Yesterday marks two weeks since I left my previous employer to work on my own projects.

I, like lots of Product folks, am used to work in single to two week iterations, so despite the fact that I didn’t set firm goals for myself for this time bucket, I thought it felt post an update on my progress.

Jackpot

I’ve been hard at work creating some new features and planning even more. Here are some of the highlights along with some screenshots for you to enjoy:

• Research
  • From watching and speaking with users, I knew the majority of our players read the question and then go look up some information to help them determine the best guess.
  • In effort to keep them in the app longer, I built out Research which allows my team and I to provide a stat relevant to the question, along with some additional details about the game.
  • This design of this feature also allowed us to advertise an upcoming Box Score Membership offering which will allow players additional playing options like
    • Editing their guess before events start
    • Previewing other players guesses before they enter their own
    • Suggest new features
• Player Enhancements
  • Players can now see the share of the pot a guess—including their own—will receive if it is the winner
• Backend Enhancements
  • Multiple new reports to help us better understand our users and their activity, where players are dropping off etc.
• Fees
  • IL legalized sports betting recently and we’ve been preparing to interact with that since the very beginning of Box Score—well before my joining.
  • Our goal has always been to provide games for the casual fan and better while also being interesting enough for more dedicated fans to participate. Creating an environment where we are sustainable is integral to this goal, so we’ve instated a 5% fee on prize withdrawals. However, you’ll be able to use your prize money for other things like the Box Score Membership without a fee.
• Box Score Membership Foundation
  • While not deployed for our players, I’ve been working on the technical foundation to allow us to sell recurring memberships to our players, exploring various integrations and methods to provide a frictionless experience to our players
• Nitpicky Details
  • Retemplated our modals which are used heavily for various features. They all now share a common template, structure and animation
  • Amended some tables to center text to be more aesthetically pleasing
  • Added a hashtag to tweets
  • Tweaked Gunicorn settings to allow more time for SMS API to complete

We’re on track to cross 1k users sometime around the end of the month or early July.

While I’ve been away, my partners on this project have been working on securing some funding for us which would make this a dream come true.

Crossing my fingers because I do think we really have something here. 


Leave

I whole heartedly believe there is a market for technology like this. I’ve talked to enough people and bars to understand there is not just a desire for it, but a need.

That said, I believe part of making the technology a success is having proper POS integration to have a truly seamless experience. Naturally, due to the nature of their business, those vendors are notoriously tight with their API keys.

I’ve found another partner that I’m exploring integrations with which could allow me to get into multiple POS vendor systems simultaneously.

Other Ideas

While spending some time at Amanda’s family’s lake house a few hours outside of Toronto in Apsley, Ontario, I’ve still managed to have some time to think about other ideas and things I want to do and explore.

I’m particularly interested in Apple’s new SwiftUI framework and learning Swift. I’ve got a simple project in mind for an iMessage app, so I’m hoping to both learn Swift and have the app in the App Store by the end of the summer. Crossing my fingers that goes according to plan.

Along with that idea, I’ve had 15 others. Some are worth at least exploring more, some others maybe not so much (that’s the beauty of brainstorming right?). However, it felt wonderful to have the freedom to think about them at all.

Consulting

Despite some prodding and serious interest, there hasn’t been much movement on that front.

Health Stuff

I decided it was time to no longer be a mildly overweight 30 year old. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for a few weeks now and have decided to pin on CICO/macros to this as well.

(I think) there some change in my trunk area and waist already which feels great. I started this at 200 lbs and before I left for Canada on the 4th, I was at 196 lbs.

My goal is 175 lbs.