Mike Zornek

Ranked Vote Flick Demo

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:58:04 -0400

Took a few moments tonight to record a short demo of RankedVote.app (Project name: Flick) tonight.

Flick is a simple Elixir / Phoenix LiveView app that helps capture ranked votes.

This project was built to help the Elixir Book Club pick books, but it is open to all.

I’m going to moving on to other side projects and seems as good a time as any to capture this in action.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Circle Sign-Up Forms and Credit Card Fraud

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

I’m a long-time fan of work done at freeCodeCamp and was sad to read this article a few years ago about how someone had used their online donation form to test/validate stolen credit cards (for later sale on the dark web). The amount of headaches this kind of thing causes (for all parties) is a nightmare. Refunds need to be issued, credit card fees paid regardless of refund status, cleaning up one’s accounting and membership books.

A few years later, it was my time to join the party.

Closed now, but in early 2023, I ran a paid-for community called ElixirClub. We ran the group on a platform called Circle. Circle integrates with Stripe for credit card subscriptions, and there was a public sign-up page to join my community.

On June 10th, I started observing lots of new member sign-ups. Most failed because of various expected credit card reasons (bad CVV, expired, etc.), but some were going through. Stripe has documentation on this phenomenon.

My initial action was to shut down the sign-up form, contact support for both companies and follow Stripes refund recommendations as speedily as possible.

I won’t detail my full interactions but suffice it to say:

Stripe was helpful over email and later via phone support. They instructed me on how to issue the refunds and how this concern should be addressed at the web form level. I explained that I was at the mercy of a third-party tool, and they encouraged follow-up so as to make sure this was resolved as best as possible to avoid future issues.

Circle’s response was less encouraging. It took them multiple days to respond and closed the conversation with: “I added this as a new feature request here, we will discuss and triage it for the next quarter.”

Next quarter?

Now my community, ElixirClub, was very small and very quiet, so it was easy to observe and react to the fraud since there were no real sign-ups anyways – but I feel so bad for the successful Circle community manager who can not do anything to add the needed technical friction to their own sign-up forms and cannot turn if off either.

I’d be shocked if this was not affecting other Circle users.

This is not a feature request; this is a high-priority security issue, and Circle’s failure to see it as such is embarrassing.

ElixirClub is closing for other reasons, so I’m off Circle, but sharing this in the hope it helps awareness of the general issue and nudges Circle to give this problem the attention it deserves.

Shutting Down ElixirClub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0400

After six months, today I announced ElixirClub’s closure. For context and for those many souls who did not know:

ElixirClub is (was/hopped to be) an outcome-oriented community that helps Elixir developers finish their side projects.

I ran the site on Circle, hosted some weekly events and async project update threads – but the hard truth is that I was not able to create even the modest-sized community that I was aiming for.

There are reasons and lessons to be learned about pricing, pitches and what not. Ultimately it was very niche target and did not have a strong marketing angle.

I thought it was best to close it down, issue refunds (automated and manual) as best I can and move on. To what? I have no idea.

There is a awful bad taste anytime you put you and a side project of yours out there, …and it fails.

It’s been many years since I had a solid side project win and I’d be lying if I did not also share, I feel like I’ve lost some of the side project drive I’ve had in the past.

I am trying to “just keep swimming” as it were and even today have a new little side project in the wings, but I’m really hoping for a win soon™.

Side Project Launch Cold Feet

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:55:49 -0400

Almost a year ago I documented my interest in re-building this blog in an Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView app for the purpose of learning event-sourcing and some new UI concepts. The good news, that project is functionally complete. The bad news, I’m not sure I want to launch it.

When I posted the project outline in “Challenges and Risks” I said:

Not using an out-of-the-box blog system will put notable stress on me to maintain the code and deployment. It will likely be more complex and costly than it was hosting a static website.

That stress is here and front in my mind. To migrate I’ll have to destructure my simple markdown/image folders into a more complex database and S3 storage system and then maintain it. I’m not sure I want to do that.

The public outcome of this project is nothing crazy new / innovative. It’s basically the same kind of website I have today – just more work for me to maintain. I dunno what I want to do.

For now, I think I’m going to step back from Franklin for a month or so and rethink it all. Should I decide to shelve the project, I’ll still be happy with what I learned along the way and could easily extract some things (like my GitHub Actions) into new projects pretty quickly.

I am also starting to debate a new side project but will post more on that when I have my thoughts better shaped.

A New Project: ElixirClub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 21:14:14 -0500

Today I am announcing a new project of mine taking shape. It’s called ElixirClub.

ElixirClub is an outcome-oriented community that helps Elixir developers finish their side projects.

Working on a side project by yourself is surrounded by risks:

personal loss of focus
no accountability
endless time extensions
exploding scope

Even a completed side project might be considered a failure if it does not find its audience or fails to provide a reasonable return on your time investment.

ElixirClub is a community where people can plant their flag, declare their side project goals, and meet fellow Elixir developers climbing the same mountain.

Through a mixture of accountability, education, and celebrations, you’ll be part of a group that fosters successful habits to an ultimately successful side project.

What to expect as a member?

All the below community heartbeats are designed to help you shape the work needed to see your side project to its planned completion and build a habit loop for regular progress.

✅ Weekly async project check-ins to share wins, plan next week’s work and ask questions.
📅 Weekly live coworking sessions, offering a mix of face-to-face accountability and dedicated mic-off time-boxed work time.
📺 Themed live (and recorded) events around side project management concerns and Elixir-specific programming interests.
📝 Written guides and suggested tasks to wrangle your project and find your flow.
🤝 A code review trading board that allows members to exchange code reviews.

Membership to the community will require a modest monthly subscription. This choice helps pay for the community software, helps people solidify their dedication to their projects, and helps fund my work creating content for the group.

Right now, my priorities are to chat with folks who are good candidates for such a group and work at preparing a productive home to host everything.

If you would like to hear more about this in the future, please email me mailto:zorn@zornlabs.com?subject=ElixirClubSubscribe, and I’ll add you to my manual notification list.

If you are really excited about the group, please reach out and book some time on my calendar: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat – I’d love to hear what side project you are working on.

The Importance of Side Project Tiny Tickets

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:12:39 -0400

If you have an active side project, I highly recommend you invest some of your valuable and limited time into ticket/issue creation to plan out your work. Specifically, you should build up a collection of ready-for-work tiny tickets in the 10-20 minute time completion range.

So often, we look forward to long “deep work” programming sessions to make meaningful progress on our side projects, but they are few and far between. We have tons of other life responsibilities from work, family, and friends that will have priority on our time. If we wait for perfect work sessions to make progress, our side projects will take much longer to complete, and the risk of failure (due to personal distractions or loss of motivation) increases drastically.

You need to find ways to move your side project forward during the cracks of daily life, hopefully setting up the foundation of a productive habit loop. Have a little time before bed; here is a tiny ticket to do. Have time to kill waiting for a zoom meeting to start; find a tiny ticket to knock out. Many will be mindless dependency updates or small refactors but little by little, your project will grow.

If you have an active side project, I’d love to ask you some questions to help me with my research. Grab some calendar time here: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat.

Side Project Idea Audit

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:44:00 -0400

During my time off this summer, I am looking for a project to sink my teeth into. Something to give me a bit of purpose and space to explore some technical tooling I am curious about.

In the future, I hope to find a project to help serve my financial needs, but this specific summer side project is more about personal exploration without any profitability interests.

I keep a running list of project ideas in my notebook, and here is the shortlist I considered for the summer.

Collaborative UI Breadboarding

UI Breadboarding is a concept I became familiar with via the Shape Up book. It is a practice where you work through user experience requirements in a whiteboard “text and arrows” environment without drawing specific UI. My app would enable a way to launch a breadboard session, invite others to it, and collaborate on a user experience. It would be a great demo of the real-time behaviors LiveView apps enable.

