Thanks @Kenai I really appreciate that feedback. It's great. I will make sure these are all updated and reflect what the app does and what we're aiming for.
The Cheezus Thread - A Startup Journey
- Thread starter randomshenans
- Start date
Still here. Still going.
Trying to get everyone up to speed and effectively working in distributed teams, with little existing process (it was just me of course before) is a slog but we're getting there. Slowly.
Had the Virtual Cheese Awards last week, which actually provided some nice connections. One of whom runs about 6 companies; an IT company, a classic car renovation company, has part ownership of a creamery, same with a salmon farm in scotland and also runs Cheshire Cheese Company. He takes on all marketing and online presence for cheese producers. Sets up sites, stores, channels and social and makes sure they tell the cheese producers story. He represents about 650 cheese producers in the UK doing this and would love to be one of the first people to get their cheese sold through cheezus and is willing to help make that happen.
This has kicked me up the butt to get to that point, so trying to work out the best way to make this happen. Lists are being made. Things are being done. Hoping we can do a 3 month turn around on this massive feature... that's my aim!
We have a new version due to be released any day now too. Just waiting on a final small change and Android will be live and then we can submit to Apple for their oh so fun process.
The list I made today:
Trying to get everyone up to speed and effectively working in distributed teams, with little existing process (it was just me of course before) is a slog but we're getting there. Slowly.
Had the Virtual Cheese Awards last week, which actually provided some nice connections. One of whom runs about 6 companies; an IT company, a classic car renovation company, has part ownership of a creamery, same with a salmon farm in scotland and also runs Cheshire Cheese Company. He takes on all marketing and online presence for cheese producers. Sets up sites, stores, channels and social and makes sure they tell the cheese producers story. He represents about 650 cheese producers in the UK doing this and would love to be one of the first people to get their cheese sold through cheezus and is willing to help make that happen.
This has kicked me up the butt to get to that point, so trying to work out the best way to make this happen. Lists are being made. Things are being done. Hoping we can do a 3 month turn around on this massive feature... that's my aim!
We have a new version due to be released any day now too. Just waiting on a final small change and Android will be live and then we can submit to Apple for their oh so fun process.
The list I made today:
- Drop Simon a note to follow up - ask about joint competition
- Get @Ahmad Tawfik and @Dan Moffatt together to work out best route to selling/ buying
- @Mina Booth to send contact of scottish cheese man
- @Ross to catch up with Kara from VCAs
- @Ross Redo the descriptions for app stores to make it more clear
- Release latest changes of Cheezus to app stores (iOS and Android) - @Ahmad Tawfik & @Ross
- Create Amazon affiliate for Cheezus - Send details to @Roshni - @Ross
- @Ross work with @Dan Moffatt to put in place best code commiting/ working/ releasing process
- Start working with @Roshni on some outline basic modeling for projections - also with @Mina Booth to make sure our % structure makes sense from a margins point of view per sale etc.
- Create strategy with @Mina Booth for what goes on what channel (web, app, social) and what joins them together cohesively.
- @Ross work on customer journey for both buying and selling (consumers and cheese producers) to aid Ahmad and Dan's work
- anything else Ross decides to add - adding jira items, updating confluence, adding logins/ accounts to 1password etc.
Yea, totally and I need those things to keep me going
but it's been really nice to hear. Essentially focus is on creating value for them without the barriers. So using tech to make sure they don't have the overhead to get on board. I've been trying to explore some funding from grants, as there are funds for agricultural efficiencies, which covers supply chain and improving revenue opportunities (which isn't via evil supermarkets who ruin all producers). It's a mine field though, so I've got Roshni on it
Especially now post Brexit. It's impossible to work out but see what she comes up with. Gitlab all setup and looking to get Dan and Ahmad all working together properly and not locally, in a bad, non scalable way
Also done some work on rough UI for producers / sellers:
Now need to work on what it looks like for a producer/ seller on the backend...
Haha you're the second person to send this to me on this!
Thank you man! I appreciate that a lot.
I have more updates, but no time to type them at the moment. **** has all gone a bit mental at the day job. I'll post in Business & moment when I get a moment and update here too.
Little update: Android version now should be up to date and latest. iOS one was being worked on yesterday, hopefully have it submitted for review today pending Ahmad's productivity!
Trying to sort out Ahmad getting this iOS release out (which I have to say he does via a space macbook of mine and teamviewer as he has no mac )is a mission at the moment. I just want it out so we can draw a line under it and do a backlog groom and look at how we can hit our 3 month goal of getting this buying/ selling solution out the door. He said the other day. He did some, and then said tomorrow. Then it was today. Now it's today or tomorrow. Dan is trying to set up his environment so he can best understand what has been done and how, so he can help build off that too. Yet it's painful for this as well. For some reason he's really defensive...
Sigh.
I spend so long trying to get him to understand this ****. He's actually the only ****** getting paid lol
He quoted for the whole deliverables, which he's about half way through. Next he was going to work on translation / localisation of the app, but we think he should now focus his efforts on helping get us closer to a revenue generation source, rather than what was the plan (which is more focused on scaling to other countries). Having looked at opportunities, fastest route to revenue is the wisest, we can build on that and the translation / language/ localisation stuff will come, just not before buying and selling options.
