One year of “How’s Fridling doing?”
It has been an entire year since I decided to dedicate myself to Fridling (now Frido) as a side project and, oh wow, what a ride.
From the beginning I knew it wouldn’t be a trivial task to create an entirely new project out of a bunch of sketches and dreams.
I’ve been designing products with various teams for quite some time now but doing it yourself opens up a can of challenges that need to be addressed even before you create the first prototype.
- Here’s a few of them that kept me busy for the past year:
- With whom do I want to build this?
- How do I know I can trust a co-founder?
- What if someone wants to drop out?
- How do I keep founders engaged?
- How do I make sure we are inclusive enough?
- How do I find & make time to work on it?
- How to manage my time efficiently so I can also perform well on my daily job?
- How to handle user feedback graciously?
- What are the things that can’t be compromised?
- How to do user research with very limited resources time+money?
- How to get people to care about it?
- Where to document features?
- How to produce deliverables efficiently?
- Which tech stack to go for?
- How do we keep up with OS updates?
- Where & when to invest money?
- Where do we get the money to cover the basic infrastructure?
- What if it flops?
- Do we have enough resources to pivot?
On the top of that, I have this odd feeling that some people only ask ‘how is Fridling doing’ in a grim hope that it will fail so they can say: I knew it would.
If you are one of those people, the joke is on you because I don’t even believe in failure. What I do believe in is the endless cycle of doing, observing, learning, adapting and going at it again.
To answer the “how is Fridling doing” question:
“We are doing what we can, with what we have and for as long as it takes”
On a more positive note, I do want to thank these enlightened people who trusted me with their time and where there to support me: Dheeraj, Marjorie Lima do Vale, Srecko Dimitrijevic and Maria.
(P.s.: if you wanna hop on the vibe train and check out Fridling before anyone else, here’s your shortcut: frido.app)
