A quick, practical guide to interviewing customers during the early stages of a new product idea.

I expected basic advice about how you shouldn’t ask customers leading questions, but Fitzpatrick goes much more in-depth. The book made me recognize weaknesses in my approach to interviewing users and provided interesting perspectives about obtaining unbiased, actionable feedback from customers.

Highlights

• What Got Done received 32 new user sign-ups (growth of about 5x since May)
• Zestful may be rising from the dead, with four new inbound customer inquiries.
• Is It Keto earned $184, and Zestful earned $26, making it my highest revenue month since quitting my job.

Goal grades

Publish a new blog post that explains why I built What Got Done

• Result: I published “Staying Motivated by Sending Status Updates to Nobody”
• Grade: A

Last month, it felt like I was scrambling to get a new blog post out the door by the end of the month. I questioned whether I was sacrificing quality for the sake of hitting a self-imposed deadline. This time, I didn’t feel rushed and was happy with the quality of the writing.

At my last job, status meetings with my manager were outstandingly efficient. He never ran me through the typical drill of listing list off everything I did since our last meeting. Instead, we jumped right to the meaty topics of career growth, team development, and challenging technical problems.

Highlights

• I launched my task journaling app, but it hasn’t attracted many users.
• Interviewing potential customers gave me a good idea for my next project.
• I earned $107 from Is It Keto and $123 from Zestful without working on either.

Goal grades

Publish a minimum viable product version of What Got Done

• Result: What Got Done is now live.
• Grade: A

I launched What Got Done on May 24th. It hasn’t gained much traction, so I’m debating whether to stick with it or focus on other ideas.

Next year, I’ll be entering my 10th year of being formally employed to write code. Ten years! And besides actual employment, for nearly 2/3 of my life, I’ve been building things on the web. I can barely remember a time in my life where I didn’t know HTML, which is kind of weird when you think about it. Some kids learn to play an instrument or dance ballet, but instead I was creating magical worlds with code in my childhood bedroom.