Collaborative UI Breadboarding is not my summer project because it is outside my typical job responsibilities. I’m not drafting new user interfaces in my consulting work day to day, and I want the outcome of this summer to be something I’ll personally use. I have considered a shift in my consulting to perhaps make this a more significant focus of my time, but I’m not there yet. So, while this would be a neat tool and an excellent demo of LiveView, I don’t think it is the right project for this summer.

Exercism but for Tailwind

I’m a big fan of Exercism. I have not gotten too deep into any specific tracks, but the platform concept and execution is very cool. One day I wondered aloud if there could be a place like Exercism but for learning Tailwind instead of a programming language. I envision something similar to Flexbox Froggy, an almost game-like environment where you learn CSS flexbox.

I’m not doing Exercism but for Tailwind for two reasons. One, I still consider myself a Tailwind novice. While building out education materials in the form of a game would surely improve my Tailwind skills, I feel like it would be a bit too large of a commitment than I’m comfortable making during this summer timebox. The second reason is that I’m not sure the meta frontend code editor / CSS rendering that I’d have to build would be transferable to future projects as other things on this list. While I am not going to be working on my profit-seeking project this summer, I am hoping there will be some skill overlap, and the time I spend in the summer will help with those projects in the fall.

Slack Plugins

From my observations, I feel like there is a lot of dysfunction in how many corporate teams use Slack and related tooling to communicate while designing and building products. Domain truth and discussions are spread out across a matrix of tools, including JIRA, Confluence, GitHub, Figma, Google Docs, Zoom, and the code itself. Slack acts as the central pipe of communication but is rarely managed well and can easily cause people to feel overwhelmed and distracted. It can also create a false sense of progress as you sit there, answering disjointed questions and resolving notification prompts. It feels like you are being productive, but the value can be pretty shallow when you add it all up at the end of the week.

I don’t even know what I’d build here, but one project idea was to interview people who also use Slack day-to-day for work and see if there are any opportunities to create plugins to help manage the chaos.

I’m not doing any Slack plugins because I hope to find or otherwise build myself a team environment where we rely less on Slack and more on other async writing to propose ideas and answer questions. I frown on using Slack as a meaningful store of knowledge. It is too chaotic and expensive (I’m talking about mental and distraction costs here). I think a chat space can be great for the social needs of a team but recommend other systems to manage product design/development discussions.

Notion Plugins

A few months ago, I increased my Notion use from a curious experiment to a preferred tool. I even dropped my use of OmniFocus and Bear in preference for Notion as my day-to-day notebook. Perhaps I’ll share more about that in the future. One side project idea was to build some plugins to sit on top of Notion. I’m not even sure what they would be, but it seemed like an exciting space.

I’m not doing Notion Plugins because I’m still learning how to use Notion and how I want to use Notion. I think there are some opportunities to build “blocks” to help host live data sections on Notion pages. I envision a product dashboard that combines outwardly owned data (like sales and analytics) and pairs those views alongside project plans or daily standups.

Personal Blog Rewrite

Spoilers: This is what I am doing.

The first commit to this repo / blog system was in December of 2018. The site as it lives today is a static site generated with Hugo and hosted on a simple Linode webserver. It works well enough, but my wants/needs are changing.

The first opportunity for improvement is to solve a bit of dysfunction in how I publish web content.

Most of my tweet-like content gets posted to Micro.blog and then cross-posted to Twitter and Mastodon. Sometimes I post directly to Twitter because I want to embed a video, and frankly, the cross-posting from Micro.blog does not match how I expect that to work.

For longer content, I’ll compose a post for this blog, which involves:

Using hugo new to create the file.
Editing the content (usually first in VS Code and then in Grammarly).
Committing the new files.
Pushing it to GitHub.
Waiting for it to publish (which is usually pretty fast).
Manually build a Micro.blog post to share the link (that will be cross-posted).

The whole process is cumbersome.

I want my website to become the true home to all my published content with this project. I am still interested in having content on social media, but I want my short-form content and long-form content to be intertwined into a single stream that is hosted on my domain. I want a single place on the web where I can compose a message, attach some media, and hit publish. Everything is on my site, but social media shares are generated automatically, in a format I find acceptable.

In many ways, this is the promise of Micro.blog, but I never really embraced it. I always had my website separate and used Micro.blog purely for tweet-like content. If this were just about the user experience, I might more strongly consider using Micro.blog, but as I said in the beginning, this is more about a technical exploration, so I’ll build it out myself.

Technical Plans

The core will use a CQRS / event-source style code architecture. Total overkill for the needs of a blog, but as this is a learning opportunity, I want to give it a try.
I’ll use Tailwind and a rich collection of Phoenix components to structure the UI. There won’t be much interactivity on the user side, but the admin area will have some places for me to play. I’m very interested in the developer tooling around component design and management, so I’m hoping something interesting will come out of my time here.
While the cross-posting will be an internal module at first, I think it is possible to share it more broadly if it is successful. To speak to specific behaviors, I thought the Micro.blog cross-posting feature lacked good observability into what is in progress and managing the format and exception handling (when the share content breaks the platform validation rules).

Challenges and Risks

Importing the old blog content will be a chore but something worth doing. Specifically, I’d like to have better accessibility constraints around media and will likely have to patch older posts with better captions and metadata.
Not using an out-of-the-box blog system will put notable stress on me to maintain the code and deployment. It will likely be more complex and costly than it was hosting a static website.

I’ll do my best to share as I go. If you have any questions, let me know.

Filters Shaping My Next Project Idea

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:00:00 -0500

This post was updated on April 22, 2025, as I am again considering new side projects.

Drawing inspiration from Derrick Reimer’s post Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea, I’ve been working through a collection of notes on my next project. Derrick quotes Jason Cohen as saying:

instead of trying to rank your ideas, run them through a set of filters to eliminate those that don’t fit.

I have a bunch of project filters to share but will open with some higher-level observations.

Why I Want To Do A Product (Again)

Outside of my initial post-college employment and a four-year window where I worked full-time at development agencies, I have been self-employed my entire career. Self-employment income has come through a mix of products and consulting. For some years, I’ve been able to make my entire living from my products; for others, I’ve had to lean more heavily on consulting. I’ve always viewed consulting as something to empower my product development and never the end goal itself.

I prefer products because:

I find satisfaction in working on a whole solution. I enjoy being involved with the design, the marketing, the customers, the support, and so on. I typically have a very limited scope of product influence in my consulting work.
I value passive income over time-based consulting income. Consulting income can be more lucrative in many ways, but I prefer the flexibility of passive income. In the past, I’ve been able to take time off or work on other projects while still getting paid, and it is incredibly addicting.
I enjoy having flexibility in my work hours and activities. My consulting life is already flexible hours-wise. Still, there is no getting around when I burn out on a particular activity, such as meetings or code review, it can be hard to avoid my billable commitments. When working on a product, there are many different activity types, and I could easily skip a few days of programming but still be productive toward the product by working on other things I enjoy, like UI design.

Recent Product Failures

Since returning to self-employment in 2017, attempts have failed to recreate my previous successful products. After spending six months of development, I failed with OwlDeck, eventually realizing that the tech stack I would need to master (CoreText) was over my head. I then had a significant change of heart towards Apple platform development, starting a multi-year period of self-discovery and eventually finding a new home with Elixir. Guildflow began in 2019, but ultimately, I decided it too would be shut down last month, November 2021.

With awareness of these recent failures, I am trying to be more mindful and intentional in picking a new project and planning my work.

