on my mind: wednesday
My mind is on two major projects at the moment, one that brings many users to the platform, and another that moves a large publication here. The many-users project hasn’t required too much stretching in the product itself; the publication project requires a major rethinking of everything. But it also takes us to a new level — somewhere I’d like to go.
As a business, Write.as is now cash flow positive, and I’m finally feeling like I can breathe after all this time — especially after the last three years of running the company full-time. It’s been a meandering journey, and there’s now years of burned savings that I need to make back. But if there’s such a thing as “arriving” in this endeavor, I feel like this would be it. So, as I would after summiting a mountain, I’m quietly pausing to celebrate that right now.
This momentary pausing place is giving me a chance to sit and look at what I’ve done — and consider where to go next. I have plenty on my commercial mind — this “next level” where I think we can find success. I’m thinking of marketing ideas I’d like to execute, and opportunities for growth already lined up. There are promising products of ours just waiting to be fully fleshed-out: Snap.as, Submit.as, and Remark.as.
And there’s plenty on my creative mind — composable apps, a chat app prototype, a Midnight.pub– / Tilde.town-esque social space, a link page builder; writing in general, finding inspiration outside again, making art without a computer.
The balance to having a head full of ideas like this is in real-world execution. So I try to keep a process for condensing scatterbrained ideas into action: some quiet time for seeing everything at once, which usually causes airy ideas to gain mass and form words — these get written down. I follow the trails, I write as much as I can. I turn to other pages or other notebooks, and remember trails I’ve already followed, then build on them. In time (a relatively long period of time, with my backlog of plans), they eventually turn into something real. But by that time, they’ve already been fleshed out — I only need to work out the tiny details that come out through the process of creation.
For me, right now, that practical execution will look like this:
- Seeing that these two major projects are completed successfully
- Fixing any remaining long-standing bugs in Write.as
- Continuing to move WriteFreely toward its next release
With those complete, I’ll look toward the products we have lined up next — all chances for open-field creativity, mixed with the chance for some commercial success to sustain it all.