I've done some super late nights at the day job this week, so hoping now I can really focus on some user journey mapping and UI stuff, so at least we can jump right into delivery as soon as I can get Ahmad to push this stuff out!
)is a mission at the moment. I just want it out so we can draw a line under it and do a backlog groom and look at how we can hit our 3 month goal of getting this buying/ selling solution out the door. He said the other day. He did some, and then said tomorrow. Then it was today. Now it's today or tomorrow. Dan is trying to set up his environment so he can best understand what has been done and how, so he can help build off that too. Yet it's painful for this as well. For some reason he's really defensive...
Sigh.
I spend so long trying to get him to understand this ****. He's actually the only ****** getting paid lol
He quoted for the whole deliverables, which he's about half way through. Next he was going to work on translation / localisation of the app, but we think he should now focus his efforts on helping get us closer to a revenue generation source, rather than what was the plan (which is more focused on scaling to other countries). Having looked at opportunities, fastest route to revenue is the wisest, we can build on that and the translation / language/ localisation stuff will come, just not before buying and selling options.
I've done some super late nights at the day job this week, so hoping now I can really focus on some user journey mapping and UI stuff, so at least we can jump right into delivery as soon as I can get Ahmad to push this stuff out!
Oh totally. This is why I'm trying to get everything centralised and this main release done for now. Then we work from there. I need to keep all things good to get this out and for a knowledge share and then at least Dan can crack on without us feeling hostage to him, which I feel we are currently. I'll get there, and when we are not so dependent, we can get him to do parts we need and carry on with other things at the same time, rather than at the moment being at a halt until he sorts his **** out.
iOS updates are out. I've told him to now forget previous deliverables so we can look at fastest way to our new goal of buying options. I want to find some time between thurs / friday afternoon where him, Dan and I can get together and do some knowledge sharing, some upskilling and backlog grooming. Right now it's my biggest blocker which I'm trying to remove so we can increase cadence as it's frustrating as hell.
Either way, we closed out May with OK growth. We just need to keep the focus on but fire fighting is frustrating and feeling like I'm not being productive as well which isn't helpful.
Hey ho, progress is progress. Keep on pushing.
Had a really good chat with Dan and Ahmad last night, next stuff is on me before they can get going, so obviously my aim is to get that out as fast as possible so I spent last night working on the user journey for the buyer / app side of buying cheese which is:
Might have missed some things off, but that's pretty much it.
Now tonight I need to get the user journey done from a seller's perspective and then crack on with some rough design stuff on both in XD and then we can crack on. The main things at the moment are the user journeys so they can work out how to do it.
I am hopeful we're back to cooking on gas and hopefully I can up the pace on things now.
Might have missed some things off, but that's pretty much it.
Now tonight I need to get the user journey done from a seller's perspective and then crack on with some rough design stuff on both in XD and then we can crack on. The main things at the moment are the user journeys so they can work out how to do it.
I am hopeful we're back to cooking on gas and hopefully I can up the pace on things now.
Done a fair bit more on the user journeys as well as some of the golden path (of sorts) for buying cheese! Now need to flash out some more of the edge case options (adding payment method, address, promo code, errors, removing / editing basket stuff, and all the other possible paths) but it's getting there. I'll try and finish some more of this off tonight and then start to build out the UI side of things for the sellers, too. Then I will kick it off properly and stop blocking these guys building it!
Just found this online - was tagged on linkedin but hadn't seen it! Which is nice! haha free marketing
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/app-job-head-of-cheese-20859791
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/app-job-head-of-cheese-20859791
July has been what I thought I would say "a so-so month" but in the end it's been very positive. It started poorly, with my off the radar trying to focus on not having a mental breakdown and **** just generally getting the better of me at home, I wasn't doing great on any front so this kind of didn't seem important. Having said that I am working on me and that's a long old road so back I got on that cheesy horse and slapped it's ***!
Social grew - instagram was a small 2% growth but engagement on that audience was up. So overall positive. I got back into posting and scheduling regularly, which I think has helped.
LinkedIn up 7% which is good and again, engagement is high on those. Right audience as well, for producers and suppliers, which is a positive.
App downloads started slowly but we've just passed 1000 to 1019 now. Huge numbers? No. Gains? Yes. We started on 272 at the end of last year. It was in the appstores from March I think it was, so 10 months to get 272 and we're tripled that number inside half that time. Got to look at the positives and the cost has been fairly low (sponsoring cheese awards biggest cost, rest is all time).
This made me dig more into the appstores though. Android we ranked about 120th for "cheese " and 108th for "cheese app" (in the UK, in the US it was something like 92nd and 120th)- which is awful. This means that every time people search cheese app, or cheese, they'll never find us! No wonder I feel this 1000 users has been a slog - why am I not putting more effort into people finding the app when they search the app store? Do people search a lot for Cheese or Cheese app in the UK and US? (main countries I'm focusing on as a start)
Yes, they do.
In fact, in the US c.36,764 people search for "cheese" each day in the Play Store and 6,918 people search for cheese app. A day!!
In the UK it's a lot smaller, but not insignificant at all. 7621 searches a day for cheese and 783 for cheese app.
Hell, I'm bitching about gaining 750 users I've fought c. 7 months for when I have people literally looking for this stuff daily!? What an idiot!!