My Project Filters

The market needs to exist already. I should be able to observe profitable competition who are not executing as well as I feel possible. I am not looking to break new ground but claim a space to offer a unique and valuable offering.

I need to feel comfortable interacting with the audience. For example, I’m not very excited about online advertising. I don’t think I would care much to drink coffee with a random ad salesperson, so that would be a poor audience for me to serve.

I need to be able to learn fast. I am not interested in going into the tank for 9-12 months before gauging if I am on to something. I need to find ways to validate my ideas and deliver value to paying customers in a short window, like 3-5 months. I don’t need to cross a specific success threshold at the end of that timeframe; I just need to observe the positive trajectory I need.

The business needs to remain small. I am not interested in traditional venture capital funding. I am not interested in building a huge team. The product needs to be successful but small at the same time.

I do not like managing people but would enjoy working in a ‘small band’. I think I would enjoy collaborating with people on this project, but I worry about finding the right match of talent who shares my vision and goals while also being a good counter for my own skillset.

The product needs to generate enough profit to provide a comfortable living for its creators. I don’t need this in the short term, but it is a significant part of that earlier learning goal and observing success over time.

The product needs to solve a pain worth paying for. With profitability and sustainability high on my value list, I need to connect with paying customers. It should be easy for them to justify and pay for the value.

The product needs to solve a pain worth solving. I don’t need to change the world, but I should feel like I am solving worthwhile problems and not adding to the virtual noise I eagerly try to silence in my personal life.

Making sales should not require more than a few decision-makers. Considering the solo nature (or small band) of development I have in mind, I can not afford complex sales cycles.

The project should not be mission-critical. I am not equipped to offer mission-critical uptime guarantees, so I should filter out products that require it.

The product should not be for any industry with heavy regulations. I am not equipped to manage that level of complexity, so I should filter out products that require it.

The product should not require mobile apps. I am not interested in building a business that requires deployment approval.

The product should provide value without asking for an outright replacement. Guildflow was a hard ask since not only did the group organizer have to buy in, but any transfer of a group from, say, Meetup.com to Guildflow would be a big ask of all the members too. I want to avoid this kind of big ask as much as possible.

The product does not need to be software. While I am a developer and empowered to deliver software-based solutions, I am not against building educational products or other assets/toolkits/solutions.

My Superpowers

In addition to considering the above product filters, it is also essential to identify one’s superpowers. We each have a unique background and collage of skills/experiences. Understanding how you can contribute to a given product idea is key to its choice.

Elixir is a notable superpower for me. I’m well over the hump as far as being competent and productive with it. The language and the BEAM empower me to build more concurrent and fault-tolerant systems than other startups of my size. I can solve some big-scale problems that a Rails or Node platform would have trouble with.

While I no longer do mobile development and have even filtered out any product ideas requiring a mobile app, I have roots in the community. I would not be against building solutions for that audience.

My attention to detail, particularly user experience, feels like a competitive edge. I do not consider myself a UI designer. Still, I could have a very collaborative and productive relationship with a UI designer, with the outcome being a well-executed app experience.

My next task will be to brainstorm possible audiences and go on safari for pains and discussion topics. Will do my best to blog some progress as I go. The journey continues.

Shutting Down my Side Project Guildflow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0400

With a heavy heart, I share my decision to shut down my side project Guildflow. In the spirit of the blog, I thought I would document some project history and how I got here.

Project Background

My history attending and organizing meetups in Philadelphia goes pretty deep. I found meetup groups to be a great way to meet like-minded developers who would become good friends and coworkers over time. Meetup groups were a huge positive impact on me.

In early 2019 I was looking to sink my teeth into a new side project. I was not very happy with Meetup.com, the website we used to run Philly CocoaHeads and Philly Elixir. The platform had become pretty stagnant and had a bunch of restrictions on data access for things like member email addresses. There was also this shady practice where if you stopped paying the group subscription fee, Meetup.com would sell ownership of your group to any member with a credit card. The parent company of Meetup.com was WeWork, which was known to me as a bad actor in the coworking world. WeWork had Meetup.com do questionable promotions of their spaces and experimented with an unwise scheme to charge users to attend events. In short, while I had an enormous passion for meetups themselves, I was concerned Meetup.com would be unusable in a few years.

The goals of my side project, in order of importance:

An opportunity to get deeper experience with Elixir and Phoenix (new tools I embraced after getting out of Apple development).
A drive to build software that I would use and crafted for an audience and purpose I could stand behind.
Create a modest stream of product revenue so that I could, over the long term, supplement and maybe replace my consulting income.

I decided to work on a tool for meetup groups.

Guildflow would be a calendar and group management tool for meetup organizers focused on privacy and data ownership. One might use Guildflow to help run their meetup group over other tools like Meetup.com or Facebook Groups.

Development History

The very first commit for Guildflow happened on April 10, 2019. Development was slow with inconsistent momentum. I was actively contracting, and most of my Guildflow time was random nights and weekends with a few scattered months of action if I was in-between paid work. As a learning project, I was also slow since I was still comfortable with Elixir and Phoenix. Considering the project’s goals, this was expected and fine, but it lengthened the whole project lifecycle.

I did reach out and run some customer interviews throughout the project, probably like eight or so. Half were people I knew casually, and the other half were strangers from random LinkedIn connections or other introductions. These interviews helped, but I fell victim to many of the bad questions and lies described in The Mom Test. In short, I was so excited to scratch my own itch and experiment with Elixir/Phoenix that I jumped into the tech way too fast.

My first public sharing of work came from a blog post in September 2019 alongside updates in October and November. By March 2020, I was ready to do a limited alpha launch. Remember what else happened in March 2020?

Launching meetup software during those initial US COVID lockdowns was, to put it bluntly, devastating. I can’t remember being personally productive at all during March/April 2020. It was scary and stressful. My paid work contract was cut short on April 1st, and new contracts were not to be found.

By June, I started to get back in the swing of things. I still did not have paying work but did launch a new Android Book Club, hosted on Guildflow. Over the rest of the summer, I would work on new marketing pages, videos, and features for Guildflow.

The meetup world was still in a state of shock during the summer of 2020. Some groups did find ways to do online meetings, but it came with new challenges. Many groups were falling apart. No new groups were forming. No one was interested in new meetup software offerings.

By the fall, I started to get some contracting interest once again and ended up landing a gig in October 2020. It was an Elixir contract, and having the Guildflow project as a reference, even doing a little code walk during the interview process, helped a ton. One downside of the new gig was that it was a full-time engagement. I traditionally avoid full-time contracts so that I can keep some momentum behind my personal projects. However, after being out of work all summer, I needed to take the work.

Through the fall, I did find some time to work on Guildflow, getting custom pages, editable navigation, and group messaging all working. I even pulled in my Philly Elixir group from Meetup.com to now be hosted on Guildflow.

After that feature push, in February 2021, I decided to put Guildflow on hold. COVID had just spiked during the winter in the US, and we did not (at the time) have an approved vaccine. It was hard to imagine a near-term future where I could observe active in-person meetups who would potentially use my software. To continue to develop in a vacuum seemed like a bad idea. I would take some time off, work on an upcoming apartment move and revisit Guildflow in the future.

Over time I have revisited Guildflow every three months or so, doing minor SSL security updates and other tiny bug fixes. We still used it for Philly Elixir, so I needed it to keep working. Today, however, I have decided to discontinue the project officially.

What Did I Learn?

Having saturated in the meetup headspace for the last two years, I’ve been trying to share my learnings and observations on the Guildflow blog. I’m hopeful I can transplant some of those valuable posts to my personal blog. I have a lot of opinions about meetups, and I could go on all day. To summarize as best as I can:

The most complex problems around running a meetup group have very little to do with the quality of the group management tools. The real challenges are finding an audience and generating rewarding, goal-oriented content that enables that audience to evolve into a true community.

