Our SaaS Feature Development Strategy Revealed: Staggering

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all right all done at the doctor's um they said I'm going to live which is good no it's just a physical nothing uh nothing crazy so nothing fun to report which I guess is a good thing when you go to the doctors I don't want to have any have any news it's cool though I didn't realize um so I had to get blood work done just part of the physical and uh I was thinking oh man I'm going to have to go schedule more time and I was asking him I said like when when can I go and he was like you can literally walk downstairs right now and do it and I was like really uh so that's awesome I didn't know that was a thing so pretty happy about not having to take more time off um I'm just being cautious this turn

is kind of crappy I can't really see anything coming around the corner so this could be it for me this could be uh the last video I ever make because um I might die right here but we'll see no we're good I will live to see another day um yeah no so that was cool but uh like it was super easy to go get blood work done right after and I just I remember having to go like make appointments and stuff for that so just awesome that I don't have to do that okay so I had a lot of ranting today so far I'm going to try not to rant this video and uh know I wanted to talk a little bit about uh more about brand go some of the stuff I'm building uh and and why right so um brand ghost primarily right

now the way that the platform exists I've talked about this a bunch it allows you to schedule content on a recurring basis across social media platforms and that's the primary offering at this point so um as we're trying to like basically approach new prospects one of them in particular is that we have a sort of like a deck like a pitch deck that we're putting together to a real estate company and um I had talked to a contact there I will refer to them as a contact and they kind of gave me some insights into some of the things that they would need to consider or sorry that they would need in our offering in order to consider us as a viable option to kind of help them now what's interesting is like this is not a tiny real estate company it's not like an

individual realtor uh where you know they really like the only income they have is like if they're making house sales and stuff cuz it's uh it's not like easy for realtors right they have to go bust their butt to go get sales but this is like an agency so it's they're they're doing pretty good um so the cost of our service I don't I don't feel like that's it's a prohibitive thing for them um so that's good news but cost aside like there's either a benefit or a hidden cost right for them if the platform that we're offering let's let's assume it's free to use right if the platform that we're offering is going to slow their social media person down that's literally like a negative impact and if you add on the fact that it costs money then it's even more negative uh so

we have to make sure that it's going to be helping them and that way it's like you know using the software is obviously like supposed to be a positive or a net benefit for them so I just wanted to kind of uh that might be obvious but I wanted to kind of say it out loud um this intersections God awful um I don't understand how that's supposed to work come on buddy come on come on go through oh I need to be in that lane that's why it's uh it's hard to explain you'd have to see it on the map but this part's really bad so anyway um they let me know that there's like a minimum set of features that we need to have and I think from our perspective we're like some of them were like we get why they're asking for it

but we actually don't believe that that's like truly a minimum set of features like we would still we believe that we would still be saving them time and money if they weren't using uh what they're at like if we don't have what they're asking for we still think that it would save them time and money like without a doubt but I can understand that they want it to be a more uh holistic platform again so that it's not going to be costing uh time and money for their social media person I got over the lane nice okay um so because brand ghost right now schedules content like on a recurring basis the other thing that they need to be able to do and actually I need this for myself I need to be able to do oneoff posts or schedule a post that's not part

of an entire chain of recurring content that's actually a requirement that I have and the way that I get around that right now is I just do it manually and it kind of sucks because I'm too lazy to go post it across every social media platform so what will happen is like I will have a post and it's like it's a one-off one sometimes I might do like sponsored posts for uh packed publishing they make well the authors that they have make really awesome books um I've had a bunch of C ones sent to me and and I'm they're not promoting or uh sponsoring this right I mean it genuinely like they they have the authors do a really good job and so I'm happy to to kind of do a sponsored post for that but when I go to post that I just post

it to LinkedIn and what I should be doing realistically is saying look like uh for a slightly more money like as a sponsored post let me go post this to different platforms right and I could do it with one click and uh I'm just not doing that right now but if I had this ability in brand ghost in the in the user interface and be great so that's one thing they're asking for and it's interesting because from like a an architectural perspective if we think about what has to happen for brand goes to work is like we already have this idea that we can go post to social media platforms like that's what we do but what's interesting is that when we think about a social media platform and content that has to go to it we have to kind of shape the cont content

in a similar way so that it can successfully post what you intend across those platforms um but part of that is when you define this stream of content we're kind of learning the shape that you want to use but if it's a oneoff post um we don't really do that so what's interesting is that that problem I don't even want to say it's a problem that like scenario doesn't exist and that could either make problems or it could make things very very simple and um so I started building out this feature and I realized that I think it actually does make it very very simple which is nice so instead of having some of the complexity that I was kind to defining it as like the shape of the different things that we want to be posting it actually becomes extremely simple for a one-off

