Shipped! (and other words I screamed this week)

Hey, welcome to season 6 of my newsletter.

Unlike other seasons of my newsletter, I’m going to give Season 6 a theme and dedicate it to what I’ve been building for the last month or so: careerlobby.app. Learnings, milestones, the experience, frustrations, wins, and humbling moments (which is every moment).

This week I shipped the desktop version of my app, a major milestone.

When I first launched the app as a mobile-first experience (though, still useable on a desktop browser), I thought it would take me weeks to get to MVP stage with a desktop browser experience. Not the case; just a few long working sessions, with a few short ones here and there, careerlobby on desktop came to life!

When I was working on this, for some reason I had a hard time grasping that the platform would just “know” it’s on mobile or on a desktop, something I later learned is called Responsive Design, when a web application automatically adapts its layout to fit the screen being used by the end user (i.e. mobile, laptop, tablet). Never something I thought about as an end user of many digital products, but hey, first time for everything.

The desktop version is great because it adds some visual indicators of activity. For example, the dates turn green in the calendar, signifying days you’ve answered a prompt (photo above is a bad example, sorry lol), there’s a leaderboard showcasing the top 5 ‘streaks,’ also known as the number of consecutive days a user has contributed a response to a prompt.

And then we have the basics; the Feed, the Journal to track your contributions and write your own notes, and Notifications, unreads indicator included.

I’ve also been receiving some great feedback. That was a priority of mine when building this, even from the beginning. There should be an in-app feedback form (thanks, Tally!). I connected it to Airtable so I can easily sort through it.

So what’s next?

I really want to nail Notifications. Push notifications that is. I have to figure that out, and obviously build out more of the experience to make something like that come to life. I don’t (yet) know where to start, but I will soon! And then there’s the app store, which is likely very far into the future. That would be awesome. We’ll see. Baby steps.

And Moderation is front of mind too. That’s partly why I have the invite code step in onboarding; especially early on as I figure out and build out the moderation parameters and tooling. Without a strong moderation program (ideally one that is both educational to users on the front-end and is a solid build on the backend), then I won’t be able to build a scaleable platform experience.

If this motivates you to get started on an idea you’re sitting on, then good! It should. Go build it.

Thanks for reading and for being here. I don’t take for granted that you care what I have to say. Or even if you don’t care, and you’re still here; thanks for being a fan anyway. ❣️

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