Get your lipsticks ready, prep your cotton pads and open up your dressing tables! 💄 The scent of freshly brewed Batchbrew is in the air and we have a highly-needed facelift in the bag ☕️ Here is my September wrap up of building Batchbrew 👨🏽‍💻💫

Retrospective

I’ve launched Batchbrew V1 on 10th of September, and the weeks up to the launch were filled with a lot of movement. Committing to that launch date was definitely a good thing, because it forced me to take off everything from the roadmap that wasn’t necessary to publish a first working release. Having that timely pressure required me to prioritise my tasks - well, initially I gave everything the highest priority but then boiled it down to a hand full of tickets.

First users, and a new UI

Having something out definitely feels good, and it allowed me to get more feedback on the things I’ve been struggling with alone or in one-on-one’s. Mostly, how to communicate BB’s features and concepts to users. V1 also revealed major drawbacks of the product, giving me good pointers on how to improve it. Really grateful for the conversations or video recordings I received from my friends using BB for the first time ✨

And there is already a new update to BB out, incorporating most of the feedback I gained. A big facelift to the original UI! I'd love to hear your thoughts on it after trying it:

So next thing to do is to improve the UX around saving stuff - it’s way too slow rn to save stuff and I think there’s something not working right, but should be fixed this week 😉

Continuing from here, the next weeks will be about improving saving inspiration (got a pretty neat scraper waiting to be employed) and getting that magic search going. More details soon!

Post launch lean-back 🛀🏽

The summer-months were packed with BB, freelance projects, and a high focus on my calisthenics practice. I felt like post-launch was the right time to lean back a bit. Essentially, calming down and giving more attention to some things that I had dropped for a bit, like hanging out with friends or painting or creating music. Meditating and re-connecting with spaciousness. Calmly working on integrating that newly gained feedback. Ironically, freelance got a bit more demanding during this time again but that’s a’right! 👨🏽‍💻

Making more space within my mind also reminded me of why I do this - to create a world I love to live in, and to create an environment for me and others where we can follow what our hearts tell us to do. For me, it’s not just about my work or my sports. I gained more insights throughout the last months, and I want to provide more space for things and people who I feel good about. Although the last years are dominated mostly by me trying to keep it low, isolate myself at times and “figure out my shit”, in the past months something new got accessible to me, which I want to provide fertile ground for 🍀

If I had to label that, I’d call it a mash-up of socialising and creating art, alongside building tech and unlocking my body. But I think label’s are too limiting here. It’s more of a feeling, that reinforces what I found before already: that we only have this moment, this is the show, and being here and now, feeling this experience and relaxing into our intuitive pull is synonymous to being alive. After all the material things, all the stories we tell ourselves about our history and our experience, and beyond all the expectations and predictions for the future, all is in pursuit of happiness, of living a fulfilled life. And that is the illusion - the story. That this happiness and fulfilled life lies somewhere in the future; that we'd have to argue for it; that only after we fulfilled all conditions the we posed to it in the first place we may "have" it. Completely overlooking that it’s here and now. Unconditionally. The only way to have anything is to be it, to experience it. You can have the most amazing time on earth but if you’re not present with it and not paying attention to it it just rushes past you. And then what's left? The story around it, comparing what you experienced to social norms, to argue on your death-bed “well, I guess the past 20 years didn’t suck too much”. And then you try to find arguments and proofs to support your hypothesis. Why not just be alive right now, and follow that feeling of inspiration, curiosity and love for creation itself?

Is there anything to change?

My flatmate asked me if I’d do anything different if I’d build BB again. And for the most part, I have already everything I want from BB as I’ve been paying attention to work on stuff I love building. So what is there to optimise? More “fun”? Having “success”? In the end, with my philosophy this is about having a great time here - the feeling I have, not the story I tell about it. So the definition of success is delegated to my immediate experience, and comes down to the simple question “do I love what I do?” (Side note: this has nothing to do with “what’s easy to do”, what we love can very well seem hard to do, just do it anyway..). And as that is a yes for the most part, I would do everything pretty much the same.

So, still, there is a practical component to it: can I make a living from this? How long does it take until BB gains traction? And for that part, I can argue I’d launch even faster if I’d do it again. I think having the philosophy of building well-designed, robust components that work well together is a great approach, but I’d tune that down to a small initial vision of the product, removing a bit of the complexity that I added for future releases. YAGNI anyway.

What’s next??

After publishing the redesign, I had to take a step back once more and see what it is that I’m building here. Having BB taking on form makes it more clear which direction it’s headed to, and it’s a bit different from what I initially wanted to create. Also after sharing how I want to make more space for things that feel good to me, I think I’ll slightly adapt the way I build BB.

Firstly, I want to add modifications / features in two-weeks intervals to have faster releases in between. Secondly, I want to be open to explore new ideas and directions when it feels right, using a two-week block for something that may also be out of scope or even seem misaligned - lemme just be open 👐🏽 And thirdly, I am reducing the target scope to a more specific feature set. More on the specifics next month, as this thought is still pretty much in the making. But I’m realising just now that I don’t need that 10 years roadmap I once came up with. I want to avoid entering the endless feature-building hamster wheel, where I promise myself that with one more feature people are gonna pay for BB. The first version - when fully implemented - has to provide enough value to be monetised. And yeah, the business case is still a big question mark here.

Creative corner 🐝

I’ve finished this thing here, and just started a big canvas in a similar style:

I also experimented with colours for real for the first time and I think at least it doesn’t suck:

Then a friend asked me for a piano improv for a feel-good walking meditation, and we unexpectedly and fabulously ended up collaborating on this little piece (all vocals hers, piano sprinkles from me):

Click here to listen 🎧

Aaaand did my first tuck lean 🤸🏽

Grateful for

My friends giving me so! much! feedback on BB with either one-on-one’s, design workshops, or video recordings. Shout out to Felipe, Ania, Raoul, Jacob, Nikolai, Janina, Namu and Max 🫶🏽
Having Mid-September more relaxed, having time to acknowledge and integrate all my learnings of the past months and building more trust in my process 🧘🏽‍♂️
Having found my new CrossFit Box and Yin Yoga class where they also teach Qi Gong ☯️
A few wonderful connections to new people entering my life rn, which I’m curious where they lead and what we can create 🌞
Musical and creative inspiration, and first time getting my stuff out. Shout out to Tati 💫

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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