post so um I started building at the back end uh pieces for this because the front end is going to be a little bit weird to figure out and the the reason I wanted to talk about this one is cuz there's like some some software development aspects from like a coding perspective but also from a a priority and like project kind of planning perspective so I wanted to walk you through it we have heard from them for the from their contact that they want to be able to have one-off post and they want to be able to see um like oneoff or schedule posts with the top extreme recurring post they want to see that all in the same view so they need the recurring stuff they need a calendar view they need oneoff post they need schedule post okay makes sense but our argument

is that they can just not use brand ghost right now for their one-off posts there's literally nothing stopping them so we know that that's not ideal but we have to think about this there's only so much time right if we want to be able to have a conversation with them and we don't have it done yet do we just wait and keep waiting until maybe one day we have it done or do we get them interested show them our capabilities and say look if you have an interest in those features we will build them out for you like basically you want it if you're interested and you're going to pay like we'll build it so what we're trying to do at this point is continue building what we have to build but I am trying to in the background come on buddy get in front

of me to merge lanes here um I'm trying to build out some of that functionality in the background sorry was not expecting that cough and um what's cool about that and this is how brand ghost has been being built this whole time like leading up to this point is like I build out the backend functionality and then I start using it for myself and I get to be sort of like the uh sort of like the primary use case validator and like I get to be the guinea pig because like I said I have a use for this too uh I can I can make it happen in like post man right like sending requests to my server like I can make it I I don't need the user interface for it so I can get ahead of the curve if we know that they're

going to want this I've started building it it's not done but I can start getting it in place that way if they're like well hell yeah we're interested we'll sign we definitely want to have that capability we go great now we can go invest the time into the user interface make it pretty make it functional from a user perspective so we've we've been fine and this is just my opinion so far but it seems like it's been a really good fit to be able to uh try getting some of the backend functionality in place to kind of prove the feasibility and quite frankly the usefulness of it so I get because I am a content creator and I rely on this kind of stuff I get to be using it and proving the value of these features then we get to focus purely on like

okay like users want this how are they going to use it how do we make it intuitive and we can invest all of our energy into that and honestly if users aren't interested it's like it's okay like that functionality exists we can find other ways to leverage it we could just stop investing into development of that feature in its entirety but some things are still going to be beneficial for me to have um in place even on the back end it's a nice Porsche it's a cool color very green um so I've been building this oneoff post scheduling and I just wanted to you know talk about this a little bit cuz it's kind of cool um the idea is very similar to looking for our our topic streams that need to be posted so we have some recurring workflow that runs and it looks

for things that are scheduled to go now so it keeps looking um and the same idea for schedule post now so something will run and it will look for posts that are ready to get fired off then what it does from there is I'm using uh I've made YouTube videos on this so this is not my my Dev leader Channel but if you go check out my Dev leader channel uh I don't edit these so I'm not going to put links and stuff and I I don't got time for that um go to my Dev leader channel it's called quartz like like the crystal quartz uh quartz.net is uh the job scheduling framework that I'm using it's really cool I really enjoy it and basically I'm uh I'm queuing up your schedule Post in quartz um now I'm not I'm not totally set on using

it's going to be kind of weird to explain quarts itself self as a job scheduling framework okay so if you have a scheduled post conceptually you could say Well when someone makes a scheduled post why not just go make the Court's job for it sorry that was a big yawn I just held it in um and you could you could go say at the time someone wants to schedule a post make the Court's job that will trigger it sometime but it makes me a little nervous not because I don't trust but it makes me nervous because I'm I'm literally scheduling like I'm scheduling the piece of functionality that's that's going to go trigger code to execute and I feel much safer I guess is a word to use I feel much safer about about storing the metadata I want to store the post content and

where you want it to go I want to store the metadata for the Post with a schedule time and then last second I want to transform that into a a quartz scheduled job there's different reasons why you may or may not want to do this but my thought process is like what if someone wants to edit a scheduled post if I try to couple all of the scheduled posting stuff into a courts job now I kind of feel like I'm coupling things together that I don't really feel good about and I would uh again my my design philosophy here is like I would much rather keep the concept of a scheduled post sort of in my my own domain I don't want to have it tied to courts I want to be able to have my own database tables for it I want to represent

a post we can build edit update functionality whatever and then when it's time to actually take care of the posting right at that point I will translate that into a job that will go get queued up to get fired off so to just to briefly explain that last part the big difference that I'm talking about is I'm not using quartz to schedule the job I'm using quartz to go execute the job um and the way that that's done is that the Court's job system technically I could have other instances pick up the like other instance of our service if we went that direction could go pick up that job to go post so if we wanted to go like um to micro services or have configured instances that only do um you know the posting or something like we could we could go that direction