Since I have started looking at this I've been working on purely these 2 markets and the key words cheese and cheese app. With Android I've moved up our ranking to 4th in the UK for cheese app while we're still at 115th for cheese. It's up 5, but not good and will take some time to improve the ranking. The US is up too; 8th for cheese app and 120th for cheese. So you can see the improvement. I'm going to be working on iOS as well but just started that. We are so bad on that one we don't even fall in the top 250!! Dammmn!
Aim to get us in at 1st place for both terms in both stores... I hope!
On the iOS side 42k people search for cheese a day in the US and 8k people search for cheese app. The UK has 8k for cheese and 800 for cheese app. Again, per day. Imagine the numbers we could pull in if we improved this?
Other pluses are; I completed all the UI and user journey for buying / selling cheeses - we've got a plan and broken it down. We're going to start with a woocommerce sync from producers woocommerce instances to one we run and will use their APIs to push all this to our app too. Makes it very easy and actually pretty good to setup. Don't need to recreate payment gateways, Dbs etc. We're on this now.
As well as this I've started getting producers emailing me asking if we can chat about getting their stuff on the app, so further validation from that side we're building something useful for them. Lots of improvements to do, but we're getting there slowly now I've kicked myself again!
Just wanted to check in and share. I like to do this for me and if it can help people, it's always good. I admit when I could have done things better. I'm sure focusing on app store presence from the start would have pushed us in numbers much further along than we are but hey, lesson learned!
Social grew - instagram was a small 2% growth but engagement on that audience was up. So overall positive. I got back into posting and scheduling regularly, which I think has helped.
LinkedIn up 7% which is good and again, engagement is high on those. Right audience as well, for producers and suppliers, which is a positive.
App downloads started slowly but we've just passed 1000 to 1019 now. Huge numbers? No. Gains? Yes. We started on 272 at the end of last year. It was in the appstores from March I think it was, so 10 months to get 272 and we're tripled that number inside half that time. Got to look at the positives and the cost has been fairly low (sponsoring cheese awards biggest cost, rest is all time).
This made me dig more into the appstores though. Android we ranked about 120th for "cheese " and 108th for "cheese app" (in the UK, in the US it was something like 92nd and 120th)- which is awful. This means that every time people search cheese app, or cheese, they'll never find us! No wonder I feel this 1000 users has been a slog - why am I not putting more effort into people finding the app when they search the app store? Do people search a lot for Cheese or Cheese app in the UK and US? (main countries I'm focusing on as a start)
Yes, they do.
In fact, in the US c.36,764 people search for "cheese" each day in the Play Store and 6,918 people search for cheese app. A day!!
In the UK it's a lot smaller, but not insignificant at all. 7621 searches a day for cheese and 783 for cheese app.
Hell, I'm bitching about gaining 750 users I've fought c. 7 months for when I have people literally looking for this stuff daily!? What an idiot!!
Since I have started looking at this I've been working on purely these 2 markets and the key words cheese and cheese app. With Android I've moved up our ranking to 4th in the UK for cheese app while we're still at 115th for cheese. It's up 5, but not good and will take some time to improve the ranking. The US is up too; 8th for cheese app and 120th for cheese. So you can see the improvement. I'm going to be working on iOS as well but just started that. We are so bad on that one we don't even fall in the top 250!! Dammmn!
Aim to get us in at 1st place for both terms in both stores... I hope!
On the iOS side 42k people search for cheese a day in the US and 8k people search for cheese app. The UK has 8k for cheese and 800 for cheese app. Again, per day. Imagine the numbers we could pull in if we improved this?
Other pluses are; I completed all the UI and user journey for buying / selling cheeses - we've got a plan and broken it down. We're going to start with a woocommerce sync from producers woocommerce instances to one we run and will use their APIs to push all this to our app too. Makes it very easy and actually pretty good to setup. Don't need to recreate payment gateways, Dbs etc. We're on this now.
As well as this I've started getting producers emailing me asking if we can chat about getting their stuff on the app, so further validation from that side we're building something useful for them. Lots of improvements to do, but we're getting there slowly now I've kicked myself again!
Just wanted to check in and share. I like to do this for me and if it can help people, it's always good. I admit when I could have done things better. I'm sure focusing on app store presence from the start would have pushed us in numbers much further along than we are but hey, lesson learned!
We are getting some decent results from the app store work I've done...
While it's been a meh few weeks so far for me sorting my **** out I haven't stopped the key things I need to do. I now just need to plan out the work. We've done some estimates on the sync work to do. Now to get Ahmad on the work and fixing some **** while building out new ****.
Happy with that growth, but still a lot of work to do on the iOS store presence. Next release I'll tidy up the listing and that as keywords aren't ranking like I want them and you can't change it without releasing a new build.
Had a great call with a very good chat with some producers too about getting on the app. They're super keen so now pull out the stops to build the damn thing out more.
I might take some time off work and crack on with the planning of it all.
While it's been a meh few weeks so far for me sorting my **** out I haven't stopped the key things I need to do. I now just need to plan out the work. We've done some estimates on the sync work to do. Now to get Ahmad on the work and fixing some **** while building out new ****.
Happy with that growth, but still a lot of work to do on the iOS store presence. Next release I'll tidy up the listing and that as keywords aren't ranking like I want them and you can't change it without releasing a new build.
