Launch Week! Sprint 5
By: Elliot Koss
Tags: Startup, Bootstrap, Startup Lessons, Building In Public, Personal Finance

Good week. PluFin.com launches on Jan 1 (ie Friday), which is less than a week away.

I’m going to keep these shorter. Let’s dive in.

Stats

I’m going to severely miss my goal of 1K signups for the Beta launch. That’s ok. As you’ll see with the 2021 Goals / Roadmap that I’ll publish in a week or so, I have modest expectations and I am not defining success (yet) by completing a metric-based goal, partly because there’s so much more for me to build to truly differentiate amongst my competition who have 5+ years, Million of $, and teams of people. And I just have me. This is a marathon, and I expect to toil on PluFin for another 6–12 months before I start seeing real traction. But I’m going to keep reaching for the stars, because that’s how you grow.

Email signups: 71 (+4 | 6.0% WoW). Goal for Jan 1, 2021: 1,000

Paid Subscribers: 0. Goal for Dec 31, 2021: 10,000

Sprint 4 Look Back

This wasn’t my most productive week, but it was also a holiday week. Even though I’m Jewish, I spent time with my parents over Christmas cooking a Prime Rib (which was delicious) and watching WW84 (eh…it was one of the better DC films, but that isn’t exactly a compliment), and while I took more time off from building than I intended, it was worth it. (In case anyone has questions: In April I moved to Temple and lived with my parents after quarantining for 2 weeks to be nearby in case anything happened since they both work in healthcare. Then I moved to Austin in September to have my own space. I barely even go outside at this point, so it was fairly safe for us to be together.)

PLUS, I’m getting a puppy and the pick-up date was moved from Jan 4 to TODAY, so I prioritized getting my apartment ready for the little pup vs pushing to build more. No regrets.

And that’s partly why I only got about HALF of the work completed that I had prioritized for this sprint.

PluFin Sprint 4 burndown chart

But I’m ok with this since PluFin is already the most complete product I’ve ever built by myself, and the Beta has all the key features I wanted, despite the bugs and details that I’ll need to clean up in January. I also reviewed the tickets I had prioritized and realized that some of them simply weren’t needed. I mean, am I really going to have SO many people want to chat with me that I NEED Calendly set-up? No. Plus, I won’t have the time. Instead, I can do individual outreach with a personalized email to the most active users which requires no engineering time.

The biggest accomplishment of the week was building the Runway metric. And holy crap does it feel amazing. I’ve never seen anyone else show users a SINGLE metric that measured their financial health, so seeing it show up for the first time was magical to me. It’s the first truly innovative feature that I’ve built into PluFin (with at least 3 big ones planned for 2021), so it feels good to know that the Beta will launch with something none of my competitors offer. BTW, if that statement is not true, please let me know via Twitter.

FYI, those aren’t real numbers below. I change the HTML of the page after it’s rendered so that I never share personal info. I always try to think about the best way to handle PII and sensitive data, whether it’s mine or yours, and if there’s something I’m doing that’s wrong, PLEASE tell me. I’m not an InfoSec expert, but I take it very seriously, I rely on experts for guidance, and I practice diligence.

PluFin’s Runway, Liquid cash, and Burn Rate metrics — the first of their kind.

The product is still buggy in ways that annoy me / prevent me from fully using it myself (which is temporary until I get it in a better place). But the plan is to use January to do a ton of clean-up with how the transactions data flows from Plaid to PluFin including improvements to transaction categorization (which impacts how PluFin counts your money).

The Onboarding experience took longer than anticipated, the video is not perfect since I just ad libbed it (plus cut out ~1 min 20 secs), and I was not happy to see the weight I gained over the past few months show up in the video…but overall, it should make for a good first effort. And as I iterate and improve during 2021, I’ll know how much progress I’ve made. My plan is to record a new Welcome Video once a month until it’s right. And then I’ll need to create video tutorials and better onboarding so that the tools make sense (plus some FAQ / definitions tooltips, etc). But that’s for later.

For now, just know that this was a good sprint, even if I only completed 13 out of the 25 story points planned.

Sprint 5

As usual, I’m the PM, Engineer, Designer, and Scrum Master. I won’t be the PMM this week, but I talk about that role a little in the PM section.

Product Manager

As I gear up for the launch on Friday, a lot has crossed my mind, particularly how many users will actually signup and what sort of learnings I’ll gain from the first few days. The truth is that I have no idea what to expect. With 71 people on the email list, I could easily become overwhelmed with customer support if even 5 people signup within the same hour. This will cut into my engineering time at some point, so I’m weary. Plus, I work a day job, so I won’t be as readily available as I’d like, but I’m super grateful for my job and I love that team, so life is good.

Luckily, there are only a couple tasks that I plan to execute this week, so hopefully I’ll spend more time playing with my new puppy and teaching him to pee and poo where I want him to — but let’s face it, I’m going to be doing a LOT of cleaning this week.

The MOST important task this week is to encrypt the AWS database, so I’ll aim to tackle that first.