While the Meetup.com tools are lackluster, they are good enough for most people. The real asset of Meetup.com is the user base. Using the Meetup.com platform, introduces your group to new people. Many group organizers do not have the time or passion for doing that kind of marketing outreach on their own, so they get tremendous value from the Meetup.com user base.

Group organizers will complain about the high Meetup.com monthly fee and complain about data access issues, but there is no observable trend of them actively looking for alternatives. I think there was a possible tipping point moment when the WeWork owners of Meetup.com (at the time) started experimenting with charging the end users for access, but they quickly backed away from that, and eventually, Meetup.com was sold to new investors.

Bigger Trends of Meetups

The other big takeaway is that the cultural concept of a traditional “meetup” is downward trending. This downward trend was historically observable, but COVID has exacerbated it tremendously.

I feel like many people traditionally consider a tech meetup to consist of “a monthly in-person event, in the board room of company X, where people interested in tech Y come by to see an educational presentation, talk shop, and eat pizza.”

As much as this format has been enjoyed by myself and others, I suspect this format is dying.

It is dying because of the internet. No one needs to wait for the monthly meetup (or conference, for that matter) to see a static, non-interactive demo of new tech Y or to talk shop with peers. There are SO MANY other outlets for this kind of exchange, including Twitter, blogs, YouTube, GitHub, Slack, Discord, email newsletters, and so on.

It is dying because remote work is here to stay. COVID is still here, and that means hesitance about in-person events, but it also means the conference room you used to meet at isn’t there anymore because the company went full remote or they can’t allow the random public inside. The people who would usually stop by your meetup after work no longer drive into town for a job; they work from home.

Traditional meetups might be dying, but communities will live on.

I think the meetup groups that survive will rethink their positioning and build thriving communities around goal-oriented events.

Why the Guildflow Shutdown?

While I continue to be supportive of the positive impact of local tech communities (or meetups if we still want to hang on to that term), my observation is that two types of people generally run these groups:

the passionate volunteer who loves the technology so much they just want to share it with like-minded people
the corporate evangelist who is running the group as part of their job to educate the public and get traction for their employer’s interests

One of the initial goals for Guildflow was: “Create a modest stream of product revenue so that I could, over the long term, supplement and later replace my consulting income.” The problem I have is:

The passionate volunteer has very little actual money to spend. Historically, they could not even get enough money to cover the pizza costs when passing around a donation jar. Their time is very limited for meta-group responsibilities like group marketing. They get tremendous value and exposure from the network effect of the current Meetup.com platform, which I am unlikely to compete with successfully.

The corporate evangelist has some money to spend, but they are also interested in harvesting the group membership data for aggressive and questionable recruiting or marketing purposes. I am not interested in participating in that kind of business.

I am shutting down Guildflow because after living in the meetup headspace for two years, I have a hard time seeing a pathway to some level of financial stability which could adequately compensate me for my time.

I could have tried to pivot my codebase to other group/calendaring needs. I might just do that. However, as I explore next project ideas, I don’t want historical assets or a sunk cost fallacy to prevent me from new audiences and concepts.

What’s Next?

First, I have some shutdown tasks for Guildflow, like moving Philly Elixir to a new home, migrating some blog posts, and archiving my stuff.

As for my next side project, I don’t know. I have a lot of soul searching going on right now. A few bullets of thought:

Do more customer interviews.
Build smaller MVPs and faster.
More open source.
More sharing of progress.

Be sure to follow me to hear more over the coming months.

Retro Taxi: September 2021 Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 09:00:41 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

A few months ago I kicked off the next sample project for this website, a team retrospective board built using Phoenix LiveView called RetroTaxi. More info about the project is available in the project kickoff and today I’ll share how it has been coming along.

From the scope of the original pitch document you’d like to think I would have gotten further along by now but a mix of client responsibilities and then a extended personal vacation kept me distracted. Over the past week however I have gotten back into the project and can show some basic things working.

First, a user can visit the home page and create a new board. This create board form also asks for their name, since they will be displayed as the meeting’s facilitator to future collaborators.

Create new board form.

With the board created you are redirected to the board page, which shows the custom title and displays the facilitator in the to-be-fleshed-out “who’s here” section.

Each board has four columns and each column has content cards. You can add cards to columns and you can edit cards. There is no active pub/sub between multiple people viewing the board and seeing the cards change (yet), that is still forthcoming.

Sample of current board with editable content cards.

The site is styled with Tailwind CSS through I wouldn’t say it represents a final visual language by any means. I hope to finish the project with a vanilla Phoenix LiveView setup and then move on to experiment with Surface for a fuller UI component experience.

Since I wrote the original cycle one pitch I feel like my understanding of what I want to build and how it will all work has been very fluid. I have pretty much dropped the concept of cycles and have just started tagging issues with a MVP1 label since this project’s progress has clearly not been constrained by time.

I’m going to try to be more deliberate with issues and pull requests moving forward so if you want a peek or contribute, check them out.

Hopefully I’ll also be able to start extracting some more code-specific blog posts from the project soon. If you have any specific questions, let me know mike@mikezornek.com.

RetroTaxi Project Kickoff

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:55:21 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

Phoenix by Example is all about crafting educational content extracted from open source example projects. Today I am kicking off my latest example project, RetroTaxi!

From the pitch document:

A retrospective meeting is a regular practice of agile teams or any group of people who are looking for continued improvement to their team process, communication or habits. Successful retro meetings give the team an opportunity to reflect on what is working, what is not and what they want to do next.

Retrospective meetings can be executed in many different ways but with the advent of more people working remotely having an online collaborative tool to help execute the meeting and capture feedback is often advantageous. Some people will initially lean on collaborative tools like Google Docs to help execute a retro meeting and while it can work, it is not very elegant or structured. There are also dedicated retro tools but most are locked behind account registration, paywalls or try to do too many things.

This project aims to provide a simple, focused tool to help people run a retro meeting online. Our solution will value:

A registrations-free experience over formalized team management.

One-time use boards over detailed historic archives.

Conversations over analytical measurements or note taking.

A responsive web experience over platform-specific apps.

RetroTaxi will utilize Phoenix LiveView fairly heavily and should be a useful source of topics to discuss.

Project Goals

The first two projects of Phoenix by Example were fairly simplistic in nature and one of the first goals is of RetroTaxi is to do a more through exploration of a real world project process. As such you’ll see some early discovery time has been spent in preparing a pitch document, which is a slice of the larger Shape Up process.

Sample of some early discovery sketching and interface breadboarding.

Some mockups from the pitch document:

Board layout.

Card state.

The second project goal is to (hopefully) provide more useful and usable solutions to real world problems. When I built the GetShorty link shortener example there were no real aspirations that anyone would actually use the tool day-to-day, but moving forward I’d like to find small slices of opinionated, usefulness solutions to model the examples after. If you find this and have thoughts on retro meeting and the tools involved, please reach out. I’d love to hear your observations.

Next Steps

With the early discovery and my first pitch written I see the next steps as follows:

Sketch out the HTML/TailwindCSS needed to execute the design.
Build out the core contexts needed to model the behaviors of the board.
Create the LiveView to wire up the behaviors to the UI, breaking the interface into simple, testable components.
Refine the interactions and test non-happy path experiences (browser reload/rejoin).
Deploy and test the app to be used on the public internet.

The plan is to do this project in 6 weeks, with about 10 hours per week of dedicated time. I’ll be blogging my progress here so if you want to stay informed be sure to subscribe.

Prioritizing Customer Feedback

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 13:22:33 -0500

During a recent mastermind meeting a member asked the group, “how do you handle customer feedback?”

