Highlights

• I’m struggling to get unstuck in two areas that have stalled for months: hardware development and hiring.
• I’m partnering with a distributor in Germany to begin selling TinyPilot within the EU.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish a new release of TinyPilot

• Result: Published TinyPilot 1.5.1
• Grade: A

This release went well and came out on schedule. It didn’t have any especially exciting new features, but we polished existing features and paid down technical debt.

The Goal is an attempt to reevaluate business management from first principles. The book explains Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, which states that in any business, the sole determinant of output is the bottleneck resource. To grow, a business has to identify its bottlenecks and reorganize business processes to address them. It sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but the lessons helped me to think about my own business.

Highlights

• Despite $30k in monthly revenue, TinyPilot barely covers costs.
• I’m exploring options to get big companies to pay more for TinyPilot.
• I need to come to terms with the fact that managing people is a real job.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Increase TinyPilot’s revenue to $33k

• Result: Increased TinyPilot’s revenue to $39k
• Grade: A

TinyPilot had a huge spike in sales following a big review from ServeTheHome, one of the top blogs / YouTube channels for IT hardware.

Highlights

• TinyPilot has its first official office space.
• I tried a marketing experiment that flopped.
• Designing IT infrastructure for a new office is fun.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Increase TinyPilot revenue to $30k

• Result: Increased revenue by 46% to $29k
• Grade: A-

I didn’t quite hit my $30k goal, but I came close. It’s a relief to end the downward sales trend that began in February.

Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month.

How is this possible?

That’s easy. You have a separate database server running somewhere that stores all of your app’s state.

No, my app never talks to a remote database server.