BioWorkWriting

Nov & Dec 2021: The experience of switching jobs

  • Monthly Update

To be fair, this is a month and a half update. I started my job with Seervision at the beginning of December. So I was too busy to write my monthly update in time.

The last 45 days saw me leaving my full-time job at Laserhub and starting employment at Seervision. In between, I had two weeks of vacation which I used to work on my side project stagetimer.io.

This monthly update contains the lessons I learned, the motivations that drive me, and some appreciation for outstanding people.

The last High Five

Even though barely 30 days passed since my last working day at Laserhub it feels so much longer ago. By the beginning of November, I had handed over all my regular work to others and just finished a few last tasks.

At Laserhub we were using a feedback tool called 15five. This tool prompts you every Friday to recap your week and to hand out high fives to your coworkers for the highlights you experienced together. I want to take this chance to quote a few high fives I received during my time there.

Really amazing skills you have when asking questions (as I saw during our workshop)!

Dr. Daniel Michaelis

I loved the stand-up and the drive [with which] you tackle high-level issues while at the same time being the office glue! Incredible 😀

Radek Srubkowski

Great job on the retrospective, It was very enjoyable! On and by the way, you are a GREAT colleague! thanks for all the great insights in cards, reviews, funny comments, etc!

Pedro Matos de Carvalho

A high five for being the irreplaceable Renaissance man that you are in your diverse Laserhub roles 👨‍🎨

Jens Nüesch

So much has already been said… I am sure your next challenge will be no match for that dolphin brain of yours. We will miss your question-asking skills, your multi-tasking capacity, and your emojination. The guys in your new company have no idea what’s going to happen to them 🐬

Tatiana Messiant

You were the best coworkers I ever had. I enjoyed the time working with you and you helped me grow a lot. I will always look back at my time with you fondly!

Ultimately at Laserhub, I was missing the challenge and ownership I wished from my work which caused me to get disinterested. It was not an easy decision for me to make because I liked the team so much. And yet, it was the right decision to make. I’m not regretting it. I hope to come across some of you again in the future.

The new guy at Seervision

Starting with a new company is always hard. You enter an existing group dynamic as the “new guy.” You have to prove yourself and carve out a spot that’s yours now. A lot can go wrong in this process, yet I decided to take the step.

Why? Not because I think everything will be better than at my previous job. I believe some things will be better, but others worse. And precisely for that reason, I accepted this job. It gives me the chance to learn another company culture, another set of best practices, and make more precious acquaintances in the small world of tech startups.

To make myself familiar with the company as a fully remote worker, I scheduled get-to-know meetings with as many coworkers as possible. This is helping a lot and is giving me an appreciation for the skills and passion of those I work with.

I also had very productive meetings with the leadership about my actual position in the company and the concrete goals of the product I am going to work on. During these meetings, it was very important to me to be straightforward and speak my mind. I want the founders to perceive early on if I am fit for Seervision’s culture and vision or not. At the same time, it was important for me to know if my ideas and methods are welcome or rejected.

I am happy to report that I have a lot of respect for the founders of Seervision as well as the CTO to whom I am reporting. Whilst not everything is perfect, I am positive and excited that I will be able to do my best work once the initial details are figured out.

Our first customer interviews for stagetimer.io

At the beginning of December, we raised our prices and added a one-time 10-day access pass for single events. The “event” package has been received well with eight purchases already. This should considerably reduce our churn which mostly came from one-time events. We don’t know the impact on subscription sales yet, we’ll wait for the beginning of 2022 when holiday fatigue fades out and the bustle of a new year picks up again.

The most interesting developments are happening on the roadmap front. We are not video production natives, therefore we don’t know what our primary customers actually need. Many indie hackers like me build tools for people like themselves, the creator community. Under the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter, you’ll find many productivity tools, tweet schedulers, and other creator and software developer-oriented SaaS products. But Stagetimer is a different beast, our customers and users are not on Twitter and they don’t spend all their time on a laptop. Instead, they work with video production equipment I have only seen on Google search results.

So when we plan our roadmap and think of new features, we are very sensitive to user feedback. This feedback mostly comes in the form of emails from our customers. And, at this point it behooves me to add, our customers are exceptionally kind! Without them, we wouldn’t be able to build a useful tool at all. Perceiving this, we (and kudos go primarily to my wife) started asking some of our customers for quick video calls whenever we need to figure out a new feature. Our question is “How do you solve this problem right now?” The responses were incredibly helpful so far and will make Stagetimer so much better in the future.

Stagetimer started as an experiment to learn about SaaS products, but it has turned into a solid product in its own right and taught me so much more than I could have imagined!

To top off the year, we reached and exceeded my €500 MRR goal.

Stats

Stagetimer €684 MMR