👥 Team building went better than I could have hoped 🐌 Customer acquisition suffered from the focus shift 💰 We got (a little) more MRR This is Ritza’s retrospective for March 2021. You can also read our previous retrospectives if this is the first one you’re seeing. Team building went better than I could have hoped Recap of February: while I was focused on finding new customers and growing the business, two of our core writers quit on the same day, and we went into emergency hiring mode.

👥 Team building is hard 🐢 Slow but steady growth 🧩 Finding product-market fit? 📚 Kicking off the Ritza Handbook and other internal resources Team building is hard, especially(?) for part time positions I was just saying that it finall feels like we have a great and stable core team when two writers quit on the same day. Luckily this was not due to negative experiences at Ritza, and they will potentially return fairly soon, but the timing (which came on the same day as a key customer agreed to an extended contract) was definitely stressful.

🎉 We got our first ‘real’ MRR - $20/month! 🎉 We did a new product launch (writing job descriptions -> first revenue in under 48 hours! 🎉 We grew the team! 🐌 We failed to sign any new long term clients Our first (?) MRR! Most of our clients are on month-to-month contracts. This means that we can fairly confidently predict our monthly recurring revenue, but it’s still manual.

For more background, you can find previous retrospectives for 2019, Q1 2020, April 2020, and May 2020. In July, I founded Ritza - a technical publishing company that offers (very) technical content marketing, developer advocacy as a service, and a bunch of related publishing services. What does that mean exactly? We publish ebooks, documentation, and blog articles, usually with the goal of helping developers or technical managers in some way. For example, we did https://codewithrepl.

May 2020 was my last month trying to launch Ritza while being full-time employed. My last month (hopefully ever!) as a full time employee was fairly busy with handovers and whatnot and this impacted progress on Ritza, so I’m looking forward to being able to stop splitting focus (spoiler for next month’s retro, the first week has been pretty great!). Launching ritza.co: the two kinds of feedback I launched ritza.co in May.

I did a 2020 Q1 retrospective pretty late, so this is more focused on the 10-30 April period. Ritza progress Ritza is still evolving at what feels like a slow pace. I launched ritza.co today (actually it has been live for a while, but it had a brain dump on the homepage which I rewrote today to have more structure and provide more relevant information). I shared it on ZATech, HackerNews, and the EUTech telegram group and got some good feedback (thank you if you were one of the people that provided this!

A large part of my 2019 retrospective focused on Ritza: a concept I have been playing with which aims to Produce high quality technical tutorials and articles Allow companies to buy and publish these tutorials (hopefully instead of buying targeted advertising) Pay full time writers, editors, programmers, and designers to produce this content at scale I also talked about some other stuff like visas and leaving South Africa, but I’ll focus on Ritza progress in this article.

People overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in ten. Someone, probably The quote above gets thrown around a lot in my circles, but I think it is useful in several ways. Most people are too concerned with short term value, too ambitious with their short term goals, and unwilling to stick at something for very long. This bias leads companies to focus too heavily on monthly or quarterly (or weekly!

Process is designed to make systems more efficient, but it often slows them down. The real purpose of process is to make systems, and especially employees, more fungible. If you are lucky enough to work with a small group of intelligent people, dedicated to a single cause, process is probably hurting them more than helping them. You should remove it. Nearly all.

Pieter Levels, the guy behind NomadList and RemoteOK, and bunch of other interesting ideas wrote a short post earlier today about the future of building applications without code. It is at https://levels.io/no-code/. I agree with most of the ideas, including It’s getting easier to build applications that can solve complex problems and generate value, without writing code More companies will do this over time We’re still far off from finding a more efficient way to build complicated applications than ‘manually’ stiching if statement and while loops together.