Had a great call with a very good chat with some producers too about getting on the app. They're super keen so now pull out the stops to build the damn thing out more.
I might take some time off work and crack on with the planning of it all.
Had a really good meeting with the guys on Weds and did a backlog grooming. A lot of bugs we did estimates on and kicked off a longer 4 weekly sprint due to Dan's time being spread out more. Ahmad cracked on and this weekend got a lot of the minor fixes knocked out. Have a couple more to do and then we can crack on with breaking down the epic of cheese buying. It's getting slowly closer though...
While they're doing that, I try my hand at anything and obviously doing app store stuff has been on my plate. With that I wanted to not only improve how we ranked but our conversion rate in the app store, so I updated all our screenshots etc. in the listings. Android allows you to do it on the fly but iOS of course you need to push a release. Which, to be fair, is something we'll be doing a lot more as this also improves the ranking on apples app store. All about trying to make it work best. I need to learn the real tips for iOS before we push this release this week but slowly learning.
On top of that I've updated all cheeses in our backend that were without details and this week I need to add some new cheeses that I have been putting out on our social and finish some UI stuff for the cheese buying. I have some bits and pieces I need to work out, like how existing cheeses tie into products for sale and what that link looks like and how it will be displayed. So this week I'll work that out.
Either way, decent week. We're still growing nicely and the app store work is definitely paying off.
While they're doing that, I try my hand at anything and obviously doing app store stuff has been on my plate. With that I wanted to not only improve how we ranked but our conversion rate in the app store, so I updated all our screenshots etc. in the listings. Android allows you to do it on the fly but iOS of course you need to push a release. Which, to be fair, is something we'll be doing a lot more as this also improves the ranking on apples app store. All about trying to make it work best. I need to learn the real tips for iOS before we push this release this week but slowly learning.
On top of that I've updated all cheeses in our backend that were without details and this week I need to add some new cheeses that I have been putting out on our social and finish some UI stuff for the cheese buying. I have some bits and pieces I need to work out, like how existing cheeses tie into products for sale and what that link looks like and how it will be displayed. So this week I'll work that out.
Either way, decent week. We're still growing nicely and the app store work is definitely paying off.
Did this last week and doing it again this week. Not 100% for this, I have a lot of life admin going on at the moment but still it's helpful to have some time to look at some of this on a day when I can schedule nothing else.
Making an app is 100% making an app.
Building a business is different... an app is simply a customer channel for that business. Our aim is to make it a valuable one so people use it to purchase as it provides them value. At the same time, we'll be monetizing our other customer channels, too. Which is why we build up all channels with the work I'm doing. No matter what the business, you build an audience and monetize it. Make sense?
It's not always done like that... but in one way or another your sales funnel will look similar. Happy to answer any questions though.
Building a business is different... an app is simply a customer channel for that business. Our aim is to make it a valuable one so people use it to purchase as it provides them value. At the same time, we'll be monetizing our other customer channels, too. Which is why we build up all channels with the work I'm doing. No matter what the business, you build an audience and monetize it. Make sense?
It's not always done like that... but in one way or another your sales funnel will look similar. Happy to answer any questions though.
I suppose this is more correct. We have our company mission - what we're aiming to do/ the value we aim to provide. We then have multiple different "products" that could help us achieve that. The app is one of those, in the same way our social channels would be and our website. Each product should have similar users, but the motivators to use / go to each product vary, so you have to understand those audiences and how best to draw people into them. Social, can we build the audiences so they feel our posts provide value, so they follow and interact and adding products to our posts can then help convert? Can we make the app useful enough so that people use it more and again, build that audience so providing sales opportunities means we can convert those users? etc etcOr maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and the product is not just the app, but the - what would they say - "ecosystem surrounding the app"
Ah thanks man. I enjoy documenting it. I love the journey and the process. I learn more each part and it's all a learn and hopefully helps me get further along. Every time I learn I bring it back into the business and try and do that better.
Just filed our taxes with HMRC - loss of 3,484 - so I managed to spend about 3.5k on getting here - probably more added this year because of general amounts etc. but I think we'll be at about 5k total so far.
I have another $1k upcoming for dev work - which should get us to our buy / sell cheese functionality.
I've done all the UI for it now and we've worked out how best to setup the linking of cheeses/ products. Regular meetings happening weekly and getting through stuff which is nice.
Had some great tech meetings over the last few weeks, just getting everything in order. We have a pretty much golden path for our beta on this feature release, but had some challenges with data structure etc. with some of the linking of cheese to products and producers and how that will be managed.
We also were going to use an off the shelf plugin to sync from producers sites to ours, which then shows to the app, but that had a downside of having to pay $30 each producer for the plugin, and we eventually found out it wouldn't give us the flexibility we needed. It allowed us to sync from a producers wooCommerce to ours, but didn't allow us to dictate what was sync'd and where to sync it to. One of the limitations we ran into in general was the fact that wooCommerce has products, but no producer attribute. We need this for the obvious linking between producer and their associated products.
Getting round this I decided to use the product categories in Woo. Each producer will be a category, which allows you to associate cheese with that producer (you can see our test of this online on the site: https://shop.cheezus.co/product-category/producers/butlers-farmhouse-cheese/) ignore the site itself, this is purely to use for the building and data but gives you the idea. Now we're in the process of putting together the UI side of things, pulling the data from that site to the app in the right structure.
