It’s been a constant struggle for me – determining that line between “this is mine” and “actually it’s not MINE anymore.” I had a very specific vision for the site when I first pieced it together over a holiday weekend, but at the time I was really just building it for myself. For my very specific use case. And as a Product Manager I know better than anyone that that’s just NOT the way to build things to be used by the People of the Internets.

When we crossed the 10,000 completed goal mark, I posted a bit of a reflection on what I’d learned and, to be honest, I haven’t really looked at it since. It’s strange to realize now that coming back to reflect on these last few weeks, my thoughts now (and more importantly my actions!) are actually EXACTLY in line with where my intuition was leading me 8 months ago.

Over the last few weeks I made a few HUGE decisions, decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that my stubbornness and general feeling of complete ownership prevented me from giving in to.

What’s in a name?

The first step in accepting my problem was realizing that I wasn’t enjoying working on 101in365 and more importantly, I was completely unwilling to talk about it in person with anyone because I KNEW I would not only have to repeat the name a few times for them to remember the numbers but also because I’d have to explain why one would have to come up with 101 goals and how that’s actually not that big of a deal. Any excitement I had at the prospect of building this out was dampened by the stress and defensiveness that came along with explaining it to anyone.

I knew I wanted to change the name for a good long while, but could never come up with a good alternative. Then, one day, out of the blue, accompl.sh hit me. I checked for the normal spelling and the .com, of course, but as a noun my odds were pretty slim. Thanks to domai.nr I stumbled across the very web 2.0 spelling and domain. It wasn’t IDEAL but it was a step and after discovering it I couldn’t get the name out of my head. A few days later I sprung for the most expensive domain I’d ever purchased at a whopping $99! I felt an immediate sense of relief and spent that entire evening changing out the logos, the copy, and the links around the site. A quick blog post and accompl.sh was unleashed to the world. I felt a thousand times better already. And it was all done JUST in time for a blog post about me and accompl.sh to go up on the Evernote Blog. Things were looking up.

But you still needed 101 goals

Once the name situation was sorted out I sat back and gave myself a bit of a reality check. With the initial band-aid torn off I was a bit more open to reconsidering some of my decisions from early in the development of the site and ended up spending the next few nights fixing those. Thus, the Suggestion Box. It was my first admission that 101 goals was, indeed, a LOT of goals to come up with.

For me, coming up with my own list of 101 in 365 was an exercise I’d gotten myself used to over the course of a few years. It wasn’t until I started watching people use the site and listening to their reactions upon hitting their first brick wall of running out ideas that it really started to click. Not everyone is like me. And if the true mission of the site is to help people come up with goals and stick to them, then WHY is having 101 goals at all important?

I’d contemplated it pretty seriously for a few days but kept rationalizing for my own use case. Then, for some reason or other, not unlike the name epiphany, I decided on the elevator out of the Etsy office that I needed to ditch the 101 goal requirement. I still couldn’t tell you how or why that decision became so clear at that particular moment, but for whatever reason, within SECONDS I had made the decision and sent a text to Tilly:

OMG I think I just decided to pivot accomplsh. Yes. I said pivot.

That was it. With no other thought given to the rationale or going through my usual pro/con list, I hashed it all out in my head it all out on my walk to the subway. I attempted to read a bit more of the book I had on my Kindle, but I couldn’t concentrate. Out the Moleskine came and I started scribbling furiously.

By the time I got home the plan had been hatched and I fired up my Terminal, Transmit, and TextMate (T^3. The tools the internet is built on) and started ripping out the bits of code that affected how many goals you needed to have. Strangely the only part that was at all difficult was getting the Javascript to place nicely. Once that was sorted, panic began to set in.

What the hell did I just do!?

It was all too easy. The whole thing just came together way too quickly. I freaked out. Why was it so easy? Was it so easy because it was the wrong decision? Or so easy because it was the right decision? What was I forgetting? I HAD to be forgetting something! What if the people who’d stood behind me on my stubbornness around 101 goals were angry that I gave in and reduced the limit? What if it just ruined everything that I’d spent 18 months building? Needless to say I was overcome with analysis paralysis. This was one of those times where I really wish I had a co-founder or someone to just sanity check me. Some of these decisions just shouldn’t happen in a vacuum.

Screw it. Just push the button!

Over-analyzing everything is one of those character traits that can be a blessing and a curse. I stepped away from the laptop for a bit (to get a commit cookie ¹, of course). It was at that point I got a DM from a member who said a mysql error was popping up on a particular page. Crap. That meant I had to either revert my changes for that particular file in order to push the fix, or I’d have to fix it and push it all together. Gotta love forcing functions. So that was that. I HAD to push everything or the production site would have this nasty mysql error hanging around. And I’m not cool with mysql errors ruining my designs.

