#004 - I am not alone

Hey folks! I am excited to share what happened in the last two weeks. I am not alone anymore. Significant progress on the UI side, first plans for integrations, and VCs are knocking on my door. Wait, what?! Yes, I don’t understand it either. Read more in my update post.

What happened

A freelancer is supporting me

I got lucky and got 10 hours per week of support from a developer I know very well. He will implement the first integrations for DevOps Metrics with me.

We start with GitHub for sure. Hence everybody is on this platform. I also see great potential to do guerilla marketing with opening DevOps Metrics for open source projects for free: it will support my community and bring more outreach for DevOps Metrics.

Other integrations are other Git platforms, CI platforms, and incident management platforms.

Not only Git

Yes, you read correctly: there will be multiple integrations. To get a 360-degree overview of your tech organization, DevOps Metrics will integrate all sorts of data sources. Git is one of them. Any promising tool to measure Change Failure Rate or MTTR entirely with Git is lying to you.

Submitted a talk to a conference, again

Spreading the word about this whole area and why the Four Key Metrics are essential is what I care about.

That’s why I submitted my talk “DevOps: the secrets to sustainable innovation” to yet another conference. But I can already share with you that the talk was not accepted. Anyhow, I asked the organizer for feedback.

And I am still waiting for feedback on my first submission, which I shared last time with you.

UI progress: show it to me!

The overview analytics page is done. Only some rough edges on the charts need some more love.

So, I am now working on the other analytics pages to dig deeper into cycle time, deployments, change failures, and mean time to restore. My main concerns are at the moment to get the flows between pages right and to answer detailed questions on each page appropriately.

I don’t want to make the user think. The goal is to visualize the data so that for 80% of all use cases, you see the most interesting parts at one glance.

Btw you maybe find this exciting or funny. Here are my crappy wireframing skills.

That’s how it looks like when I sketch user interfaces on my iPad. Here you see first thoughts about a deployment frequency chart.

And on this image, you see version 0.0.1 of filters in DevOps Metrics. My main question was on which dimensions it makes the most sense to filter for my users.

This weird looking UI sketch with bad handwriting resulted in this design:

I present this user interface in calls with interested parties. I already learned that there would be other dimensions, and I probably add tracking of different environments.

VCs are approaching me

Is this the result of adding DevOps Metrics to my LinkedIn profile already? I don’t know, but some venture capitalists text me that they want to talk about DevOps Metrics, the market, and opportunities.

Given that I have already VC-backed competitors and interest in my tech audience, they may be only interested in not missing an opportunity. The market seems to be hot at the moment.

Also, this market is no winner takes it all market. And I have some savings - no need for me to raise money soon. Though, VCs have an exciting network of potential leads for me.

What did I learn

Risk-seeking is not comfy

Thank you for stating the obvious, you may think. But the last weeks showed me again that it is pretty hard for me to deal with the uncertainty I face next year. Currently, I have great clients in my IT consultancy business, which allows a lot of flexibility and a long runway for my bootstrapping endeavors.

But things can change, and I wonder if I can find such great clients and gigs again because I lack a proper sales funnel. Potentially something I will invest in soon.

I prefer bootstrapping, for now

It is a nice feeling when VCs are approaching you, for sure. It gives you a nice ego push, but that’s it. After this, I thought about my willingness to accept funding and how it changes everything. I don’t believe that it suites my or DevOps Metrics' needs in the current stage.

I want to bootstrap. I want to take the entire risk and learn how it feels.

Tailwind gets super fast with the JIT compiler

I struggled with slow builts while developing the frontend. Then I learned about the JIT compiler of Tailwind and how fast it is. I am back to milliseconds with this great feature when sketching the UI and pushing some CSS classes around.

Coffee Kitchen Talk

In the coffee kitchen, we chat about interesting and funny stuff like you would be a co-worker.

There is a thought coming back repeatedly: why build a business from Zero to One when you can acquire an existing one and grow it further with your expertise. The most prominent platform is Microacquire. There you can buy small online businesses for reasonable prices and very transparent. I like their approach of democratizing this area of investments.

Inspirational tweet

We have biases. And it is good to know about them. This doesn’t eliminate them, but you better are aware of them.

Cognitive biases are systemic errors in thinking that negatively impact decision-making quality and outcomes.

THREAD: 20 cognitive biases to learn (so you can think clearly and make better decisions):

— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) July 24, 2021

Next weeks

I am focussing on the detailed analytics pages: presenting the data best to allow easy filtering and finding bottlenecks in development processes. All efforts are on integrating GitHub: fetching all data necessary to compute aggregated DevOps Metrics on the backend side.

The work on the backend is already influencing my rough designs for onboarding. Next time I may share another crappy UI sketch with bad handwriting for this.

I did not forget the customer research interviews. I will share a condensed update next time.

See you in two weeks.

– Felix