On transparency.
One of the strongest parts of our company culture at Forrst is our transparency and honesty around our thoughts on community, product, and most importantly, our foul-ups. I have always tried to maintain the same level of openness with all of my projects, as I believe it is vital to a product’s success. I wanted to share this email I sent Tinyproj subscribers this morning about the current state of the service. Keep in mind, transparency doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be divulging trade secrets, detailed roadmaps, etc., but it’s paramount to at least be open about messing up, if nothing else. In regards to the email, it went out to about 9,000 people. To my delight, dozens have responded quite positively with great, great feedback about the service and words of encouragement. Now, without further ado, the email:
An important Tinyproj update
Hey {Name} — I’m Kyle, the creator of Tinyproj. I wanted to let you know about a few important things related to the service, and to thank you for giving Tinyproj a shot.
Lack of Saturday emails recently
You may have noticed that the past few Saturdays have either had no project email, or had a project email which only had a few projects in it. First, I’m sorry for the radio silence about that! Since launching in September the amount of quality inbound projects has dipped substantially. Each project is hand-approved based on interestingness and a fair and realistic timeline and budget, so only a small percentage of projects submitted actually make it into the weekly email. Lately, many of the projects submitted have not passed this quality threshold, and because of that, there have been a few weeks where no projects actually made the cut. I have some thoughts around churning up new and interesting inbound projects, and have been working hard on a solution. It thrills me that many of you have not only connected with great projects, but in some cases have even ended up with longer-term engagements through Tinyproj. That’s awesome, and I hope to see that trend continue.
Lack of response from project owners
Another issue I’m keenly aware of is that project owners are overwhelmed with the response to their projects, and therefore are frequently unable to respond to all interested folks in a timely fashion, if at all. I am a huge fan of transparency; having spent many years freelancing myself, I know how frustrating it is to never hear back from a lead. I’m sorry for that, and am working on solving that problem for you.
Confusion about intros
The other major hiccup with the service is that the intro flow is confusing to some. By intro flow, I mean the way we have you get in touch with project owners when you’re interested in working with them. Right now, it involves following a link in the email and then hitting another button which triggers an anonymous email intro. You then (very confusingly) have to reply to that email before you’re actually in touch about the project. It’s not an ideal user experience, and I’m going to make it much easier to get in touch about neat projects.
What’s ahead
I’m devoting some serious time to rethinking the product, including tackling the above-mentioned issues as best I can. I very much believe in the overall model, and I’m confident Tinyproj still has a chance to be a solid player in the talent space. My hope is that thousands of talented designers and developers can find interesting and lucrative projects to work on in their spare time through Tinyproj. I pledge to be more in touch about how things are progressing, and I look forward to your continued support.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns at all, please feel free to reply directly to this email.
Cheers,
Kyle