The new restriction-free accompl.sh was alive.

So what did I learn?

• Just because it’s how you first built something doesn’t mean that’s the way it needs to stay.
• Changing a major piece of a project doesn’t necessarily mean you’re admitting defeat.
• Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in one area to grow in others
• Sometimes taking out the one nail that you’ve been hanging everything from opens the doors to solve a lot of the problems you haven’t been able to find solutions for (more to come on this)
• The only cure for stubbornness seems to be impulsiveness.

Going Forward

While I’m a bit sad at having just finished hacking up my “baby,” and, honestly, I’m still SLIGHTLY worried that I may have made the decision a bit too impulsively, I’m excited for the future of this new system. I already have a few new bits up my sleeve that didn’t make it into the MVP for fixing the goal restrictions, but that I think will add a whole new range of possibilities for where I can take the project.

At the very least I’m interested to see what I’ll have to say about this decision 8 months from now when the effects will be fully realized and I get around to writing about them again!

Getting to 10,000 was not easy. It’s been a lot of trial and error and thankfully our ever-patient users have stuck with me as I used them as my guinea pigs for experiments in motivation, community, and social design. I thought I’d take a step back to really think about what I’ve learned getting to goal #10,000 and perhaps ponder some possible changes to the site to hopefully get that next 10,000. Or even better: 100,000. Here goes:

101 goals is a LOT to come up with

Yes. So I’ve heard. Over and over again. 101 goals is a lot. I totally get that. It even takes me a few days to come up with my own list. I’ve been very stubborn on this point up until now, but reaching this milestone has also made me realize that isn’t just MY site anymore. There are real people out there using this and they’re not all as obsessive about lists as I am. Who am I to prescribe the number of goals a person should have in a given year? Not saying I’m ready to ditch the 101 concept just yet, but I’m certainly more open to exploring other possibilities. Dare I say pivot? Perhaps.

Lesson learned: Know when to let go and let your users help define the future of the product rather than imposing your ideas. (But know when to stand your ground!) Everyone will be much happer in the long run.

101in365 is not the easiest name to remember

I’ve gotten mixed feedback on this one. Some say to keep it. It describes the site perfectly and is different from all of the startup-y types of names. The flip side of that is that when I’m out and about talking to new people they say “oh you made that 1 oh..? 3 sixty…? thing right?” Not exactly good branding. Personally, I’m not too attached to the name. The numbers thing is tough and if I DO in fact pivot as I mentioned above, the 101 piece of it may not even be true for much longer. So I guess that means it’s time to start exploring a rebrand!

Lesson learned: If they can’t say it they probably won’t remember it. Or they’ll remember it for the wrong reasons. Branding, Branding, Branding!

People will use your tools in ways you never anticipated

This one is kind of a “duh” point, but it’s just one of those things that you have to experience to really understand. When I added comments to 101in365 they were slow to pick up. They weren’t integrated very well (and they still aren’t, to be truthful), but after a lot of prodding on my end and personally leaving a lot of comments around the site, they picked up and took on a life of their own. List owners now generally use the comments to keep track of their progress with their own goals and leave a note to explain when they check off a goal. This isn’t something I’d considered when I added comments, but our users have given comments a whole different life. Awesome! Now it’s time to figure out if there’s a better way for everyone to leave notes on their own goals or if they’re perfectly happy leaving notes in their comments.

Lesson learned: You can’t always predict what your users want but they’ll show you what they need. You’d better be ready to listen.

Designing for an always-morphing site is tough!

When I look back at the original design for 101in365 I shake my head in shame. That thing was pretty terrible. I’m not really sure what I was thinking there. This new design, while better aesthetically, is not at all better in terms of scaling. When I designed it the site was basically a list for each user, a goal page, and a list of most recently completed goals called Explore. It’s since grown to include various filters on Explore, a Dashboard, a Goodies section, and more to come. It’s not just the main pages that have pushed the design to the limits, but the new functionality such as the ability to Like goals or Pics Or It Didn’t Happen have pointed out design flaw upon design flaw.

Lesson learned: Keep scaling in mind when you’re designing a quickly-growing site and get it right the first (or second) time. Measure twice, cut once. Or something like that.