PluFin Sprint 5 Board

There is one thing that’s sitting in the back of my mind. Despite building the Runway metric, I don’t have anything on the landing page that mentions this special and unique feature. This is a HUGE metric in my eyes, and one that I fully expect every single one of my competitors to copy in 2021 (or at least 2022). It’s a little tricky to calculate for a 1-person band, but if there’s a dedicated engineering pod + PM + Designer, like I’d expect at my well-funded competitors, they’ll figure it out faster than I’ll be able to take advantage of it. That’s ok, because while I believe it’s innovative, it’s not the ONLY innovation I’m planning, nor is it the biggest. In reality, it’s the smallest, but they don’t know what I’m going to build on top of it :) This little kernel of a feature is just the tip of the spear.

Putting on my PMM hat (which overlaps with PM a lot), I will likely need to dedicate at least a few days each month to creating new content so that I not only convert users to sign-up via a well-optimized landing page but also so that I begin to build out the SEO which I view as a crucial acquisition channel. I plan to rely on SEO and Twitter as my primary acquisition channels for the first few months of 2021 while I am still building out the core infrastructure. I expect that PluFin should be able to grow to 10K+ organic clicks in a year if I set-up the SEO correctly.

Engineer

This week will largely be focused on cleaning up things that I didn’t execute as perfectly the first time.

The database (DB) is a good example, partly because I’ve never created an encrypted DB before. This isn’t a default setting (though I’m not sure why, but like SSL for secure connections or SPF for email trust, there’s probably some legacy reason for the default).

Word to the wise, once you’ve created an AWS RDS database, you can’t go back and encrypt it. You have to clone the existing DB, then create a new DB that’s encrypted at set-up, copy the cloned DB to the encrypted DB, and then update all the connections to the new, encrypted DB. Plus delete the old DB once everything’s done. It’s tedious but likely shouldn’t be too risky since only my personal data sits in the DB. PLUS, I’ve maintained a SQL file that would allow me to recreate all of my DBs and tables, so worse case scenario, I just delete everything (though I do need to sever the Plaid connections to avoid paying for those ghost connections).

I am still missing an ETL job that backs up all the data. I’ll try to set-up some auto-backup in AWS RDS while I do the encryption work so that the data is at least safe from corruption, but I don’t expect to set-up an ETL for a bit. This means that I’ll have to query the production DB when checking on things post-launch, which is bad practice and could cause issues. If PluFin gains a little traction in January (and all 100 of the Free Tier Beta spots are taken), I’ll probably prioritize this faster.

I’m already starting to think about how I will need to release future updates to PluFin. I will likely need to take the site down for a maintenance time period, which means that I’ll need to signal this to users. PluFin will be small at launch, so I don’t think this will be an issue for the first month, but I should get into the habit of having a planned maintenance downtime so that I’m comfortable with the process and so that users are used to the fact that they may not have access for some time period. I’ll target times when traffic is low or non-existent to minimize impact. My current deployment of code to AWS is fairly smooth since I’ve done it 50+ times at this point, and I need to make the maintenance downtime / updates to production when real users are using it as smooth as possible so as to not disrupt my users’ experience. After all, there’s already going to be bugs. I don’t need to make it worse with a sloppy process for releasing new production code.

The rest of the work this week is clean-up. It’s been feeling great adding new features the past few weeks since I took a lot of time setting up a clean PHP framework that would make adding features and changing functions super easy. And using a proper MVC framework definitely helps maintain the code.

I’m feeling good about the launch, though considering this will basically be my first real product that I’ve built myself which users will login and do whatever they want, I am a little nervous / anxious to see how it all works out. There’s always the possibility that my New Years day / weekend is miserable fixing things, but I’m hopeful the worse case scenario won’t happen.

Design

There’s basically no work for me this week. It’s all engineering clean-up. At a high level, the design is ok, but the site is NOT mobile optimized and I think about 70% of the traffic is coming from mobile at the moment. This will likely become an issue in 2021, and I haven’t thought too much about how I want to handle it.

At some point, it will be imperative to create an app (the ability to use Apple and Google’s ID platforms for logins is exciting), but I’m just building this all by my lonesome, so it’s not realistic for me to think about building on multiple platforms at this point. It’s safe to say that an app won’t happen in 2021, which puts even more emphasis on creating a dynamic website that renders amazingly well on mobile.

Since CSS is NOT my forte, I’m probably going to delay this longer than I should. My best guess is that in March or April, the lack of dedicated mobile design will become intolerable. Luckily, the visual framework I’m building off already includes a lot of mobile-friendly features, so the current experience isn’t as bad as it would be.

Scrum Master

I will track the work this week, but I won’t use it for the weekly burndown calculations. With that said, I went from prioritizing 25 points last week to 15 this week, so I am making some adjustments based on the limited data (I only completed 13 of the 25 story points last week).

I expect to start using this data more intelligently in mid-January.

Prior Sprints

Sprint 4

Sprint 3

Sprint 2

Sprint 1