Like everything, it’s complex. I’m going to box my thoughts with the assumption we are talking about single-person bootstrapped businesses. If you are part of a larger team or working on a personal-education / open-source project, things will differ drastically.

During the early phases of a product development cycle customer feedback is usually the most valuable artifact of an alpha or beta release so, trying to take that feedback and transform it into actionable tasks to improve customer happiness is usually a good and high priority.

Eventually though, as your product matures and the next big goal of your business changes, you may find yourself getting lots of feedback or customer signals. At that point I think it’s important to be mindful of how you are spending your time. It can be very easy to fall into a cycle of reacting to things, feeling busy but not actually moving the needle of your business in the way you need to be. At this point instantly reacting to that customer feedback is not the most important, next thing for you do.

As for feedback tracking, I’m generally more of the mindset that important feedback will come in via repetition so there is little value documenting each and every item of customer feedback. Maybe a loose notebook of quick thoughts and screenshots, but nothing too formal. Customer feedback is not a “vote”. You determine the goals and vision of your software.

Google Ad Numbers Don't Add Up

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 10:46:27 -0400

I tried to run some Google Ads but can’t reconcile the numbers. I’ve been duped!

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Video Notes

I work as a consultant.
- I do a lot of iOS development, some Elixir, some teaching, etc.
Trying out a new productized service angle:
- Developer-focused User Reviews for $99
- Spent about a day working on a landing page and demo video.
Marketing so far: Release-day social post and the blog header.
Figured I’d try some Google Ads.
Initial take on the Google Ad UI: Much better for a person starting out.
Ran my ads for about a week.
The numbers don’t ad up in my eyes.
- I paid Google for 222 clicks but can only reconcile 77 of them.
- I asked for delivery to United States only and they did not seem to honor that.
Turned off the ad campaign for now.

Video: Bartering With Other Developers on Side Projects (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:24:03 -0400

A short video talking about bartering your time with other developers to help add perspective to each other’s side projects.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Challenging My Assumptions Through User Interviews

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 09:34:11 -0400

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

A short talk about how recent user interviews have challenged some of my assumptions about how Guildflow accounts should work.

Clubhouse is Now Guildflow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 11:38:06 -0400

Just a quick note, that I have a new name for my meetup project. Say hello to Guildflow!

If you’ve been following this project you may have seen some previous names like Campfire and Clubhouse and while I still like those names to run a modern software project requires a lot of unique name checkboxes, registrations and trademarks and those names did not work.

Why Guildflow? Guild is a nod to the group and community focus of the product and flow is a reference to the zen like toolkit for meetup organizers I envision will continue to materialize as the feature set matures.

The official blog post has links to the various new social account. Give them a follow if you can.

Video: Accountability via Masterminds (4m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:56:51 -0400

It can be hard to keep the momentum with a long term side project. I’ve found accountability help recently through a mastermind group.

MastermindJam | https://mastermindjam.com/

Clubhouse Roadmap Tour

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 May 2020 10:02:11 -0400

I’m using a public Trello board to keep track of my Clubhouse project’s roadmap. Check it out. Feedback on the roadmap style and content itself very welcome.

Buffer | https://open.buffer.com
Trello | https://trello.com
Amy Hoy - Just Fucking Ship | https://stackingthebricks.com/just-fucking-ship/

Video: How I Decided to Build Clubhouse (6m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 11:32:08 -0400

Links:

My Project: Club House Hosting

Video: Quick Thoughts on User Testing (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:50:17 -0400

Clubhouse Public Alpha

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:50:28 -0400

Today, after more than a year of side project progress, I finally am starting to share some of my progress regarding Clubhouse Hosting through the release of the first Public Alpha.

My first commit (over a year ago):

In my full time consulting work I push for “release small and fast” but personal responsibilities, this project’s scale, and the new technologies I’ve had to learn through the process have slowed me down tremendously. I still have a ton of spit and polish to do, and even bigger ideas once the basics are in place but I’m excited to hit this milestone, even if it is only a Public Alpha.

The platform is still in-development but available now as a Public Alpha. This means many features are incomplete and probably broken. Users should expect things to change, sometimes in breaking ways, and know the site still lacks production-acceptable backup and export systems.

The real focus of this release is getting feedback. I’m asking friends, peers and anyone interested in the goals of the project to lend me their time for some online user testing. If you would like to donate your time, please consider scheduling some time on my office hours calendar.

From this point on I plan to do regular updates. You can follow along via the Clubhouse Hosting Micro.Blog or twitter accounts as well as consider signing up to the mailing list from the front page.

Thanks for your support!

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 2: A Tour of UI Sketches

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 13:42:04 -0500

The Project: Club House Hosting

Show off some of the early UI sketches and then talk a little about plans for the week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Khn0nas24

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 1: Some Introductions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:08:21 -0400

The Project: Club House Hosting

Some basic introductions about me, about the project and about the timeline. See you next week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgi00EWZc0o

My New Project: Club House Hosting

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 11:30:26 -0400

Over the past few months I’ve been tinkering on a new project and it’s time to start to talking about it publicly.

From the Development Journal:

Club House Hosting is a new platform that will help group organizers launch dynamic websites for their group using their own domain. These sites will feature traditional publishing tools as well as tools dedicated to the unique needs of running a group, from things like event calendars with RSVP systems to member directories.

I’ve decided to keep most of this discussion on a separate blog since a big part of that content that will be posted is non-technical advice for group organizers and I don’t feel like that audience overlaps too well with my personal dissertations on the latest video games.

Aside: Can’t wait to play Link’s Awakening this weekend!

If you are a group organizer or know of one, please consider passing along the website, it’s RSS feed, it’s Twitter account, and so on.

I’d really love to hear from people who are running groups and what they would like to see from their tools.

Thanks for sharing.

New Project: Group Leadership Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 21:19:13 -0500

Today I’d like to share a new project I’ve been working on called Group Leadership Club, Helping People Build Successful Technical Meetups.

This site is dedicated to group leaders. Our goal is to help them start, run and sustain their own meetup groups. Through articles and a community forum we work to answer questions and provide guidance.

I’m a huge believer in the power of meetup groups. I’ve participated in many groups over the years and have myself helped run a very successful group in Philly CocoaHeads. Through CocoaHeads I’ve met dozens of people I now consider close friends and peers not to mention the education opportunities.

Over the past few years I’ve tried to give back to the community, specifically to other leaders, from causal conversations and advice to a formal talk I did at 360iDev. This new site is an extension of those recommendations with a modern discussion forum to help address specific questions as they pop up.

If you think the content is relative, please sign up to the forum or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you know someone who might like such a site, please do share a link. Thanks for your help.

Meet OwlDeck, a New Mac Presentation App for Programmers and Markdown Geeks.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 May 2017 02:44:09 +0000

Today I’m launching the teaser site for my new app, OwlDeck.

OwlDeck is a new macOS presentation tool for programmers and geeks who need to display code and love Markdown.

If you are interested in OwlDeck I’d love for you to signup to its newsletter and email me your thoughts.

If you are interested in some behinds the scene stuff you can checkout the project journal I’ve been keeping over at Rested Experience. I hope to share more now that things are going public and timelines are set.

Really excited to be working on products again. 🙂

Greetings, from the Ranch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 02:08:59 +0000

One of the great perks of working at Big Nerd Ranch is that you are allowed to take one Big Nerd Ranch class a year. This week I’m taking the Front End Web class, and am really looking forward to it.

At nights we are encouraged to work on a side project to help practice what we are learning in the day. I think I’m going to work on a wiki app — with a few touches that I myself have an itch for, drag and drop image uploads, code syntax coloring, and more.