Beware the hazards of building in a vacuum

Right now I’m flying completely solo. Building, designing, marketing, maintaining, failing, succeeding – it’s all me. I don’t mind because I love it, but I do find that without someone to be a check and balance I end up in a situation like I mentioned up in #1: I’m stubborn about building it the way I would use it instead of the way people demand. It’s also lonely and tougher to recover from issues like not designing for scale the first time. Since I’m essentially a one gal show, time spent in Photoshop is time NOT spent interacting with the community or promoting the site or building a new feature. Everything is a tradeoff and mistakes are especially costly because it means something else has to be put on hold while you address it. Like the night I almost lost all of the data because I was trying to finish a feature and truncated the live database instead of the dev. Checks and balances and a second set of eyes are always helpful. User feedback is fantastic, but sometimes it’s nice to have feedback BEFORE you send something out into the world.

Not to mention the fact that working solo means that I’m limited to my knowledge set and a few other things I pick up along the way. Let’s face it, I’m nowhere near awesome at algorithms but goal suggestions and some clever people-connecting things are at the top of my to do list right now. I could probably teach myself how to do that sort of data analysis, but again, time spent reading a book on algorithms and data processing is time not spent doing more tangible work.

Lesson learned: It’s totally OK to build things by yourself. You get to learn every aspect of the process. But, it also means that you’re always focusing on one or two things at a time and the other things are likely suffering. If I had the opportunity, I’d love to bring some other people into the project to spread the load and to have the luxury of diverse perspectives.

At the end of the day, even with all of the tougher bits, building 101in365 and watching it grow has been an amazing experience. It’s been a crash course in many areas for me and I’m looking forward learning more, growing more, building more, and helping people accomplish more. There’s still a LOT of work to be done, but when I take a step back and look at what I’ve built over these last months, I’m pretty proud of how far it’s come! If you haven’t already, sign up and check it out! I’d love your feedback!

It was out of this that I wrote my first 101in365. A simple list that I put on my old blog. It’s still there and I still update it, but now that 2009 is coming to a close and it’s time for me to start working on my 101in365. I wanted something better for 2010. I wanted a way to automate it so I didn’t have to go through and add strikethroughs to each item and so I didn’t have to go into a blog post and scroll down to find my item. I wanted a way to keep track of the number of items I’ve marked as done, as in progress, and just as empty. I wanted to be able to manage my list more easily with a quick “heads up” view of my status. So I tried to automate it.

I started on Thursday night after a holiday party. I worked on it Friday night and all day Saturday. Some of Sunday and a teeny bit of Monday and here we are. A tiny weekend project to make my life easier that sort of snowballed into a multi-user site with a whole to-do list of features (not quite 101 of them, but close!) that I still have to add.

I’m really excited about this project and I hope you’ll join and start creating a list of your own. It’s most certainly still a work-in-progress, but I’m a firm believer that getting a site out into the wild and into the hands of users is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t and go from there. So head on over to 101in365.com and sign up!

I’ve been struggling with not having a project for the last few months. When I got back from Europe and found myself with a few weeks with nothing to do but enjoy summer vacation I was itching to DO something, to create something, but I didn’t know what. Instead I played around with my blogs. I decided to leave forever-digital behind and move here. And that kept me occupied for a while, but it wasn’t the project I was looking for.

It was incredibly frustrating. I hadn’t started work yet, I was in the process of moving and starting my post-college life, but at the same time I felt almost directionless. My mind was idling.

When I started work a lot of these frustrations were set aside as I learned the ropes of the corporate world and had some work projects to keep me occupied for a while, but now that I’m more settled in and I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve struck a decent work/life balance, I’m ready to get back into my personal projects. Now that I know how much time I need for work and how much time I need for a social life and all that, I’m ready to tackle MY projects again.

Having all of this time to really think about what I want to do has been incredibly helpful and for the first time ever my need to create something has matched up with having the time to do it. I’ve had this idea mulling around in my head for a few months and I’ve finally gotten it down on paper and it’s almost ready for the next step: action.

I’m really excited about it and when it gets a bit more fleshed out I’ll try to share some of it, but for now I’m just really thankful to have a problem that I find personally interesting to work on for the first time since I finished school in May. Here’s hoping it all works out!

I’ve seen a few cool projects go here or there that I was intrigued by, but I haven’t necessarily felt compelled to contribute – until today. There is a really good batch of project proposals vying for support and I finally gave in to one of them: Designing Obama.

The proposal is this:

…The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art and design from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.

The 360-page book is full-color and hardbound, highly crafted with an embossed sleeve…

I’m a bit of a design geek and I can’t wait to get my hands on this book! Fellow design geeks and Obama supporters alike should definitely help Scott Thomas reach his goal. He’s 3/4 of the way there! And while you’re at it check out the other Kickstarter projects – there’s something for everyone!