big yawn there we go so that's how I've been building that part and I think it's made me realize there's um the part that actually looks at the schedule that part I probably that's actually like that should be a scheduled job and it's not right now it's like a an asp.net code code asp.net core oh my goodness uh hosted Service uh inside of our web application so I kind of think that that I want to see that as a quartz job but like it feels like it's a better fit but the other reality is right now like it's working uh and I've just written all the tests for the um scheduled post one that we'll go look at the schedule for that works the I already said this in the video works the same way as the top extreme one so I'm kind of like

hey look man it's not broken like why like fix it if it's not broken and I don't think that I'm going to spend the time on that now I like it as an option I like knowing that it's there but right now if someone were to say well Nick what's the benefit of doing that I I would just say it seems like a better fit kind of seems like a crappy reason to go spend time writing code on that so I'm not for now but we will see um I'm just checking I'm going to be almost late for a meeting the doctor's appointment was a little longer than I thought but I'll make it home on time which is good news uh what else what else that's the schedule post stuff so the part that I mentioned that we're probably going to defer a little

bit and see if they're still interested this is the real estate company is going to be visualizing a schedule for that because it becomes like a it's not it's not easy to show all this stuff on a calendar it's a bit of a pain in the butt so um we got to see we'll come up with something for that but uh I don't know it like I said it's it's just not it's difficult to make it feel intuitive because it's already like not super intuitive with the top extremes and I should try to clarify what I mean by that um so with a topic stream it recurs on a weekly basis okay so when we show you a calendar view it's a weekly view it's not an absolute date okay so if that makes sense now we have another view where you can see like

what's up and coming on specific dates but the current calendar view shows you a week like Monday through Sunday and it will say on Monday here's the topic streams that are firing at these times but it's not absolute dates what's very different about a scheduled post or a one-off post right is like that's going to have a specific date so we need to make sure that our calendar view is is representing truly what people want to see so um it's just it's not impossible but right now it's just it's a lot more work and I think personally that before we go commit to go doing a whole bunch of that right now we should we should see if they're interested because right now if no one else is asking for it there's a lot of other stuff that people are asking for that we should

look at so that's kind of like our priority order right I'll kind of try to summarize it but we have feature asks from a group kind of preemptively we want to pitch to them our initial offering which does not have those features but we have started building in the background some of those features and uh if they are interested in pursuing working with us then we'll continue to build out those features um and then hopefully that will demonstrate to them as well like we're serious about building the things that help them right um and I I mentioned that I'm currently building some of that backend functionality so that we're not too far behind on being able to deliver it if they're ready to move forward but but I think that's kind of where we're at with that set of features so it's pretty cool I'm

happy about it in terms of uh cuz one of the last couple videos I made was talking about testing in terms of where we're at for testing that I have a bunch of the um a bunch of pieces of that scheduled post system like uh being exercised with functional test so I feel pretty good about a bunch of it there's a couple spots I just want to make sure I have more automated coverage on and should be easy to do I feel like I said I feel good about that I'm not nervous but I I just got to get it done and uh and then I should be ready to go try it like uh running it end to end and and truly like hitting a web API with content I want to post and seeing it go it across my social platforms I'm really

excited for that I think that's going to be super cool it's uh reminds me of like the first time I I actually brought content into brand GH cuz I've been us i' mentioned this before I've been using brand ghost as an API to go post out across social platforms but when I started pulling in my own content into brand ghost and having it do like on its own like the scheduling uh the first topic stream that posted was really cool because it was like man like it's happening like this is it working so I'm excited to see that kind of stuff work for the first time and it's been it's been working ever since so it's been pretty cool um yeah I'm running out of ideas here but it's pretty exciting I think I think it's good to see that the the group of us

are like that we're all excited it's not it's not like other people are getting burnt out from it like and I know the other guys are working super hard too so that's like a it's something like a Feelgood thing where none of us are like every one of us is working hard at it uh it means some calls that especially for the other guys like it's pretty late for them so it's late nights it's challenging problems it's you know us debating things together and it's not like they're getting uh burnt out from it or like fed up right like okay we'll screw this like this is it's not it's not too much work is maybe how I would say it and it's a it's a cool thing to say because it obviously is is work we're like we're doing this thing to build this software

it is work but even though it's challenging we're enjoying building it together and I think that makes a huge difference because you know it'd be so easy to just give up and say like why bother right it's hard work who cares it would be so easy to just not go work on this like right get so much more time back for for doing other stuff like great cool I could nap longer everything um but it's actually fun to go build these things and uh I'm just glad that the other guys are enjoying it too it's it feels like kind of selfish if like this is something that I can leverage and um and they're like that's nice but like this sucks to build for example I would feel bad and like that's not the case right now it's actually really cool um that like this

is an idea that I kind of started with but you know even last night right we were on a call together and uh and like I had to leave early and they stuck around and they're on the call like it's they're they're motivated and it's just it's exciting to see so that makes me feel good it's energizing for me um so I feel good about it but I am home dogs are barking I got a meeting I'll see you guys later take care