I’ll check in later through the week. Wish me luck.

New Blog: Rested Experience

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 15:29:25 +0000

I’ve been working on a new Mac app for a month or so and it feels good to be building a product of my own again. I figured I’d blog the experience and hence, the new blog: Rested Experience.

Feedback and retweets very welcome. Thanks!

Clash of the Coders: Day 0

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 15:35:33 +0000

One of the many interesting benefits I get working for Big Nerd Ranch is the opportunity to participate in many fun and unique events. One of the bigger ones is called Clash of the Coders.

Clash of the Coders is an annual coding competition, whereby Big Nerd Ranch effectively “shuts down” for a a few days to allow developers to flex their coding muscles in to build something (anything) that is both wizardly and useful.

This years edition of “Clash” starts at 6pm tonight, Wednesday March 30th. While people are encouraged to brainstorm ideas and form teams ahead of time, no code shall be written until the event starts.

During the event we are treated to full time catering, shoulder and neck massages as well as other free-form geek activities. (I hear Christian will have his new Oculus Rift around for testing.)

While remote nerds can choose to stay remote and participate, anyone who wants to come into the office can. Last year I was at home and didn’t really get into it. This year I’m working out of the office so I’m anxious to see how it all works out.

As for my project and team, I’m still working on it. I have an idea and if need be will work on it solo but am also hosting a meeting after lunch for ‘Clash Singles’ to see if we can form some last minute teams.

At the end of Clash (Saturday, 6pm) we have a nice BBQ dinner (spouses and kids welcome) and we run a science fair of sorts, where people demo their work and answer questions. People are judged on project complexity, presentation and other factors. Bonus points are awarded if your team was interdisciplinary (mixing people of different departments) and if you were able to integrate any of the emerging technologies on our watch list. Top prize allows you to choose from list of high end geeky toys (think drones and musical instruments) with second/third prizes getting some nice Amazon gift cards.

I’ll post more as Clash gets going. If you have any questions let me know.

Rebooting My Professional Side Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 04:25:06 +0000

It’s been a little over two years since I put Clickable Bliss, the company name for my personal projects, then self-employment, on hiatus after taking a job at DmgCtrl (which then turned into a job at Big Nerd Ranch). Back then when I wrote about the change, I mentioned that team work was something I was really missing after my group startup Shindig ended. The good news is, in the last 2 years time I’ve gotten to work with some very talented people and have learned a ton from them. The sad news is, the yearning to work on something longterm, something of my own, something I can have a meaningful impact on does not go away. Today I’d like to share my intent to reboot my professional side projects.

I say “professional” side projects because I do want these to be serious projects that result in profitable products. I want to create software that people enjoy using, solve meaningful problems and people are willing to pay for. I’m not looking to quit my job but I don’t want that to be an excuse for lack of progression or service level, I want to make sure my customers are taken care of.

So what’s next? Well right now I’m working on breaking down some project ideas and otherwise trying to get up to speed with some tech stacks I’m considering using. I’m also trying to figure out the legal and branding side of things. Some questions on my mind:

Do I continue to do work under the name Clickable Bliss (which is a D.B.A.) or do I come up with a new company name that helps distinguish this new era and long term team intent (I do hope to bring on help for these new projects sooner than later).
If I do a new company name, do I run it as an LLC?
Do I promote these products under the company brand or just build brands around the project(s) themselves. (The two leading ideas I’d like to work on have fairly divergent audiences although longterm I’d say my interest is in providing tools for people who embrace technology to create things.)
I want to start to build up a newsletter as soon as I have some more concrete things to share. How do I migrate those people from the old Clickable Bliss mailing list? Should I?

So that’s what’s going on. Will share more when I have it. If you have any feedback or comments, please shoot me an email!

Encouraging Impactful User Content

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 18:17:04 +0000

I’m not one to do a ton of online product reviews but after CocoaLove I was asked to do one for the walking tour we took on Sunday. The site was TripAdvisor and from what I hear having good reviews there is really important for companies so I figured I’d share the love.

Since posting the review I’d say I get an email from TripAdvisor every 3 months or so. The email helps explain how much of an impact my review has made.

I really like the email.

I suspect emails like this help encourage further user contributions. If your website or service captures user generated content I’d encourage you to experiment with similar behaviors.

7 Minute Workout Featured on Apple.com

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:24:00 +0000

One of the apps I worked on, 7 Minute Workout, has been featured by Apple again. This time it’s part of the Strength TV ad which features a bunch of great fitness apps on iOS.

In related new the DmgCtrl and Tonic merger is kind of official these days. You can read more about it in Technical.ly Philly. You can also check out the revamped Tonic website which has a bunch of new case studies of some of our recent projects.

Congrats to all involved.

GoldCards 1.1

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 20 May 2014 13:43:03 +0000

GoldCards, a Hearthstone reference guide version 1.1 is live on the App Store.

It is mostly a data update regarding the recent nerf of Unleash the Hounds though I did squeeze in a few other bug fixes.

Looking for feedback from Twitter users

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 04 May 2014 02:39:54 +0000

I have an application I’ve been working on. I’d love to get some feedback from people to see if this is a real problem for Twitter users. To do so I’ve made a short survey.

If you use Twitter and have a few min to spare please check it out:

https://clickablebliss.wufoo.com/forms/twitter-research/

Side Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 03:08:02 +0000

Sorry for the dead air over the last few months. Things got a bit hectic at my job and I couldn’t seem to find the free time to post. On the plus side, things are starting to calm down. We’ve shipped some more software and I’m finally catching up with some side projects.

One project which I started at the March CocoaHead Hackday is GoldCards. It’s an iOS reference tool for Hearthstone.

While I want this to be a Universal (iPhone and iPad) app in time I think I’m going to finish up a few more loose ends and release it as an iPhone-only app for now.

Another big side project is CocoaLove, an iOS-focused conference coming to Philly. I’m on the planning committee (sponsorship and AV to be specific). I’d also like to help build a simple conference app with the schedule and what not. Shouldn’t be too hard considering my history with such things.

In addition to all that I’m also trying to catch up with some web tech, Ember and Node to be precise. There are a few things on my idea board that could utilize such skills so I’m taking some time reading books and going through Code School examples to catch up.

MegaManEffect now on GitHub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 20:25:35 +0000

A few days ago I started to archive a lot of the Clickable Bliss website, replacing it with a smaller “hiatus” version. In the process I moved the MegaManEffect which lived primarily via a blog post and a GoogleCode subversion repo to GitHub.

https://github.com/zorn/MegaManEffect

The MegaManEffect is an application that emulates an effect seen in the classic NES game Mega Man 2. When you launch a Mac OS X application, the screen goes dark, stars sweep the night sky and your application’s icon is presented in a blue letter box bar with a cheesy 8-bit music introduction.

MegaManEffect was written while I attended the ADHOC/MacHack conference in 2004 and took second place in the ADHOC Labs Showcase! In the summer of 2005 the application hit a nerve in the community generating tons of interest and downloads. It is to this day one of the most distributed pieces of code I’ve even written.

Funny enough after tweeting the move I ended up getting an email and later a pull request to update the code base to compile on 10.9. I approved the pull request today (thanks @smithrobs!) with a few other fixes.

The MegaManEffect will be 10 years old this summer.

Philly Startup Weekend

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:50:22 +0000

This weekend I got to take part in Philly Startup Weekend!

Startup Weekend is a world wide organization dedicated to hosting events to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs. The goal is to launch a startup in 54 hours. There have been several past Philly incarnations leading to some well known companies. I’ve always wanted to go but have had too many commitments. This weekend worked out and I’m glad it did.

