I worked from home for 6yrs – here are my 20 tips to boost your WFA productivity in 2023:
Hi there 👋 I’m Gagan, co-founder at Maven. AMA 👇
At what team size did spreadsheets stop working for you?
I've been noticing an interesting pattern while talking with founders.
For very small teams, spreadsheets, chat, and memory seem to work surprisingly well.
Then something changes.
Not because people become less organized.
What's the money app you rage-quit — and what finally did it?
Building in public and doing some research on my own scar tissue. I've rage-quit more finance apps than I can count YNAB three separate times, two spreadsheets I lovingly built and abandoned by week three, one app whose notifications made me feel like a parent was scolding me.
Every time it was the same story: the tool slowly turned into a chore, and one day I just... stopped opening it.
So I want the war stories. What money app or system did you rage-quit? Was it the manual data entry, the guilt-trip notifications, the endless categories to maintain or something else?
What made you finally walk away?
To what extent can you include team work in your personal portfolio?
Back when I worked in advertising agencies as an idea maker and copywriter (creative), I cared a lot about my CV and portfolio (honestly, I wanted to include almost every project I worked on, as many things as possible).
But whenever I wanted to add something, I realised that many of those projects were team efforts and not entirely my own.
How do you know you’re ready to launch? 🚀
2 weeks before the product launch. What am I doing in terms of preparation?
Not really much, and it annoys me a bit. In exactly 14 days (28. 1.) we will launch the product, and the only thing I do is talk about it.
But yes, there are points that I still want to master by then, e.g.:
Create an informational newsletter inviting people to follow our product page
Create a list of people who could support us and ask them for help
Announcements on social networks
Inform Kickstarter backers who supported us with updates this is also an audience
Publishing a Product Hunt badge on the landing page
Continually grow and maintain a personal brand which should be a long-term goal, not just for launch purposes.