Context
First, this week’s post is a continuation of the progress from last week. And, next week’s post will likely be the same :)
We’ve had a hectic and exciting couple of weeks - both in Dub & in our lives. As we prepare to (officially - though we say we’ve basically been out for 2 years) graduate college, we’re equally amped to put the FIRST version of Dub officially out into the world. We’ve revised our approach slightly to be focused radically on small, niche community as an entry point for testing. More below.
I’ve just been looking back over our experiments in the past few weeks - Dub has been a long time in the making. The team has learned an unbelievable amount and I can feel my own skills in engineering and product-building scaling the same.
Equally a long in the making has been has been data persistence; as you can read from Cam and I’s post last week, this is the LAST major functional jump needed before we can consider Dub ready for a primetime v0 “launch”. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past month, it’s to better scope out (technically and feasibly) every feature before pushing down a major project.
I find myself constantly drawn to vast problems with few clear next steps, excited to dive in, experiment, and builds towards progress. And while I am all around happy on our progress implementing this last re-architecture of Dub (for now) and we are certainly moving much faster than if we had kicked off data persistence from the start, there is something to be said about understanding every problem more holistically and slowly from the get-go.
With that being said, I’m excited to come up for air from the technical deep dive and push back into what I love most - product building.
Overview
First, the technical goodies: I’ve spent most of the past week re-implementing our entire app into a new relational infrastructure driven by Apple’s CoreData framework. While this might sound quite monotonous, I’ve found myself constantly excited by all the code improvements and new ideas unearthed by the tedium. All around, we’re getting there.
Secondarily, I’m really excited about the next phase of Dub. Pavan has been laser focused on user testing - finally putting a tangible Dub in front of users and asking them what it would take for this to be their ideal web3 experience.
The next phase of dubdubdub is exactly this - maintaining a continuous cycle of iteration and feedback WITH our users to construct the most perfect browser for them.
With this decision, we’re most excited about laser focusing in on web3s most niche, tight knit communities, helping a chosen few craft the perfect browser. While the goal is always to be pushing towards retained users, we feel the best step between there and now is deep feedback cycles.
This next phase brings a slew of changes - needing our team to adapt into new roles to reflect Dub’s more holistic output expectations (build, launch, test, plan). While nothing has changed yet, we’re hoping to make a slow migration from a team heads-down focused on engineering to a wider perspective.
We’re hype.
Next Steps
My big (MAJOR) goal for the next two weeks or so is to push through CoreData & support Cam in his frontend implementation.
Tangentially, I’m hoping to dive into:
- User Interviews / User Feedback
- Team Task Prioritization
- Analytics and Data Collection