The Inside Scoop: February 2021

👋 Friends.

This month, even though it's the shortest of the year felt really long.

It does seem to get better though as we move into autumn here in South Africa as well as the new financial year.

Onward to the inside scoop 😁

The New Name & Logo?

I finally decided to rename the app “Pencil Bible”. It’s short, sweet, and very descriptive. I got the .com domain 🙌 and with an hour's worth of tinkering changed Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and the website to Pencil Bible. It was easier than I thought. Maybe we will change the name again in the future. Who knows. I bought the paperbible.com and notesbible.com domain just in case 😎

I really want to change the logo as well. I have zero budget to do this, so I’m unashamedly playing with Canva to make a new one. This is what I have so far:

What do you think?

So what’s the day-to-day like?

Good question. We (me and the developer) use Trello to plan, build and discuss progress. It’s pretty neat. As Texas is 8 hours before us I usually start getting questions and feedback at around 18:00 in the afternoon here in SA.

This is the screen at the moment:

Every day I get feedback, videos, screenshots, etc. The opposite of my previous developer. Literally the opposite😊 #heaven

You may notice the green, yellow and purple stripes? It is used to indicate how much progress has been made.

I use Notion to manage the Pencil Bible from a company standpoint. Notion is so good. I use it for planning, notes, design systems, and the roadmap. It even has templates for this. I will show more detail at a later stage.

The website 🙄

So any app needs a website for:

1. Information
2. Promotion
3. Legal Stuff (very important)

Instead of spending more money to make a polished website with lots of glitz and glamour to showcase the capabilities of the Pencil Bible, I decided to go the minimalist root and create a light MVP (minimum viable product) just to cover the basics. Why? Well at the moment we don’t know if the app is going to work? Will people like it? If no to either of those then a fancy Nancy website is pointless and wasting money.

Besides I have been itching to build a website with Notion and Super.so! Super.so takes any Notion page and makes it a static website. That’s how I found my developers. By browsing the Super showcase https://super.so/showcase 🤠

So basically what I’m saying is I will make a simple site to get the party started. Just a welcome page and all the legal stuff about Privacy and Terms etc. 🥱🥱🥱

Ok, that’s it for now. I hope this gives a short glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes when building a company on top of a digital product.

Have a great weekend and remember, I have no idea what I’m doing.