iiiiit's BBrew time ☕️ cramp out your reading glasses, grind your fav coffee beans and light the fire below your moka pots! Let's get started with some random brain juice of mine to get into the swing:

❤️ What if your heart beat is the rhythm of your song, and you have just that one beat each moment to get the melody right? You can strike any chord you want, and you can release all the chords you played before anytime. The symphony of your life is not the chords that have been played, nor the chords yet unplayed. It's not the story of what song you "should" have heard, nor about the song that "should" come up. It’s right here, the chords that are audible right now. What you play right now is your life, and what you "expected", the story about what's a nice song, the melody before and the yet unknown sounds hereafter are just the distraction from the real thing. So if this is "it", what point is there to buy in to fear from playing that special chord which your heart is pulling you towards?

Deadlines are for focus, not for throughput

It’s 10 days left to the V1 release, and I have to admit I’ve been temporarily freaking out every now and then about how much there is still left to do. But I keep reminding myself that Batchbrew is a journey that takes time to unfold. So I’m back to my chill, knowing that I stack one brick at a time, and knowing that they compound eventually. What I learned about deadlines this month is that they are not to increase throughput and get more done, but to increase focus and get only the right things done. Identify and ignore all of “the rest”.

That also comes with a few deliverables falling out of the scope for now: I simply won’t be able to account for the App Store review process, so mobile support will have to wait bit. Also, I originally considered to make this an invite only launch, but given that the pricing structure is worked out I’ll let the price tag do the filtering bc I simply don’t have time to integrate a waitlist. Also, I might not have time to integrate a payment processor, so maybe everyone will simply be on free tier until I can get that done (yay to you..) and figure something out to account for costs..

Pricing

As the launch is coming up, I can more clearly see the pricing structure and boy it’s gonna be cooostly… given that I just went for integration of SERP searches and a local-first architecture for all users regardless of pricing tiers, it’s unlikely that BB will be free. This also ties in with my thinking from two newsletters ago that I’ll have to be vary of my runway, and will have to find a pricing structure that allows me to pay ongoing costs and earn my salary to fund my (so far pretty much student-like) lifestyle. From my first interviews it seems that power users are willing to pay up to 20 bucks a month, once I deliver a features set around Version 2.5. W’re now at V1, and it seems fair to go a good share lower to account for the yet missing features. My gut feeling also tells me that the people I’ve been talking to about pricing also know a lot of the BB journey, so in order to justify my price points I’ll have to rethink the pitch and how new people perceive the brand, but I’ll keep this tasty brain exercise for the next month.. yummy 👅

Anyway, I said pricing. So I feel like we’ll go for 9€ monthly for now, with 20% off for yearly billing (pre-taxes). Anywhere lower doesn’t seem sustainable, and with the yearly pricing I feel like BB definitely delivers more value than it costs - especially given the upcoming indexing and search features.

Pareto is simply not enough, and “just get it done” mindset leads to pressure and low quality

I also fell into the trap of simply wanting to work through the scheduled workload and, well, it’s messing with my usual approach a lot. Quality dropped during these few days, and pressure increased as I didn’t honour the process and quickly fell into thinking like “this shouldn’t take so long, this should be better, this is not good enough, you’re too slow”, … I had to step back and take a break, and come back to my process: to view BB as a process of self-expression, building what I've been missing in my life for years. My art project, that encapsulates my journey as a human being. Getting back to my design principles to build trustworthy, robust pieces of a system, and to never take a shortcut, got me back on track to make that particular feature I was working on work flawlessnessly. This I why we now have a great state synchronisation across web- and offline-available content. tada 🌟

I feel like I just have to obsess on quality when I’m working on a feature I’m interacting with every day, and I found that means to ignore Pareto’s 80% and aim to deliver +90% at least. It also means to build less, and get the right very right ➡️

Getting ready for launching

Ha! Ready! 🦍 But alright it's not too bad; I made some good steps forward. Among a few basic things like auto-updating and adapting the app to the chosen subscription-plan I definitely want to integrate some of the feedback I gained so far. I’m incredibly thankful for the people who sat down with me and had a closer look at BB, and there is some golden nuggets in it that can soften the rough edges of the product. There's some more stuff around importing content from sources and improving the web searches but let's see how far I get, 10th September is set in stone and whatever doesn’t make it over the line will be shipped in the subsequent release.

Personal journey

My shoulder stand is getting better, and I managed my first forward roll on the gymnastic rings! It’s more about knowing and managing fears, and trusting my body and skillset to execute the movement; but it feels very freeing to unlock this next degree of freedom. Also going forward with my tuck hand stand, which is insanely hard to push through but I’ll get that. On a personal side, I made more observations and saw what happens when I cling to the story about my identity, and I saw once more what happens if I let tension and fear win. Hence the introduction text.. I trust more and more that I can simply drop my concepts, acknowledge that I cannot argue for what’s right or wrong, and simply make space for whatever there is to arise in consciousness. I think I’ll start these mails from now on also with a small paragraph on my “existential learning”. My pursuit to find happiness and relief suffering. Yeah, I think we can call it that. 🌚 🌝

More low quality pics (I'm sure you'll get it):

Also getting more chaotic with the illus, I think I'll have to add pic support soon to BB as well bc I'd really like to pull in more inspiration for my art:

Grateful for

Hours of user feedback! Shoutout to Felipe, Ania and Andreas, thank you 💚
Eventually connecting to a few of the people I’ve been hanging out with at the yoga and calisthenics studios without talking much before
Having some calm time to integrate all my learnings and journal about my time in Lisbon, spending time with my parents
The jaw dropping sunset I saw from the airplane when flying to Germany

Thank you for reading, it's great having you here ❤️ and see ya'll next month 👋🏽

Learn more about Batchbrew: https://batchbrew.xyz/
Read my blog (the other one): https://medium.com/@giorgiogross

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