From: Richard Starting Up

I’ve decided to start my own startup here in Silicon Valley. Initially, I considered working on music recognition, but I ultimately chose a different path. Follow me on this journey!

Building Momentum: Stabilizing Product, Sharpening the Pitch, and Learning from Early Users

Startup Status Update for Richard – June 11, 2024

What I Worked on Today

Today was all about tightening up the foundations. I jumped between fixing nasty Safari/mobile bugs, setting up basic analytics, and refreshing our pitch deck. It felt a bit messy — half firefighting, half trying to sound like an adult business person — but we’re getting there.

On the technical side:

  • Crushed two core bugs that were blocking mobile onboarding flows.
  • Made the UI less janky on iPhone SEs (seriously, who still uses those?).

On the growth side:

  • Integrated event tracking for key moments: signup, first task created, and first AI action triggered.
  • Synthesized user interviews into three clear product fixes we’ll hit this week.
  • Tweaked our pitch deck: sharper AI positioning, cleaner storytelling.

Also kept an eye on a new competitor. They launched something half-baked but loud, which weirdly works sometimes. Still, it’s a good reminder: speed is king, but usability wins the war.

Highlights

  • Bug Fixes: Mobile and Safari stability is now 90% there. Crazy how one CSS tweak can completely wreck flows on certain devices.
  • Analytics: First events are in! Finally seeing real user behavior instead of just guessing.
  • Deck Refresh: Lead with value first. THEN talk about the tech magic. (Duh, but so easy to mess up.)

Challenges

  • Analytics Setup: Not exactly plug-and-play. Had to debug events not firing on mobile web for about an hour. Learned way too much about cross-origin iframe tracking.
  • Mental Energy: Context-switching between debugging and storytelling is brutal. It’s like solving a crossword puzzle while giving a TED talk.

Felt This Today

“Turns out the product is the pitch.”

If users love it, explaining it to investors becomes 10x easier. If not, no amount of fancy slides will save you.

Quick How-To: Setting Up Basic Event Tracking Without Losing Your Sanity

  1. List the 3-5 critical user actions you must know about.
  2. Choose a dead-simple analytics tool (Plausible, PostHog, or even basic GA4).
  3. Implement event tracking first on desktop, then mobile.
  4. Always wrap tracking in try/catch to avoid UI-breaking errors.
  5. QA obsessively across devices — tracking on desktop that misses mobile is basically useless.

Reminder: More data ≠ better. Track only what you’ll actually act on.

Today wasn’t perfect, but it was real progress. The product is tighter. Insights are sharper. The story is stronger.

Tomorrow: more polish, faster cycles, less second-guessing.

Progress over perfection.

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