Squadron – First steps

Yesterday’s tasks

Those were my yesterday’s tasks, check out the outcome.

trello-kick-off

Measure people interest and start gathering information about customers

As you might have read in the previous blog post, I want to be very focused on building the product from the beginning. It means one thing, marketing and proper product building. I will try to use my “engineering” point of view to a minimum.

That means I have to deliver product features quickly and check if my potential customers like it, but how can I check if people like the product or a feature?

I am going to start with two tools, Google Analytics and MailChimp. For a now I will use just one main feature of google analytics, tracking how many users was on my website. That way I can simply know if people get interested in what I am doing or not.

MailChimp, that is simply to build up my database of potential users, I will share with them with some insights of my current work and they will get early access.

Those two basic tools will help you to kick off gathering very useful information and metrics. Every time you publish something or change, you will know if your changes or features drives more users or not.

The first iteration, make it simple!

The first iteration should be quick, it shouldn’t be perfect, it can be crap, it’s the internet you have many lives to launch a product, idea. If this time you will not be lucky you can try another time, and another time, and another time. IT’S FINE!

I took Amy’s advice to my heart, so that way I published getsquadron.io, in less than 2hrs. That includes:

  • Get a domain getsquadron.io
  • Setup repository
  • Setup & customise Jekyll website
  • Setup mail server & MailChimp mailing list

I keep most of my personal stuff on AWS, I know that tool well so I will stay there at least for a while. I got domain via Route53 and the mail server via WorkMail, I was kind of amazed how easy those tools are nowadays, especially mail server and domain it has always been a pain in the ass.

Outcomes

After 24hr from publishing getsquadron.io, I am able to say that I got some traffic and 3 new users at my mailing list!!

squadron-first-ga

mailchimp-first-ss

Books

Books that helped me a lot to understand what is actually a problem of product development and how you should do it if you build product or company that sell on the internet. Tech is not a problem at all, tech is just your toolbox.

Squadron take off – Get Noticed

Get Noticed

This is the time!

Unfortunately last year I didn’t take part in Get Noticed! If you don’t know what it is, checks this website, translate to English should do work.
In short, “Get Noticed” is a contest where for three months you have to work on
your personal project, that you come up and you write about it on your blog, how amazing idea is that?

The reason for that is simple Get Noticed! by other people, go out from your comfort zone!

Squadron as a tool for distributed load testing

The project that I am going to build is a tool for load testing. The main reason for that is I couldn’t find a tool or a product that would fit my needs. What I am looking for are those three main features: simple DSL that describe scenarios and endpoints under test, being distributed that works easily with major cloud providers, runnable in most of the OS and Linux distros

Technical goals are still in progress, mainly because I don’t want to be very rigid, currently, my trello board is in a big mess. I will try to share with you a draft of some goals. You will see how do I manage tasks, and goals.

On the other hand, my personal goals from this contest and project, are very different than usual tech person. I would like to that my main takeaway would be an experience in creating a product from scratch. That I could potentially make a profit. There will be a lot of knowledge not very technical but around that, like marketing-ish, SEO, customer tracking, OKRs. In general getting a first customer is much harder than coding, at least for me!

What technology?

Well technology is not really that important in this project, but we have to distinct here two different projects:

  • Core application that does load testing: it is going to be NET Core.
  • Website that allows you to manage your scenarios and work with cloud providers: that is going to be ReactJs and some free web templates

I chose “.NET Core” because it’s still my main platform that I work and it will be much simpler to create first iterations of that project. I strongly consider rewriting that into GoLang/C++ and some point.

Take off!

Good luck to everyone that take part in “Get Noticed!” you are amazing! I might show up at YouTube so stay tuned 😉