Monthly Letter #08 - Bento
As you might have guessed from the two previous editions of this newsletter (#06 and #07) - things took a bit of a halt when I lost some motivation working on Bento…
In the past few weeks, in between numerous holidays and long weekends under the sun, I've basically treated Bento more as a side project. The good thing is: there was no disaster or significant negative impact in that. I've put most operations on "autopilot" and that was fine. Nothing blew up. There wasn't growth, but it was stable, not particularly stressful, and it gave me time to keep working a little on Bento, but also do other things and think about what to do next. Let’s break it down.
For Bento
The main thing I've done is performance work for SurveyNuts, to improve the overall speed of the main pages and server requests. The initial motivation for that was to improve SEO metrics which were slowly going down, and Google reminding me that PageSpeed Insights number were really bad.
For several days straight, all I did was a bunch of optimizations on all our pages, trying to remove a few Javascript frameworks, changing image sizes and formats, kill any code that wasn’t necessary or use tools to do optimizations (like CSS used).
It was quite satisfying: unlike most problems in life, you can find out instantaneously if your work has resulted in a success ! You can immediately check performance gain by evaluating relevant metrics (such as LCP : Largest Contentful Paint) on tools provided by Google PageSpeed Insights. And you keep going at it until you don’t see any problems reported.
Within a few weeks, basically every indicator turned Green, and you feel like you’ve won at a video game. But more importantly, people who use SurveyNuts get a better & faster user experience. And if everything goes according to plan, all of our rankings will move up and to the right and traffic will 10x in the next few months (we’ll see about that 😅).
Doing other things
I’ve started doing a little bit of freelance work. More specifically, I joined Beta.gouv.fr last month as a “Product Coach”.
I had been following Beta since they launched a few years ago. It’s basically a startup studio for the public sector, working under various departments, such as the one I’m now affiliated to : the Ministry of Ecological Transition, through their own incubator, La Fabrique Numérique.
In essence, they’re doing a batch of several startups, and try to match an entrepreneur coming from the public sector who’s passionate about a problem to solve, and people coming from tech/startup backgrounds to give it a leaner approach : going step by step, talking to users, validating hypothesis, testing mockups, building an MVPs etc.
All in all several projects created under this organization are already real teams with products used by millions. In my case, I’m working with an entrepreneur based in Martinique on a new project at the intersection of real estate & environnemental impact !
I might also take other freelancing gigs in the next few months while I figure out what to do next.
What to do next
While I’m not writing off completely the possibility to keep working on Bento, I’m officially searching for something new to launch ! My priority is to find another idea / entrepreneurial project to start from scratch. Ideally with a team. Or joining an existing project as a late co-founder.
I’ve started to proactively engage with a few other entrepreneurs to brainstorm ideas, for example in the health sector, and these discussions alone are very refreshing.
For now, this is mostly a blank page, I have no idea where this is going to go, but I’m quite comfortable with a high level of uncertainty.
If you want to chat, or if you know other people in the starting blocks who are looking for co-founders, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Also, thank you for reading this newsletter ! This will probably be the last one (at least in this format / frequency). Congratulations if you’ve read all 8 of them, this was a great sounding board 🙏