What I done did in April 2021
Pokemon Snap is coming out tomorrow so figured I’d document what I was doing before I get lost in that.
Conducted lots of user interviews
I had some time off at the start of the month as I was taking advantage of a double Bank Holiday we had in the UK so I managed to get almost two weeks off work from five days of holiday allowance.
During that time I spent a lot of time with potential users of Reciprocal.dev asking them about their current approach to User Journey Mapping and using the techniques I learned from reading The Mom Test to get more actionable information out of them.
After a while though I found that the information I was getting overloaded my brain with possible directions to take the product so we had a session to find a focus for our efforts.
This focus made the remaining user interviews even more useful as I could drive the conversation in a more specific direction to learn more about those aspects of how User Journey Mapping was used.
Managed to get the Sanrio Animal Crossing Amiibo cards
At the end of March Nintendo was due to re-release a set of Animal Crossing Amiibo cards that it had originally sold in 2016 and the internet, being what it is these days immediately swooped into the US launch and there were soon packs of cards with a RRP of $4.99 going for $70+ on eBay.
The UK had a different approach to the rest of the world, instead of holding pre-orders Nintendo UK decided to randomly drop the cards a couple of days later without much warning and then limit the orders to 1 per household.
Waiting for the initial drop was anxiety inducing as I didn’t want to miss it and then end up having to pay the tax of inflated prices just because I hadn’t happened to check the website in the window that they were taking orders.
I was lucky that a colleague had checked it around lunch time (which was literally the first time in days that I hadn’t checked it as I was in a meeting at work) so I was able to put my order in.
Eventually at the start of April after another week of anxiousness of my order not being completed the cards were dispatched and I’ve been able to enjoy the items and villagers they add to the game without having to pay silly amounts of money.
While it was horrible to have very little idea of when the cards would be available to purchase or if your purchase would be completed I think the UK approach was more fair than the US launch which seems to have allowed people to essentially buy out an stores entire supply and sell it at a steep markup.
Johnny Decimalised my digital life
After reading about the Johnny Decimal system on Hacker News a while ago I finally got round to setting it up and applying it to my digital life.
I’ve written a post about the process I went through and the initial results I saw.
Since writing that post, the system has continued to make things easier to organise and I’ve started to extend it to my photo albums.
Additionally after sorting out my emails using the system I decided to free up some space and was able to delete close to 37,000 emails dating back to 2007.
To put that in context I had 38,000 emails overall and only needed to keep 988 after 14 years.
Started turning Reciprocal.dev into a proper business
After conducting the user interviews and holding the ‘vision quest’ session my co-founder and I decided to incorporate and start working on reciprocal.dev properly.
This has meant taking the rapidly developed prototype and turning that into a scalable solution, which as someone who isn’t really into data modelling (I like to build pretty things instead) this isn’t my idea of a good time but it’s crucial for a successful product.
On the plus side it has given me an opportunity to learn more about Firestore though which was something I was meaning to get my teeth into.
