Picture sums it up. Read on.
PROJECT
File Finder
ELEVATOR PITCH
We help you find files you know you have, but can’t find, faster.
BLUF
Having two engineers is greatly helping us AND it has taken four months longer than expected to get through our Google security audit because of legacy code issues.
FULL UPDATE
In this update:
- Financial update
- HR Updates
- Product progress
- Thoughts: Why I pushed more chips in to get a second FT engineer AND How it’s effected the team
- Goals: How we did based on projections for March and April and new goals.
- Biggest lesson learned this month
FINANCIALS
File Finder Income Reports
File Finder Income Reports
HR
We have two FT engineers, 1 part time, and me.
PRODUCT PROGRESS
We’re four months behind where we projected. Our MVP code has turned out to have many more issues than we anticipated. One fix has triggered and exposed several other problems.
While we’re disappointed with the progress, it is important to make sure we have every hole we can find closed given we are storing customer’s files.
The time it would take to recover from a data breach from a brand and financial standpoint far outweighs the time and money we’re spending now.
The code itself has passed all the audits. Now we’re finalizing all our security policies and settings across all the services we use.
Barring anything crazy we “should” pass this week as long as the audit company can meet with us.
Once that is done we submit the passed audit to Google and once they OK it (not sure how long this will take) we’ll be able to release to a beta group of users.
THOUGHTS
I’m not happy about it taking so long, but better than the alternative
The engineering team is also disappointed, but is feeling much better about our updated code base, their understanding of it, and the fixes we’re making will allow us to be secure and scale quickly.
MAY GOALS
- Pass security audit.
- Get a small group of beta users using the service.
- Get 1 paying customer that doesn’t know us.
BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED THIS MONTH
Hofstadter’s law is REAL. A project always takes longer than expected, EVEN when the law is taken into account.
Simply put, time estimates for how long a project will take to complete always fall short of the actual time required to complete it.
Plan on it ????
If you enjoyed this article be sure to claim your subscription to the weekly email I send out. It’s full of great information and other articles just like this one. This piece is from my 5/7/23, Week 19 update.