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. It’s … rough … to say the least, and the initial feedback I got from family and friends was brutally honest. “I still don’t get what it is?”, “Why are there no pictures?”, “Uh, maybe take a design course or something? Here’s a coupon.” etc etc. While Ritza aims to take a strong stance against “marketing websites”, “SEO strategies”, “call to action buttons”, and all of those other good things, I am not planning on the landing page looking like that forever. The copy is not great for a start, and it’s undoubtedly ugly.

I posted the link in ZATech slack, news.ycombinator.com, and the EUTech telegram group. I got one comment on HN (it shouldn’t have been on “Show HN” anyway as it’s not something anyone can “play with” yet.), a bunch of good discussion from EUTech, including some people saying that their companies were looking for Tech content, and a few comments from people who already knew something about Ritza on ZATech. The feedback was unanimously negative about the landing page.

The rebel in me wanted to see if Ritza could be successful in spite of an ugly landing page (playing on hard mode?) and as I spent most of May juggling needs from my employer and two Ritza clients anyway, improving the landing page was not the top of my to do list. But I also wondered if I was shooting myself in the foot. It’s obviously in my best interest for people to get a good first impression.

A few days later, I came across https://foundersummit.co/ again. I’ve been following Tyler Tringas on Twitter for a while, and while I was initially very skeptical of the “funding for bootstrappers” paradox, I’ve found his posts interesting and authentic. I signed up for the FounderSummit community of getting an email saying that it was free for a limited period.I posted a short introduction and a link to Ritza.

As there were under 100 people in this “paid” slack community, I was expecting exactly 0 response. I was surprised.

Within hours I had received a bunch of positive feedback and had set up several introduction calls with potential customers who wanted to hear more. People told me they were excited about the idea, could see the need for the service, and wanted to work together. Not a single person mentioned the (lack of) design, or ugly landing page. It was a pretty strong contrast from the “friends and family” launch and it was great to get the positive reinforcement.

I haven’t signed any new deals from these intros yet so take the seeming success with a pinch of salt, but I have met some good people, had some good conversations, and I am waiting for some “leads” to get back to me still.

What got published

Very little.

I worked on some more Python notebooks, and had a lot of fun playing with some global energy datasets (did you know that South Africa is one of the few countries in the world to see the amount of energy going towards rail drop over the last 20 years? I didn’t). I edited several of these notebooks and created on from scratch. It was fun.

I am working on several things for another client, but due to various factors (including me being slow), none of them are published yet. I decided to delay my May invoice for them until they have published at least some of the May work, so Ritza revenue is down a lot. (I’m expecting to still invoice them for May and June and to count the first invoice as part of May revenue, so this is hopefully a temporary situation.).

Publishing tools and services

I also started experimenting with micro SaaS-like tools, which I am expecting Ritza to build and release regularly over the next few years. The first one is an Opinionated Tutorial Publisher. I have spent so much time messing around with different themes (HTML, Ghost, Hugo, etc) as well as with Pandoc flags, different markup formats, etc, that I wished there was just a tool that had no options, no themes, and “just worked”. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but the MVP of this was something that could turn markdown into HTML and handle text, images, and code samples in a nice way.

I’m now working on another SaaS-like tool too. This analyses landing page copy and finds common cliches, patterns in adjective, verb, and noun use, sentence length, etc. I scraped around 20000 landing pages and built an initial dataset. I’m still doing a lot of cleaning and analysing, but here’s a sneak preview (which should also technically be part of next month’s retro, but I thought it was pretty cool), showing how many sites use the phrase “makes it easy to”.

Goals

June is going by fast already. By the end of June I hope to have

• Signed at least one more client
• Launched one more SaaS-like service (probably for free, but something that has the potential to grow into something I could start charging for), probably based around landing page copy
• Signed a contract with a Dutch Startup Facilitator to help secure a visa.