Dan is working on building out our version of the plugin that will allow us to sync what we choose, to the categories we want on our side.
Growth has been decent. I'm trying to be more consistent with everything and making that a priority even when work work is busy, which it really is at the moment. Either way, we're still aiming to be ready for a christmas push. Producers have been reaching out looking to get on board, so hoping we have a decent amount to work with and onboard when the time comes. Considering I cannot afford to throw money at it and the progress we're still making, I'm content
Just need to keep pushing everyone
/My update
We also were going to use an off the shelf plugin to sync from producers sites to ours, which then shows to the app, but that had a downside of having to pay $30 each producer for the plugin, and we eventually found out it wouldn't give us the flexibility we needed. It allowed us to sync from a producers wooCommerce to ours, but didn't allow us to dictate what was sync'd and where to sync it to. One of the limitations we ran into in general was the fact that wooCommerce has products, but no producer attribute. We need this for the obvious linking between producer and their associated products.
Getting round this I decided to use the product categories in Woo. Each producer will be a category, which allows you to associate cheese with that producer (you can see our test of this online on the site: https://shop.cheezus.co/product-category/producers/butlers-farmhouse-cheese/) ignore the site itself, this is purely to use for the building and data but gives you the idea. Now we're in the process of putting together the UI side of things, pulling the data from that site to the app in the right structure.
Dan is working on building out our version of the plugin that will allow us to sync what we choose, to the categories we want on our side.
Growth has been decent. I'm trying to be more consistent with everything and making that a priority even when work work is busy, which it really is at the moment. Either way, we're still aiming to be ready for a christmas push. Producers have been reaching out looking to get on board, so hoping we have a decent amount to work with and onboard when the time comes. Considering I cannot afford to throw money at it and the progress we're still making, I'm content
Just need to keep pushing everyone /My update
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chee...NaAervCJmSfsEanEfvNDn9N-EH2mNIFbvwUc370e9XLz5
Some more recent reports on the cheese / dairy industry and the growth.
Appreciate it though, really.
Spent some time over lunch setting up woo commerce / revolut business payments gateway so no fees and directly sends the cash from orders into your business account, which is great. Saves any 1-3% fees, which is great and it's super easy.
Also added some products so Ahmad can crack on with both examples of unique cheeses and more generic ones. In the example above, you see searching for cheddar will obviously yield many results. As such it'll take you to the main cheddar page and then using tags in the backend you'll get all cheddars, such as: https://shop.cheezus.co/?s=cheddar&post_type=product which should be easy enough to hook up to the app as a search string and associate it with the cheddar entity on our app side.
Scheduled all cheese posts for this week and Ahmad is cracking on with getting the UI done or started anyway tomorrow.
I was supposed to jump on the bike at lunch but instead ate a cheese board and did this
Some more recent reports on the cheese / dairy industry and the growth.
Ah thanks man! Great part of it is, now that I work in product as well, it's a nice synergy between both. So it feels like education more than anything! I'm really weird, I don't think I couldn't do something like this. I think I have issues
Appreciate it though, really. Spent some time over lunch setting up woo commerce / revolut business payments gateway so no fees and directly sends the cash from orders into your business account, which is great. Saves any 1-3% fees, which is great and it's super easy.
Also added some products so Ahmad can crack on with both examples of unique cheeses and more generic ones. In the example above, you see searching for cheddar will obviously yield many results. As such it'll take you to the main cheddar page and then using tags in the backend you'll get all cheddars, such as: https://shop.cheezus.co/?s=cheddar&post_type=product which should be easy enough to hook up to the app as a search string and associate it with the cheddar entity on our app side.
Scheduled all cheese posts for this week and Ahmad is cracking on with getting the UI done or started anyway tomorrow.
I was supposed to jump on the bike at lunch but instead ate a cheese board and did this
Hello all. What a year. It's been a funny one for many reasons, not least covid continuing in the way it has but my life, in the words of the Fresh Prince, got flipped turned upside down.
I thought it would be as good a place as any to do a 2021 retro as a lot of it is Cheezus, but also a lot is not. Bear with me.
This year my Wife and I separated after 10yrs together. It was tough leading up to that, when looking back, as I lived in my home office for the whole year. Mentally it was a really tough year for 9-10 of those months. I don't blame anyone for the breakdown of our relationship. A relationship is two way. We both played parts in it, and were clearing miscommunicating for some time leading up to that day. We probably wanted to before, but felt the stigma and pressure of the kids not to. It was the best thing we could have done. Without dwelling on the past, I spent a lot of time reflecting, learning about me and trying to grow, so it's been a huge personal growth year for me.
The downside of this though, was the attention spent on other things. In my relationship, I was never really "allowed" to spend money on things like Cheezus. It wasn't a priority for some, but for me it was. The end result was wanted, without the risk/cost and work. I am happy to put those things in and so because of that, post separation I have pushed things forwards nicely.
Alas, whilst I didn't spent greatly in the year on development, I did put time in each week to make sure the social side of things was covered. With some weeks where I just couldn't do it, but for the most part I was consistent with getting things done.
