If you‘ve seen my home page, you might have also checked out Anzu. It‘s the new thing I‘m building together with Bruno and have been doing so for the last couple of months. We‘ve conducted interviews, moved features from one place to another and talked a lot about our vision.
Running a business (or wanting to run one) means that everyday is like day one. You always have to filter out noise and make decisions that impact your life and the lives of your colleagues, customers and friends. And while Anzu in its very nature is still very much a side project (you know, cause existence alone already comes with a hefty bill), we‘ve already spent quite some time on it. And after semi-pivoting/shifting focus, we‘re confident that we can deliver value now.
Let me tell you why increasing velocity is so important to me that I want your business/idea to start with a boost.
Bruno and I have been building products/side projects for some time now. While we go back many years, only over the last three years we have found a common denominator between our technical skills, and that is software that drives productivity and/or allows our customers to be good at what they‘re best in. Be it (the now-dormant) cuteforms that allowed our (non-existing) customers to build simple validated forms for static serverless pages. Or our safari into consumer products with sonata, which allows our users (and we do have some!) to connect to people with similar taste in music.
Building those diverse products gave us insights on things we always needed but couldn‘t be solved with frameworks and libraries alone. It also surfaced some deep pains, like us not knowing what the users do without deep and meticulous work to integrate tracers.
We‘ve built a toolbox for us to focus on the pieces that make those products special, and now it‘s time to open it up. We‘re starting out with user management, as the first step in building a new product often involves getting users signed in somewhere.
So, why do I want you to increase your velocity (besides me wanting to run a business, of course)? Well, because building a product without having to care about pieces you don‘t want to care about is fun. It‘s what keeps me motivated to build, because I know that the next lines of code directly flow into delivering value, not as a framework of doing so. It‘s because so much time we spend on it drains our precious energy we need to iterate quickly.
Not because of the grind, but against it: grind culture is unhealthy and toxic. And when you have more time, you can spend it on the meaningful things in your life.
I know, this is a broad claim, but it‘s the bar we want to reach and we won’t settle for less.