This article reflects my current struggles with releasing my personal project Impromat.
Goal of the application is to create a cool tool for the improvisational theatre community where you can easily plan and share improv workshops. There is already existing wikis like improwiki, learnimprov, or improvresourcecenter. However, they are focusing on individual game and exercise descriptions and not on more holistic workshops. For example, what elements should you pick if you would do an improv session with pure beginners around the topic of accepting and saying yes to each other ideas?
This is the value that Impromat.app brings: creating more holistic improv experiences through a collection of meaningful elements to create immersive improv workshops.
It started quite straight forward: fetch all elements from existing wikis (with respective licensing) and place them one after another in a list, which is then the description of a workshop. That works.
Now the question of questions: when is it actually finished? When do I feel comfortable with publishing the release number 1?
Potentially never.
Potentially never, when I do not decide on what to focus on.
There is this saying: to go fast, go alone, to go far, go together. And I find that partially true. I am developing really fast, but often I am just developing things that are completely irrelevant for the projects success. For example, switching the frontend framework into a newer version, or redoing functioning deployment pipelines to try a different approach.
I am developing very fast. Very fast into any direction. That direction could be wrong. I don't know, I am just developing.
This development and technically driven motivation used to me very fine for me. I am happy spending a couple of hours fixing something there, implementing something over here. However, I am now realising that I would like to show the stuff that I am doing to more people. It would be quite easy to show it to more people by posting my app in online forums or reach out to more friends to try it out.
However, it is extremely challenging for me to find that cut, to be like "now, this is a good state Impromat is in". That is, because I am finding details that do not add up. For example, designs that are not 100% accurate. Or that the website is a little bit too slow because a search request takes 600 milliseconds, but I want it to be under 100 so that it feels smoother. Then, on the other side I am grinding myself up in exactly those details.
I am getting lost in details because I am not 100% satisfied. And I do not have the definition of 100%.
Then there are different saying like the 80/20 rule: you need 20% of your time to get to 80% success but then 80% for the last 20%. I think I am somewhere there. Overall it works great. Overall it is good. I am just always finding new things I could improve or even implement. Nonetheless, I might be stuck in my own box so it is crucial to show what Impromat is to a wider audience now.
Am I stuck in my own box of ideas? I only know when validating my product with end consumers as a good product manager would tell me.
To address this, I made a plan:
- I am going to release version 1 of Impromat to friends as soon as the basic flow of workshop creation works for visitors (e.g. what is the minimum what a user requires for creating a simple improv workshop?).
- I am going to post a small announcement on Reddit to broaden the user base.
I even wrote a small strategy for this because I was reading an engineering management book from Will Larson.
Those thoughts were possibly just for me, but possibly also for others that face struggles with releasing their personal projects.