App users grew from this time last year 10x
So regardless, I'm pleased with the work done. Every metric grew nicely.
The above development work has been planned, paid for and is now underway. I would have liked it done by Christmas (big cheese time) but it's coming anyway. I know what we need to do and it's getting done. Sitting down with some of the guys in the new year to sort out plans for next steps and what it means. Certain people (CMO) has not pulled any of their weight (I feel they should be covering social tbh not me, but it's always me) so I will be having discussions with everyone and outlining my expectations for the new year and 2022. I want to set out with clear expectations and objectives. Make things properly set and official. If people want to be a part, go for it, if not, no problem.
Cheezus wise, given the circumstances as well as how busy work has been as well, I'm very pleased with growth. Next year I am very excited for what's to come. Hitting 10k users would be a massive thing, which I'd like to do.
Other things:
Fulltime Job - I don't know what I expected here, but it's been very frustrating as a place to work. I knew how dysfunctional it was, I've contracted there long enough, but I'm such a **** I always think things can change and it was an exciting chance to make a difference in Product. Which I love. I found it's not been the case and spent most of my time frustrated. It gave me some confidence in what I do though, so it's been good in that sense and while I haven't achieved anywhere near what I'd have liked to, I made progress in educating the masses. I also realised they don't own me. They pay for some of my time, but outside of that, it's my life. I made that very clear to my boss who thinks contacting me on my holidays is acceptable and so no doubt have ****** some people off, but life is too short.
The job market is really very good at the moment and in my time off in December I had two interviews for interesting companies as fully remote jobs (head of product and head of product operations). One very well known blockchain company, been round since 2017 and a series B company doing some really interesting stuff, looking to IPO in the next 3-5yr, so interesting options. Talking to them both more in the new year. Either way, I will never let work control and dictate my life as I have in the past.
YouTube - Some of you will know I have a YT channel where I do my endless projects (yea yea I know, I know) and the main reason I set it up was to keep myself accountable to my projects. It wasn't supposed to be anything serious. I then posted a "short" which was when they were brand new. It was a 10s clip that I edited from a news website I'd literally just seen of a guy in pants ice skating in amsterdam on the frozen river and falling in. I thought nothing of it. We had about 2k subs at the time.
It "went viral" and I hate that saying, but it really did. It keeps going to this day. This was posted in March and as of this post, has 82.7m views, has got 2.4m views in the last 48hrs and 65k in the last hour. It seems to pump up and down all year... this has taken our subscriber count from 2k to 43.3k - mad.
Shorts at the time and for a long time didn't make you any money, so that 80m meant nothing. They changed that last month in France and so it's started to make money. Due to that though, I started recently posting more shorts. There is an audience there and they're getting very decent (not 80m decent but you know) views, so I figured I'd keep creating consistent content across our instagram/facebook/ tiktok (I hate that platform but hey) and YT shorts. Making sure the content was more inline with our car sort of stuff.
At the same time I earned enough in YT rev this year to get a better camera than my phone and figure if I can start to capture that audience with our general YT videos, it could be healthy money wise. I know people with channels with around the same sub count but higher views on general content, who make 2,5k a month. I post anyway, it's about time I made it better. Content, production, editing. I'm going to start to make an effort. If this could pay for my projects... I need an R8 is all I'm saying.
This year I track prepped (kinda) the C1, redid the whole inside of the Taxi (which I LOVE) and has it's seats being recovered in Feb! Which will finish off the inside. Test drove many cars. Bought a RR Sport, modded a RR Sport, broke a RR sport, kicked back off with trying to get my S4 back on the road (which has some ace new things!)
Without this push of YT, I'd not have done half of this. Or had so much fun on quad bikes and go karts with the kids. It's been great.
Other Business Activity - My 7yr old launched her first business this month (https://byharper.co.uk) not promoting, you're not my audience, just for you to see She loves making bows and hair stuff. Her hair is so damn long and gorgeous, she's a star. She loves making it and I think must have got something from me as this wasn't the first time she wanted to sell things. It started with lemonade, then her "art" but we were the only buyers. I told her doing it at home wasn't good. Setup a site and she's done more sales in her first month than I ever have 
granted it's only in the hundreds, but it's very very good. She is using the money to buy different materials for hair bands, soft bows and scrunchies. We're picking it tonight. I'm trying to automate some of the making process with my plotter, so we can keep churning things out.
Zach is 14. He's wanted to make clothes for ages, so I bought a screen printing press. With school and all things going on we never had time to sort it all out (he has been preparing for his GCSE equiv) - So over December holidays I chatted with him and we've created a whole plan. We have a room in the basement, which is like 5mx5m or something, that just has a lot of my wife's baking stuff ALL ******* OVER IT! She won't box it up and take it, so him and I will do that and set that room up as the printing room. The press we have is a cheap one so we want to keep things simple. He has some test shirts and ink, we have the screens and the stuff to print on them. Now it's setup and testing. We have an idea for a really catchy brand. It's actually really good. More will come on this but we own the trademark in a few countries our aim is to get to the point we can buy better equipment to start. See how it goes from there.
