Issue 14

April 1, 2024

The Ups and Downs

On my mind

As you're about to find out, last week was a rollercoaster ride, especially with Agendaful.

I'm learning a ton while building my first app as a solopreneur. And I feel like this is valuable knowledge for not only future me, but others too. I've thought about unifying these lessons into a guide or e-book. I could either use that to grow my mailing list, sell it as a digital product, or give it away for free.

One thing I read recently that resonated with me is that we all have knowledge to share and we can share it with people who are a couple of steps behind us. Even though my journey as a solopreneur just started a few months ago, I've already gained so much insight into what and what not to do when building your first app. This knowledge could be useful to someone who is just starting or thinking about getting started.

Project Updates

Valence

I met with two people last week and spoke with them about our app idea. It was a success! They both had insightful feedback to share and would like updates on our progress with the app.

The team and I will meet this week to discuss the feedback from our demo meetings. I'm excited to hear how everyone else's meetings went. My two meetings were very positive and I hope the others were.

Last week I mentioned my new rejection goal.

How did I do last week?

Well, I contacted 8 people and got rejected or ghosted from all 8 people. 3 people replied and said they didn't have time to meet or weren't interested. It felt good to get a few replies, even though they were rejections. I'll take a rejection over being ghosted any day. After all, that rejection could turn into a yes someday.

I made an honest attempt last week but didn't quite reach my rejection goal of 15. I planned to contact 3 people a day, but I quickly realized finding 3 people a day to contact is time-consuming. Instead of doing this every morning, I should do it once a week, perhaps on the weekend. Then, I can either message my list of people on Monday or throughout the week.

Agendaful

I posted my weekly Agendaful goals last Monday and by Wednesday, I wasn't feeling too good about reaching them. However, this story has a happy ending!

My first attempt to deploy the app found me using Supabase edge functions and Deno. After several hours of hitting configuration errors and not being able to make much progress, I eventually came across a blog post and GitHub issue, which revealed that Deno doesn't work with Prisma, the ORM I'm using to connect to the database. Since I want to keep using Prisma, I had to say goodbye to Supabase edge functions and Deno. On to the next!

I probably should have done this first, but for my second attempt, I decided to follow the Slack Bolt docs, which somewhat explain how to deploy a Slack Bolt app to AWS Lambda using Serverless. I say somewhat because I discovered the docs don't paint the entire picture. They're also outdated. However, the Slack API team does have some useful repos on GitHub with sample code. I also had to consult the Serverless and Prisma docs to get both of those frameworks to play nice with each other.

At the end of the week, I reached the top of the deployment mountain! I was able to successfully deploy Agendaful to AWS Lambda using Serverless. 🙌 I must have tried dozens of configuration and code changes to get it working. I don't know exactly what I was missing or doing wrong, but it works and that's what matters!

I could honestly write a detailed article on how to deploy a Slack app with the tech stack I'm using. I can't be the only one building a Slack app with Prisma, Serverless, and AWS Lambda. And this got me thinking. I could also build and sell a Slack Bolt app boilerplate with the specific technologies I'm using. Don't worry. I'm not going to do this right now. 😂 However, I will keep it in the back of my mind in case I want to validate this idea someday.

One last thing…

I took a big step in my solopreneur journey last week. I filed a trade name certificate with my town, which allows me to do business as Made by DW! When the time comes to sell subscriptions for Agendaful, I will be ready for it. There are a couple of other papers I have to fill out, but it's happening!

I don't know what the future holds for Made by DW, but I know one thing. I will make at least $1. That's my current goal. I won't quit before then. And once I make $1, I'm sure I'll want to keep going. Sometimes we have to set the bar low just to prove to ourselves that we can do something. And then, we can raise the bar and reach higher.

Thanks for reading this week. See you next week! 👋