The overall format is pretty self explanatory. For us there were about 110 attendees, 50 pitches, 16 projects selected based on a popular vote via stickers and then informal team formation. The teams worked on their new startup for the next two days with occasional drop-ins from local coaches to help out. The event hosts 4-minute presentations with 3-minutes of Q/A from the the judges for each project. Things closes with awards and a final party/mixer.

What I Liked

The attendees I interacted with were good people. No one there was slacking, nor did I see people looking to milk free work out of volunteers for their pet projects. Everyone genuinely seemed to be there to learn and do what they can to launch these startups.

The coaches that showed up were extremely helpful and provided great feedback as we matured our startups.

Overall, the whole event was a blast.

What I Didn’t Like

The venue / wifi. Once work started it was clear the organizers couldn’t support everyone on the main floor via wifi. Workbridge who is located in the same building was gracious enough to host moving a few teams up to their offices to help the congestion and while it did fix the wifi issue it also disrupted the “single open floor plan” which I think is extremely welcome for events like this.

The value in having an open floor is that you’ll overhear ideas and problems your fellow attendees are having and be able help each other out. It’s a great way to meet people and share ideas. On our 2nd floor space each team was isolated into their own offices so there wasn’t as much cross communication as I would have preferred. To balance things I took walking breaks back down to the main floor and talked with people. Even just having the ability to see the other team’s whiteboards was pretty interesting.

Some Take Aways

When you are given a project to do with a team of people, make sure you modify your plans to get the most out of these people and their skill set. Don’t get bogged down in that you are missing out on a specific developer or designer skill set. If you have someone who has experience with WordPress, figure out how to integrate WordPress into your solution. Make the most of what you have. Embrace constraints!

The overall entrepreneur community is maturing. I think it has been common to think that having a working prototype at the end of a weekend like this is a major goal however from my experience this weekend I was very pleased to see a larger percent of time focused on customer validation and the business model than code. More than working code what I think you need to at the end of the weekend is strong visualization of your product, and this need not be working code. I think UI renders or even a mocked up Keynote deck that fakes your website or app suffices. What you don’t want to do is let the complexities of the code implementation get in the way of prototyping different ideas during the weekend.

Our Project

I helped out with MentorShake, a website that aims to help connect mentors with students. Over the weekend during our validation we actually got back a lot of contradictory feedback from mentors on what they wanted and also struggled with the business model. By presentation time I think we ended up with a pretty good business plan and verbal commitments from over a dozen locals who were willing to be listed as mentors. Time will tell if the idea has legs but if you’re local to Philly and interested please sign up to the mailing list by visiting this page.

Thanks!

I’d like to again thank the organizers of the Philly Startup Weekend. It was a great time and I appreciate their hard work. If you are at all interested in this kind of thing I recommend you be on the lookout for a Startup Weekend in your area.

Running Lean: Problem Interviews

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:24:24 +0000

The following post is part of a series of posts related to my new project, currently code named CB Reader. For the latest info, please consider joining the CB Reader mailing list.

When I last posted, I introduced the lean canvas and explained how it helped to defined some user problem hypothesizes. Today we’ll start a new phase of Running Lean, the Problem Interviews, where you’ll interview people to verify if your problem hypothesizes and more than likely discover aspects and existing solutions you never knew existed.

Problem Interviews

With your falsifiable hypothesizes in hand it’s time to start talking to people. The book recommends 10-15 face-to-face interviews that last around 20 minutes each. It provides the following suggested interview format:

Personal Execution and Results

I reached out to the IndyHall community and the Philly CocoaHeads. I did 7 problem interviews, 4 face-to-face and 3 over Skype. I’ve had a few other people say they were up for the interview but they haven’t materialized (yet).

First, the face-to-face interviews went way better than Skype ones. Skype tended to disconnect and get laggy during the calls. This was annoying for the two people whom I’m previously friendly with but for the one interviewee, whom was a new connection for me, it really made the call awkward. Comparatively the face-to-face interviews went a lot smother (even brand new introductions) and I think generated better overall data. Lesson: by all means do face-to-face if possible.

I tried hard to follow the recommended interview format but I found it a bit off focus. For starters that first 10 minutes becomes a lot of you talking with very short bursts of answers from the customer. Part of this is needed as you need to set some context for the interview, however I just felt it was too long considering the target of 20 minutes. The meat of the interview is clearly “the customer’s worldview” section, where they explain what they view as the problems and the solutions they are using currently to solve them (along with their pros and cons). Moving forward I want to rework things to get to that as fast as possible.

Regarding the collection of demographics, the book suggests using tools like Google Forms which can help you graph and measure the various responses. I did this early on but found using the web form during the interview itself to be a bit of a pain as I needed to take notes on things the person was saying that didn’t fit the form. For the most recent interview I sticked to a simple plain text editor, typing in notes manually and then later punching it into Google Forms where appropriate. That said, the biggest value from all this is the free form stuff. Plotting 10-15 points of data isn’t usually that interesting for me so I’d recommend against the forms for this part.

What did I learn?

Before I started I wrote down the following goals:

Problem interviews will confirm pain points:

Multiple apps for RSS, Read Later, Pinboard, Twitter is painful / annoying.

RSS content can take to long to manually browse.

Regrets that you may not be reading enough.

Regrets that the time you do spend reading isn’t the most efficient.

You get value from Twitter but don’t want to monitor it 24/7.

Problem interviews will confirm use of the following alternative solutions:

Instapaper / Pocket / Safari “Read Later”

Reeder for iPad

Google Reader

Pinboard

Twitter

Problem interviews will confirm Entrepreneurs and Blog authors as valid customer segments.

For pain points, the biggest amongst my interview base was clearly the quantity of content being hard to manage. All seemed to share a sense that they weren’t getting the most from their reading time. Very few people considered switch apps to be a problem.

All of my suspected alternative solutions (minus Safari’s Read Later) were mentioned somehow. A few new ones popped up including: Zite, Flipboard (was previously known but forgot to list), FLUD, Umano, Fever, Yammer.

During this phase the Google Reader shutdown was announced as well, which made me aware of even more clients (some current, some in-development). I’ve blogged some thoughts on Google Reader in case you are curious.

Finally, my market segment was verified to include entrepreneurs, blog authors as well as programmers.

What’s next?

With our problem verified we move on to the solution interviews. This is where you mockup your solution, show it to people and gauge their reaction. The goals here are to continue to verify your problem and early adopters, figure our the minimum feature set needed to launch, evaluate if people are willing to pay for your solution and then what price they will bear.

I’m breaking away from the book here and doing this in two phases. One is a very digital phase. Part of this is the release of my new intro video and feature survey. The second part will come with more face-to-face interviews, re-interviewing people from before (now with solution demos in hand) and new people — preferably people whom I’m not previously connected to (which frankly I’ve very worried about finding).

Next up: Solution Interviews

CB Reader Intro Video and Feature Survey

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:16:46 +0000

Released earlier today, the new intro video starts to visualize some of the concepts I have in mind for CB Reader.

I’ve also posted a feature survey that you can fill out to help me gauge what features are must have for the initial launch. There is of course also free form text fields for detailed feedback too.

Thanks again for your interest in CB Reader.

Running Lean: Building Our Lean Canvas

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:44:02 +0000

The following post is part of a series of posts related to my new project, currently code named CB Reader. For the latest info, please consider joining the CB Reader mailing list.

It’s no secret I enjoyed book The Lean Startup (Review). Afterwords, I followed it up by reading Running Lean, by Ash Maurya, which is a collection of actionable examples for how to implement the Lean Startup for your next project. I’m doing my best to follow along with Ash’s recommendations and will report my progress here on on the blog.

