month…

The product for the next month I think it will be the output from a Hackathon that I plan to take part of. Its due date is on February 7th, so if by that time I have a working MVP, I may have the first users from the hackathon.

After it, I can spend the other 3 weeks looking for ways to attract users. Maybe the hackathons can be the source of the first users… I’ll learn.

If you read until here, first of all.. thanks for your time! And if you want to discuss any of the mentioned topics, please feel free to reach me on twitter @txordy.