Today whilst Krebs and I were marking exams for the course we've been tutoring at UQ (INFS3202), we were talking to one of the other tutors, a German guy called Frank, about work and what we do outside of tutoring. He discussed how he made lots of mobile apps in his spare time and some of them took off to the point he could quit his job and work on them full-time (the most popular being a navigational app on your smart watch). He posed an interesting idea about making lots of useful, single purpose applications (like for instance, a todo app with a reward system attached to it or a sleep countdown application) that you can pump out in short periods and putting them out there for the world to use. Just things with a low barrier to entry but you can execute on perfectly, each and every time. Working on 4-5 projects at a time allows you to experiment with different systems, hedging your bets and allowing for some projects to fail, all whilst honing your technical proficiency, exploring new concepts and generating your own luck.

It's an interesting idea as this is the opposite methodology that we've had for a number of years. We have all solely worked on one idea for months at a time, releasing it and putting all this time and effort into trying to get our first customers or people off the ground. Within these time frames Pagoda Technologies (crypto trading bot tool) was all of 2021, Pulse (crypto payment splitting app) was Feb-May 2022, Tute.ai from Jan-April 2023 and Complai/Duclare was May-December 2023 being the major products that we've worked on. The only problem with working on these projects for so long is that if you aren't gaining traction within a number of months (and you aren't exactly super passionate about it), you'll eventually get disinterested and stop working on them entirely, which results in a ton of wasted time and a pit of despair. I have the following image in my Obsidian vault as a reminder for working on projects for months, only to abandon.

In saying this, if there's a project that I work on and I care deeply about, I'll keep working on it, no matter what. Right now I don't have a passion project, but I do have a lot of problems that need solving. This is a perfect segue onto the crux of this post.

Since I've finished university now (pending no supplementary exams), I have a bunch of ideas that we can use to instantly enhance Jensen Labs as a company, allowing us to do more while it's just the 3 of us. It also gives ups products to put under our flagship and our banner. I'm aiming to build these over 4-5 days each, sort of as a mini hackathon for each project. We will use each of them internally, gauge they're effectiveness and determine if they're worth continued use. If not, we write a post-mortem and figure out what went wrong, why we didn't use it and what we learned, so that not all is wasted. For the projects we like and continue using, we will then write a standalone version of it and publish it for public use, as a free service and posting it on websites like Product Hunt to garner some traction. For these projects, we are thinking of building out replacements for our existing vendors, such as Clockify and Atlassian products. I'm also building a couple of novel projects for solving some problems we face at Jensen Labs.

For new product ideas, some of the projects I've been thinking about working on include:

1. Issue Tracker / Request Tracker (something comparable to Jira issues / GitHub Issues)

   1. We need this for Jensen anyway, since our current means are having a dedicated Jira board for issue tracking and also just Slack messages or emails. This decentralised nature makes it really hard for us to read and understand independently, so having this centralised for our clients to use will make things considerably easier. Also, we're not paying for ZenDesk or Servicenow (stupidly expensive for what they offer). It also provides a better way for them to provide video recordings or draft up issues that they're facing.

2. Time-sheeting Software (Clockify replacement)

   1. We are paying nearly $90/month for a time recording app. We use this software to track how many billable hours we send to a client, based on work that people do. I'm certain we could build something much simpler and do exactly what it does in 3-4 days and remove that expense entirely.
      
      It's insane to me that this company makes millions of dollars and is so predatory in terms its intended use for employees to ensure they're on time. I reckon I could strip 80% of the functionality and it'll still be just as effective for us. It's a glorified recordable stopwatch after all.

3. Project Management (Jira replacement)

   1. We pay nearly $150USD/month for Jira when all we use it for is tracking which items people are working on, and categorisation of features into EPICs. This is outrageous and I can use Atlassian's react-beautiful-dnd to spin up a really quick project management service under our umbrella.

4. Cloud Storage (using Supabase instead of Google Drive / Dropbox)

   1. This is something that I've personally wanted to do for a long time, was to write a virtual cloud drive like Megaupload or Mega.nz but for our own internal file storage. It's something that I had within the first version of Psychostasia but that project didn't really go anywhere. This would be a dedicated file storage solution that we could use for unifying our files. Something quick, simple and easily iterated on.

5. Requirements Elicitation Software (Jensen-specific problem)

   1. An issue that we've been facing with our clients has been that none of them tell the full story during the design/early phase of a project. This is infuriating as when you're 90% through a build and asked, "hey can this whole process be thrown out and restarted?" it can throw other features out of whack too, particularly if it's a core process. Clients also don't understand how the project is really laid out, apart from things like UIs and naming conventions.
      
      Another thing is that it's much harder to elicit requirements from clients since they can't really be expected to explain everything to you about what they want in their project. They're focusing on their job and maybe 25-30% of their mental effort is dedicated to the project, so they're not going to tell you the nitty gritty details about, "x, y, z has to happen, but only y can happen once a, b, c have happened, else don't do y and skip to z." They'll just tell you that x, y, and z need to happen.
      
      I think one area that we need to improve in is our ability to extract requirements from a client. One way is to establish a common vocabulary and some fundamental definitions about the project. I think I'll write more on this, since it's a pretty important topic and one that I care deeply about. I think there's a lot to be explored about crafting the early stages of a project and understanding the pain that a client is experiencing. It often is what makes a project smooth sailing until deployment or constantly faced by big rollers that can jeopardise a project.
      
      Anyway, this service would be a way for Brody, Krebs and I to more easily elicit requirements by creating a pyramidal construct of knowledge, starting with first principles, then working down each domain as a pyramid of knowledge (for instance, domain name and key definition, then definitions, features, systems and processes.) This would provide a pyramidal graph and the ability to create additional sections and whatnot.
      
      I personally think this would be a pretty awesome tool to sell to companies to improve organisational knowledge.

It's a definite departure from some of the old posts of mine about Complai/Duclare but it's an experiment to build better products and learn how to put value in the hands of people. At the very worst, it's more products to put under our belt for repertoire building for JL, and at the very best we get a sustainable source of income to work on full-time+ (100 hours a week each).

P.S:

There may be some more project ideas that come up during the build phase of any of these, and I'll be sure to either create a proper post editing system here or just write comments down below.