One core concept Ash pushes is getting out there and interviewing your customers, not after the 1.0, but even before you begin coding. There are a few phases to customer interaction before you have a shipping product and with the Lean Startup principal of measurement they are all designed around learning.

However, before we interview customers we need to figure out what we want to learn and to do that we’ll create our first version of the lean canvas, an extremely simple 1-sheet that describes your product and business model. You are encouraged to spend some time on this but not too much time as realistically you’ll be coming back with edits and changes soon enough.

For my own project, I ended up using Ash’s Lean Canvas web app and it worked great. I did one version early on and then a second version as I prepped my problem interview questions. I wasn’t able to fill out all the squares as detailed as I wanted but as Ash explains in the book that’s fine for now. This canvas can and usually does change drastically as you learn from your customers.

The most important info, for this next phase, the Problem Interviews, is defining your falsifiable hypothesizes. These are the problems your believe effect people, the existing alternatives they are currently using to solve them are the most important, and the customer segment these people fall into.

Next: The Problem Interviews

The End of Google Reader

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Alas, as the prophecies foretold, Google Reader will be shutting down July 1st and with it hundreds if not thousands of apps that used Google Reader as their centralized RSS hub will be in trouble.

Many of us saw this coming. I know personally, the previous lack of commitment from Google to improving Reader was one of many things that pushed me to start working on my own CB Reader system.

While in the short term this will be frustrating for many, the long term benefits will outweigh. This is good news.

Announcing a New Project, CB Reader

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:29:06 +0000

Ah, the first public breath of a new project. So much potential and so much to do. Exciting times are afoot.

From the teaser page:

CB Reader (code name) is a new project that aims to help people centralize their many sources of incoming online articles and organize them through semantic analysis and social network influence.

This is an application / service for people who use RSS, “read later” tools, Twitter and other sources to manage and read online articles. The big goal is to help you get the most from your limited reading time.

The only real action for you at the moment is to sign up for the mailing list, should this type of app interest you. From here I will be inviting people to participate in various reviews and beta testing.

I’m going to be doing my best to blog progress at it happens. How this will break down:

Clickable Bliss Blog — major release announcements only
Mike Zornek.com — discussion of the creation process, coding and design
“Future Product Blog” — user experience, tutorials, support, tips and tricks.

It feels great to be building things again. Ever since my return I’ve been drowning in accountants, lawyers, agreements and meetings. It’s been kind of a downer but, with this project starting to get momentum, I’m feeling great.

Book Review: The Lean Startup

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:16:54 +0000

With the sale of ProfitTrain complete, my schedule has room for a new project. There’s a handful of ideas I’m working through, but, before I jump into one, I think that now is a great opportunity to catch up with some business books I’ve had on my radar.

The Lean Startup, written by Eric Ries, is a book I first received from New Relic through some promotion. Sadly, I wasn’t in much of a reading phase at the time, but with a secondary recommendation the other day, I decided to go ahead and start reading.

First, the book defines an entrepreneur as:

an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Using this definition, Eric explains that you can find entrepreneurs everywhere, from the typical garage startup to a division inside a larger corporation that’s been told to start a new initiative or project.

Some might say that we live in a golden age of entrepreneurship, but, while the overall number of new startups is increasing, success continues to be a real challenge. Lots of startups are failing because of elements that can actually be avoided. The Lean Startup is a movement that challenges entrepreneurs to work less on instinct on more on measurement in order to quickly learn what it takes to build a sustainable business.

Too often product ideas will come to a team and they’ll enter a long development cycle, only to find out that they’ve spent all their money and built something they can’t sell or that nobody wants. The Lean Startup encourages building “Minimum Viable Products” which will help start a real feedback loop with customers as soon as possible. Only by working with real customers can you truly learn.

Learning is an important, if not the most important, aspect for the Lean Startup movement. It should be at the center of how you spend all your time. If you are working on something that is not going to help you learn about customer behavior or evaluate a company risk, it’s probably just waste.

The heartbeat of a Lean Startup is the feedback loop, named “Build-Measure-Learn.” In practice, your actual feedback loop might look something like this:

Figure out what you want to learn about your customers.
Figure out how you’ll measure it.
Build it into the product.
Deploy it to the customers.
Measure customer behavior.
Use these measurements and metrics to define future work and pivots.
Repeat.

The feedback loop should be as small as possible.

When it comes to metrics, Lean Startup does warn against “vanity metrics” — these might be reports or charts that look good at first glance but don’t really represent whether your business is really growing. Consider an app that gets 1,000 downloads per day but also has a bounce rate of 80%. What if that remaining 20% decays over time to leave you with only a handful of active users. Showing a “Total Downloads” chart might make the team feel nice inside, but does this represent the real growth rate of the product? What you need to track will vary per business model, but the recommendation to be wary of “vanity metrics” is true for all.

There is more advice in the book, including some suggestions on using “Five Whys” to help find root causes of problems, along with a reminder than no system is perfect for everyone. That said, I really took a liking to the ideas of Lean Startup. I’m currently reading a nice followup book, Running Lean, which has a collection of real world approaches to applying Lean Startup to a business or product prospect.

Regardless of what my next project may be, I’m definitely interested in applying The Lean Startup to see how it works out.

To learn more, you can check out the book’s website: theleanstartup.com.

Mike Zornek

Ranked Vote Flick Demo

Circle Sign-Up Forms and Credit Card Fraud

Shutting Down ElixirClub

Side Project Launch Cold Feet

A New Project: ElixirClub

What to expect as a member?

The Importance of Side Project Tiny Tickets

Side Project Idea Audit

Collaborative UI Breadboarding

Exercism but for Tailwind

Slack Plugins

Notion Plugins

Personal Blog Rewrite

Filters Shaping My Next Project Idea

Why I Want To Do A Product (Again)

Recent Product Failures

My Project Filters

My Superpowers

Shutting Down my Side Project Guildflow

Project Background

Development History

What Did I Learn?

The most complex problems around running a meetup group have very little to do with the quality of the group management tools. The real challenges are finding an audience and generating rewarding, goal-oriented content that enables that audience to evolve into a true community.

Bigger Trends of Meetups

Why the Guildflow Shutdown?

What’s Next?

Retro Taxi: September 2021 Update

RetroTaxi Project Kickoff

Project Goals

Next Steps

Prioritizing Customer Feedback

Google Ad Numbers Don't Add Up

Video: Bartering With Other Developers on Side Projects (5m)

Challenging My Assumptions Through User Interviews

Clubhouse is Now Guildflow

Video: Accountability via Masterminds (4m)

Clubhouse Roadmap Tour

Video: How I Decided to Build Clubhouse (6m)

Video: Quick Thoughts on User Testing (5m)

Links

Clubhouse Public Alpha

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 2: A Tour of UI Sketches

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 1: Some Introductions

My New Project: Club House Hosting

New Project: Group Leadership Club

Meet OwlDeck, a New Mac Presentation App for Programmers and Markdown Geeks.

Greetings, from the Ranch

New Blog: Rested Experience

Clash of the Coders: Day 0

Rebooting My Professional Side Projects

Encouraging Impactful User Content

7 Minute Workout Featured on Apple.com

GoldCards 1.1

Looking for feedback from Twitter users

Side Projects

MegaManEffect now on GitHub

Philly Startup Weekend

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Some Take Aways

Our Project

Thanks!

Running Lean: Problem Interviews

Problem Interviews

Personal Execution and Results

What did I learn?

What’s next?

CB Reader Intro Video and Feature Survey

More Google Reader Thoughts

What was Google Reader?

The Impact of Google Reader’s Demise

A Pipe Dream

What does this mean for CB Reader?

Running Lean: Building Our Lean Canvas

The End of Google Reader

Announcing a New Project, CB Reader

Book Review: The Lean Startup