Expectations, revisited

How wrong expectations can throw you off from building and growing your product consistently

Exactly a year ago, I wrote about how I had the misguided expectations for Lifelog:

So right matching of expectation to product or goal, is mission-critical. Basically, being realistic, and having good judgement to not let what I think I want cloud what’s really happening.

Lifelog suffered that. For too long I’ve expected it to grow just because I expect it to. Because it’s my first ever SaaS, my main project, my Chosen One. So I kept going. I’m pretty stubborn with keeping at things until it hits my goal. But I was so wrong this time. I was blind to the reality and the data I was shown. That it won’t grow till some big changes are made. More features to be built. Less expectations to be had. Little presumptions for MRR growth. Perhaps after that it will stand a chance.

So, no more expectations. It’s holding me and Lifelog back.

I’ll get back to before I had expectations, and just see the product as it is, as what it does, right now.

That was in November 2022. But it won’t be till January 2023 this year when I finally start shipping new features again—the markdown preview feature—for Lifelog. This was after more than 1 year of no new features.

I would then continue to build 1-2 new features for the following months until late March 2023 when I started on Side Projects Weekend, where I decided to go even further to block time to build Lifelog on weekends. And the rest is history, they say. I’ve built much for Lifelog since that fateful post about expectations a year ago.

This really goes to show, just how much the wrong set of expectations can throw you off from building and growing your product consistently.

Had I not taken a cold, hard look at Lifelog, and ate humble pie and downgraded Lifelog to side project status while risking disapproval from my existing users, I wouldn’t have made the adjustments necessary, and eventually land on to the build momentum for it.

I might have found my build stride, but I’ve not yet cracked the growth part. But I got some ideas. Ideas that makes me feel optimistic. Rationally optimistic.

Maybe now that I’ve fixed a lot of the quality of life improvements for Lifelog, I can start adding in some features to help with it’s growth. Stuff like for SEO, affiliate programs, etc. I love this homework list Tim gave us:

Here’s your SaaS marketing checklist for November:

⬜️ build a free tool
⬜️ build a change log
⬜️ do 5 build in public posts
⬜️ launch an affiliate program
⬜️ publish 3 alternative to pages
⬜️ publish 5 “glossary term” pages
⬜️ publish 3 blog posts (500 words)

I’ll still continue build user features, but interspersed with product-growth features probably.

It’s funny how some projects take so long to figure out.

But I’m glad for it.

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