Written on 02 Feb 2024, 4 min read.
February already! Summer holidays are over and I’m overdue in writing up a look back on 2023 and my goals for 2024.
2023
2023 was a good year. We had several opportunities to catch up with extended family we hadn’t seen a lot of in the last 3 years, the boys are all continuing to do well at school and unlike many we did not have to personally deal with any major crises or unexpected events. My personal highlight was finally gaining the motivation and discipline to exercise regularly and eat more moderately. I’m fitter than I’ve ever been, and I lost some excess weight and dropped several clothing sizes. The resulting compliments were equally flattering and horrifying - I never realised how much attention anyone paid to my physique!
Continue reading...
Written on 13 Jul 2023, 9 min read.
I’m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.
No further investment in co2mon.nz
In March I made the decision to focus on completing the market research for co2mon.nz. The results of that research led to two key conclusions:
- Indoor air quality/ventilation is not a problem many people are actively thinking about or looking to spend money to improve.
- Even when introduced to the problem and educated about the need, most people are looking for a one-off expense or solution (e.g. the physical monitor) and are much less interested in a monitoring software service.
Based on that, it was clear that this is not an opportunity that I should continue pursuing and I’ve put co2mon.nz into maintenance mode.
Continue reading...
Written on 03 Apr 2023, 5 min read.
The key decision I made mid-March was to commit to pursuing ventilation monitoring as my primary product development focus.
Prior to that decision, I hoped to use my writing plan to drive a breadth-first survey of the opportunities for each of my product ideas before deciding which had the best business potential to focus on first. Two factors changed my mind:
- As noted last month, I’m finding the writing process much slower and harder than I expected – the survey across all the ideas may not complete until mid-year or later!
- I’ve realised that having begun building co2mon.nz last year, to stop work on the project at this point would leave me feeling that I had not done justice to developing the product and testing the market - seeing it to a conclusion is important to me.
This decision is an explicit choice to prioritize seeing a project through to a conclusion (successful, or otherwise) regardless of whether or not it has the highest potential of the various ideas I could invest time into. I’m comfortable making that trade-off in this instance, but I am going to bound my time investment to two months. I’ll evaluate at the end of May whether I’m seeing sufficient traction and potential to justify continuing further with the idea.
Continue reading...
Written on 04 Mar 2023, 6 min read.
February ended up being a very short work month as I made a last minute decision to travel to Adelaide for the first 2 weeks of the month to help my brother with some house renovations he was undertaking. I thought I might be able to keep up with some work and my writing goals in the evenings while I was there, but days of hard manual labour are such an unfamiliar routine for me that I didn’t have any energy left to make good on that intention.
Continue reading...