The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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Season 3, Issue 4: Cosmic Staggering Tortoises
1. Weekly Studio Update
Hello. We're going to try doing this newsletter thing regularly. The ambitious goal is to write you a lovely letter every week. Aim for the moon, right? But wait, if you aim for the moon, how in this physical world can you possibly hit a star by accident?
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Strong Prototypes, Weakly Held
Excuse any obtuse thoughts that make their way into this writing. I sat down to type with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne as my soundtrack. This is an album I've never listened to before, and apparently I'm supposed to love it or hate it. Mostly the Internet told me this could be a decent album to work to, so let's find out.
(I'm not going to look, but I'm pretty sure Strunk & White would tell me not to capitalize that "in" in the album title. Yet when I look at Apple Music the title has an "In." Spotify has an "In" and a "The" and an "Of." And people give Wikipedia a hard time?)
So about that title. We here at Good Enough have decided to enter a season of prototyping. Our company has a goal to reach sustainability within five years. As with all time, the end of 2027 will likely come sooner than we think. Yet we are planning to spend all of this first year as a full team on things that are not clearly going to pave the road to profitability. Goodness, why?
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Season 3, Issue 3: Cosmic Maelstrom
1. Team Full
It's exciting times over here at Good Enough HQ!
(There is no Good Enough HQ. I'd say it's in the cloud, but even clouds are now looked down upon as dirtyish things that should not be enjoyed. And not because of air pollution per se, though perhaps because of industry in a sense?)
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Our ChatGPT Mission Statement
What follows is an edited transcript of my interaction with ChatGPT to help craft a mission statement for Good Enough. The resulting mission statement was surprisingly good and I had some literal LOLs along the way. Though I think we'll leave out the haiku.
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Actual Customer Support Is Remarkable
What a sad thing to write.
We believe in good software around here. There is a lot of poorly built software on the Internet and in the app stores. Our motivation with Good Enough is to try to put together a few products that feel just right to the folks using them. The things we build, especially those things we charge for, should respect the customer by streamlining something for them that used to be hard. We hope people enjoy using our software, while also not trying to dopamine-hit them such that it becomes addictive.
While we'll do our best, there are still going to be times where we fail in our mission; especially in the beginning as we're figuring out just how a software should work. Those are the times where polite, helpful customer support helps out. Whether a company decides to do this with phone, email, chat, or a combination isn't nearly as important as a human response in a reasonable time.
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PEOs are Good Enough (for us)
Hi, I’m Patrick. Good Enough brought me on as a part-time Operations Manager who basically does all the things that Shawn and Barry don’t want to do! My first task was to set up payroll for Good Enough’s three employees, something we thought would maybe be worth talking about!
If you intend to build a serious business, you’ll probably end up hiring some people. Once you’ve gotten over the exhilarating high of finding a perfect candidate, you’ll quickly realize that hiring someone has obligated you to legal and tax compliance whack-a-mole. There’s federal, state, and sometimes local (hello NYC!) rules that need to be followed just to keep someone on the payroll (and if your new hire is remote and resides out of state, don’t forget all the rules for that state). You’ll also get the ultimate American experience of providing healthcare for people who don’t really want you involved in their healthcare experience but who often have no better option.
All of this tedious bureaucracy might really sap the enthusiasm you had for your new custom dog stroller business. Don’t you wish you could just make someone else do all the bureaucratic stuff so you can focus on the latest in dog stroller trends? Maybe you can…
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: Use randomness to prevent email trimming
With conversation threading (which almost everyone has enabled), Gmail was trimming the bottom of the emails we send with our new app because they were too similar to the other emails in the conversation thread.
They’re similar because that’s just the link to get back into the app—you know, the important bit to keep our users engaged! Having that trimmed is bad.
The solution to this is silly: Gmail will not trim content if it’s always unique, so now we add a unique/random number to the bottom of every email we send. Insert eye roll.
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Asking the Right Question
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've spread the word enough that there's now a steady stream of new users coming in each day. So, what's next?
Portrait of the author pondering My first impulse was to answer this question: How do we get people to come back and spend more time on Album Whale?
Following that questions, I came up with a list of ideas on how to get people's attention so that they'd use Album Whale more often. But something didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a whole night of sleep to figure out what was wrong.
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Season 3, Issue 2: Britney Coltrane
1. I ❤️HR
The past two weeks Barry and Lettini have been building our next little project, and I tried to deal with the company-side of work: setting up payroll, health insurance, and making sure we’re compliant (hello, bureaucracy!). Back in the day when Danny and I started Iridesco, we had to get on the phone (this was before the iPhone and we had a real telephone) and call people—like a health insurance broker—and fill out a bunch of paperwork.
It’s a different world today and now there are apps for all this HR quagmire. We’re using Justworks, which seems good enough. It’s impressive how they’re able to conceal most of the stink of the rotten business of health insurance (such a shitty, gross, and prohibitively expensive product).
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Good Enough, A Serious Business
Hello reader, my name is Shawn, and I'm one of the co-founders of Good Enough. I'd like to tell you a bit about how Good Enough came to be and what we plan on doing here.
Barry and I started working together again in early 2022. By “work,” I mean that I’d show up on Slack for a couple of hours each day, make some wise cracks, try to design in Photoshop and give up, and once in a while wrote some poor HTML and CSS. (Barry probably worked a lot more––somebody had to do the heavy lifting!)
Our first public project was DoEvery.Day, and then we didn’t do much for the rest of the year until we met up again in the fall to work on Album Whale.
For me, this half-ass effort wasn’t cutting it. I wasn’t proud of my work, and I felt like I was often not there for Barry. I felt like I had to make a choice: either leave Good Enough and go back to making Neophyte all day, or take it more seriously.