General - I never really put much thought into the house. It wasn't something that I did, it was always my wife. However, having had her leave and me be here, I felt a bit lost. I didn't feel at home in my own home. Coupled with me trying to find myself and workout what I needed and who I was. It was a good time to combine it all as one. I have completely redone downstairs. Have a absolutely lush baby grand piano, that I rebuilt in 3 days. I built myself a telecaster, have new lights and lamps all over. I have bought all the things needed for me to make a mammoth dining table, as well as custom metal TV cabinet and coffee table. I'll kick those off in the new year too. I cannot wait for the next phase of changes. The place is really starting to feel like me. Which is very comforting and I love it.
Today I put up these:
They're not what most would have, and that's fine. I love them. I picked these three and they're in that order for a reason. It starts with ambition, it takes hustle, but more than anything you need gratitude for every single thing in your life.
Closing:
I'm truly grateful for where I am in life right now. I am grateful for the journey I am on and the journey I have been on in this last 12 months. I have learnt to be honest and open with my kids about how I'm feeling. I am open about not having all the answers and making mistakes. I have learnt that happiness is nothing something you strive for, which I did for many years. It's not a destination, but it's the little things you find joy in every single day. I love learning about myself and my needs and putting trust in myself to push for things I believe in.
I will always push things to the max. I will always take on too much, but by god I'll give it 100% on every single thing I do.
So much love for people in here and on OcUK. Those who support my threads, those who merely follow them, and those who reached out when I was struggling. I am truly grateful for so many great people.
I hope you can find some light in what has been a strange year as I have. I'm not setting resolutions, I'm just going out to continue to grow and continue to find joy in the small things in life.
Ross xx
I thought it would be as good a place as any to do a 2021 retro as a lot of it is Cheezus, but also a lot is not. Bear with me.
This year my Wife and I separated after 10yrs together. It was tough leading up to that, when looking back, as I lived in my home office for the whole year. Mentally it was a really tough year for 9-10 of those months. I don't blame anyone for the breakdown of our relationship. A relationship is two way. We both played parts in it, and were clearing miscommunicating for some time leading up to that day. We probably wanted to before, but felt the stigma and pressure of the kids not to. It was the best thing we could have done. Without dwelling on the past, I spent a lot of time reflecting, learning about me and trying to grow, so it's been a huge personal growth year for me.
The downside of this though, was the attention spent on other things. In my relationship, I was never really "allowed" to spend money on things like Cheezus. It wasn't a priority for some, but for me it was. The end result was wanted, without the risk/cost and work. I am happy to put those things in and so because of that, post separation I have pushed things forwards nicely.
Alas, whilst I didn't spent greatly in the year on development, I did put time in each week to make sure the social side of things was covered. With some weeks where I just couldn't do it, but for the most part I was consistent with getting things done.
App users grew from this time last year 10x
So regardless, I'm pleased with the work done. Every metric grew nicely.
The above development work has been planned, paid for and is now underway. I would have liked it done by Christmas (big cheese time) but it's coming anyway. I know what we need to do and it's getting done. Sitting down with some of the guys in the new year to sort out plans for next steps and what it means. Certain people (CMO) has not pulled any of their weight (I feel they should be covering social tbh not me, but it's always me) so I will be having discussions with everyone and outlining my expectations for the new year and 2022. I want to set out with clear expectations and objectives. Make things properly set and official. If people want to be a part, go for it, if not, no problem.
Cheezus wise, given the circumstances as well as how busy work has been as well, I'm very pleased with growth. Next year I am very excited for what's to come. Hitting 10k users would be a massive thing, which I'd like to do.
Other things:
Fulltime Job - I don't know what I expected here, but it's been very frustrating as a place to work. I knew how dysfunctional it was, I've contracted there long enough, but I'm such a **** I always think things can change and it was an exciting chance to make a difference in Product. Which I love. I found it's not been the case and spent most of my time frustrated. It gave me some confidence in what I do though, so it's been good in that sense and while I haven't achieved anywhere near what I'd have liked to, I made progress in educating the masses. I also realised they don't own me. They pay for some of my time, but outside of that, it's my life. I made that very clear to my boss who thinks contacting me on my holidays is acceptable and so no doubt have ****** some people off, but life is too short.
The job market is really very good at the moment and in my time off in December I had two interviews for interesting companies as fully remote jobs (head of product and head of product operations). One very well known blockchain company, been round since 2017 and a series B company doing some really interesting stuff, looking to IPO in the next 3-5yr, so interesting options. Talking to them both more in the new year. Either way, I will never let work control and dictate my life as I have in the past.
YouTube - Some of you will know I have a YT channel where I do my endless projects (yea yea I know, I know) and the main reason I set it up was to keep myself accountable to my projects. It wasn't supposed to be anything serious. I then posted a "short" which was when they were brand new. It was a 10s clip that I edited from a news website I'd literally just seen of a guy in pants ice skating in amsterdam on the frozen river and falling in. I thought nothing of it. We had about 2k subs at the time.
It "went viral" and I hate that saying, but it really did. It keeps going to this day. This was posted in March and as of this post, has 82.7m views, has got 2.4m views in the last 48hrs and 65k in the last hour. It seems to pump up and down all year... this has taken our subscriber count from 2k to 43.3k - mad.
Shorts at the time and for a long time didn't make you any money, so that 80m meant nothing. They changed that last month in France and so it's started to make money. Due to that though, I started recently posting more shorts. There is an audience there and they're getting very decent (not 80m decent but you know) views, so I figured I'd keep creating consistent content across our instagram/facebook/ tiktok (I hate that platform but hey) and YT shorts. Making sure the content was more inline with our car sort of stuff.
At the same time I earned enough in YT rev this year to get a better camera than my phone and figure if I can start to capture that audience with our general YT videos, it could be healthy money wise. I know people with channels with around the same sub count but higher views on general content, who make 2,5k a month. I post anyway, it's about time I made it better. Content, production, editing. I'm going to start to make an effort. If this could pay for my projects...
I need an R8 is all I'm saying.This year I track prepped (kinda) the C1, redid the whole inside of the Taxi (which I LOVE) and has it's seats being recovered in Feb! Which will finish off the inside. Test drove many cars. Bought a RR Sport, modded a RR Sport, broke a RR sport
, kicked back off with trying to get my S4 back on the road (which has some ace new things!)Without this push of YT, I'd not have done half of this. Or had so much fun on quad bikes and go karts with the kids. It's been great.
Other Business Activity - My 7yr old launched her first business this month (https://byharper.co.uk) not promoting, you're not my audience, just for you to see
She loves making bows and hair stuff. Her hair is so damn long and gorgeous, she's a star. She loves making it and I think must have got something from me as this wasn't the first time she wanted to sell things. It started with lemonade, then her "art" but we were the only buyers. I told her doing it at home wasn't good. Setup a site and she's done more sales in her first month than I ever have granted it's only in the hundreds, but it's very very good. She is using the money to buy different materials for hair bands, soft bows and scrunchies. We're picking it tonight. I'm trying to automate some of the making process with my plotter, so we can keep churning things out. Zach is 14. He's wanted to make clothes for ages, so I bought a screen printing press. With school and all things going on we never had time to sort it all out (he has been preparing for his GCSE equiv) - So over December holidays I chatted with him and we've created a whole plan. We have a room in the basement, which is like 5mx5m or something, that just has a lot of my wife's baking stuff ALL ******* OVER IT! She won't box it up and take it, so him and I will do that and set that room up as the printing room. The press we have is a cheap one so we want to keep things simple. He has some test shirts and ink, we have the screens and the stuff to print on them. Now it's setup and testing. We have an idea for a really catchy brand. It's actually really good. More will come on this but we own the trademark in a few countries
our aim is to get to the point we can buy better equipment to start. See how it goes from there. General - I never really put much thought into the house. It wasn't something that I did, it was always my wife. However, having had her leave and me be here, I felt a bit lost. I didn't feel at home in my own home. Coupled with me trying to find myself and workout what I needed and who I was. It was a good time to combine it all as one. I have completely redone downstairs. Have a absolutely lush baby grand piano, that I rebuilt in 3 days. I built myself a telecaster, have new lights and lamps all over. I have bought all the things needed for me to make a mammoth dining table, as well as custom metal TV cabinet and coffee table. I'll kick those off in the new year too. I cannot wait for the next phase of changes. The place is really starting to feel like me. Which is very comforting and I love it.
Today I put up these:
They're not what most would have, and that's fine. I love them. I picked these three and they're in that order for a reason. It starts with ambition, it takes hustle, but more than anything you need gratitude for every single thing in your life.
Closing:
I'm truly grateful for where I am in life right now. I am grateful for the journey I am on and the journey I have been on in this last 12 months. I have learnt to be honest and open with my kids about how I'm feeling. I am open about not having all the answers and making mistakes. I have learnt that happiness is nothing something you strive for, which I did for many years. It's not a destination, but it's the little things you find joy in every single day. I love learning about myself and my needs and putting trust in myself to push for things I believe in.
I will always push things to the max. I will always take on too much, but by god I'll give it 100% on every single thing I do.
So much love for people in here and on OcUK. Those who support my threads, those who merely follow them, and those who reached out when I was struggling. I am truly grateful for so many great people.
I hope you can find some light in what has been a strange year as I have. I'm not setting resolutions, I'm just going out to continue to grow and continue to find joy in the small things in life.
Ross xx
Yes! haha we've 10x'd our userbase and still have lined up producers to sync to the app for ordering cheese directly from the app, to them. We have a single backend system (actually WooCommerce) that is currently being built out app side to allow sales from the app, which will process payments and all the customer journey for buying, tracking etc. an order, which will come from our main backend. That backend will sync with all the producers shops, so when the order comes to the app, it checks the API, which checks their shop, which then places the order to us, which passes it on to them. We process payment our end, pass it on to them minus our % commission. They fulfil the order, when it's updated on their system, it updates ours and sends updates to app and email.
Simple really.
The app side of buying is in progress at the moment. Our backend is all ready. We now need to sort the sync from producers to us. A HUGE chunk in the UK use Woo/Shopify and one more i forget, but that covers 75%. Which we have a simple sync from woo > woo, but we need the plugin to be able to sync items from their store to specific categories that we want on our end (each producer has their own category) which the off the shelf won't allow. So we're reverse engineering it to then add some more features of our own. That's the only thing I need Dan to crack.I'm meeting him in the new year to iron out the plan and timelines.
So yes. It's not just running but will be hugely changed in the next few months in so many ways. So much more to come!
Ha not sure I'm allowed to share a link but you can find me under BareFamTing