Week Two - The Editmode Dilemma
Hi friends,
For most of you this is the first email you'll be receiving from me, and it's a bit of a monster. Reading back on it now, it’s way too detailed, but cutting it down will take even longer and I’ve already spent too long on it. The next one will be shorter, promise 😬. Here’s some context from the intro post, which most of you should also have received…
If we met in the past few weeks, it’s likely I promised to keep you in the loop as the project progresses. So this substack is me following through on that. The idea is that over the coming months I’ll circulate periodic emails which will consist of 1. Short updates on how the project itself is progressing, 2. My evolving thinking on the product and the space in general, and 3. Links, videos, resources and articles I come across.
I’ll try to keep it as interesting as possible, but please feel no obligation to stay subscribed if it’s not your thing! If it is your thing, engagement in the form of responses or even the like button is much appreciated to remind me I’m not shouting into a void.
Non-technical people, feel free to skip anything tagged with the 🤓 emoji to prevent the eyes from glazing over.
With that, let’s kick off.
This week was interesting - I had a lot of forward momentum but also felt a bit stuck. Part of the purpose of writing this email is to force me to clarify my thoughts and make the options a little clearer. Thankfully I'm not in any major rush at the moment.
First, some of the interesting happenings from the week:
I set up a Ghost blog and jotted a draft of "Great Horizontal Products", which was a collection of thoughts about product that came out of my US visit.
On twitter, I announced that I had left First Circle and was working on new things, and started a thread on some software opinions. The announcement got a much better reception than I expected - it was lovely to see the positivity and encouragement from people.
I got accepted to OnDeck: An SF-based 6 week program designed for people who are "in between" roles, targeted at mainly US based, experienced people in tech. They do a good job at marketing and seem to have had really strong people go through, but because they're new it is tough to know whether it's worthwhile. It starts March 7 & costs $1200, although they don't take equity.
I decided to go ahead with traveling to Asia. I spent a half day researching coronavirus and concluded that, while it is going to get worse, the worst case scenario is probably that I'll have to leave early and fly back to Ireland. I'm writing this from the plane. The plan is to be in Japan until next Tuesday and Manila until early March.
I finally replaced the 2012 Macbook I'd been using with the new 16 inch. I'd been waiting until February to avoid dipping into my savings - a rare display of personal financial discipline and hopefully a sign of things to come.
I bought the Nokia 2720 Flip phone. I'm planning on starting to experiment with cutting screen time, particularly at night and in the morning, by making the experience so unbearable that I can't do it for more than a few minutes. Will report back on how that goes.
✆ Call: Alex from First Round. She was super helpful - took me through their "co-founder dating" program and sent me a fairly comprehensive form to fill out to get connected to the network, and after the call connected me to an immigration lawyer. I told her I was going to write and build an audience, and she offered to amplify it to her networks which was a very nice gesture. Will reach out to her once I get back to SF.
🤓 ✆ Call: Eric, who I reached out to on twitter. He created a library called Codelift which layers a very nice visual UI on top of your existing react components and piggybacks on SPC CSS frameworks like tailwind to make it super simple but lightweight to change styling without breaking other parts of your app. This is exactly the direction I'm thinking with the Uno UI editor. He's clearly an excellent programmer but also has a great eye for polished product and feels strongly about replacing code editors with interfaces where they're not needed. It's good to know there are people out there thinking along the same lines and it gives me encouragement that the right co-founder is out there, as he was exactly the kind of profile I'd be looking to partner with. He was also a big fan of open source - in his view there's a way to build an abstraction layer that allows you to connect interfaces like Codelift and Blocks UI to data sources without needing to be part of the same bundled product, but we got cut off before we could go into that. My current view is that'd be difficult to do but I love the idea of building something Open Core, now that that model seems to have been proven out, and this thinking is along those lines.
✆ Call: US immigration lawyer who Paul set me up with. I wanted to understand the path to getting a visa if I decide to move to the US. He was oddly confident that I'd be able to get the O Visa - he noted they're getting more strict but that just meant they might ask to clarify a few things. He said it would cost around $6.5k all in would and would take 10 to 12 weeks, which is good to know. Interestingly, after the call I came across Passright which costs $1200 and seems to automate the whole process.
✆ Call: Dennis from Foundation.co, a new nocode tool similar to Forest Admin targeting internal tools. Was interesting to see how he was thinking about it. We both agreed there are many different ways to approach the problem, and said we'd keep in touch with each other as we progress.
Podcast: Emmanuel, co-founder of Bubble. Bubble is probably the closest thing out there to what we want to build. We share the same philosophy and probably many of the same technical challenges. This quote from him hit home.
"We spent 7 years bootstrapping and building slowly before we raised any money. If we had raised a seed round, Bubble wouldn't be here today. We would have been pressured, either by ourselves or our investors, to rush and pursue short term gains at the expense of the long term vision"
It's quite unlikely we'll need 7 years to build Uno, but he still gets at something important: The moment we raise money from an official source (not family & friends) is the moment the pressure is on to launch something to the public - whether that's pressure applied by them, or created by us. I want to be careful and intentional about when we choose to do that.
Ok, so back to the title of the email. What the hell is Editmode?
🤓 Technical jargon incoming…
Editmode is a product, API, and collection of plugins I started developing about 5 years ago, to solve the recurring problem I had of giving non-developers access to super seamlessly edit the text and image content on a website without needing a developer, and without completely breaking the site. It's *very* rough around the edges and not quite ready for public launch, but we used it in production for a few years at First Circle. It's technically a headless CMS, but it's different to the slew of other CMSes popping up at the minute in that 1. It has inline editing at its core with editmode.js, and 2. The text editor plugins make adoption very low friction (See point 2 in "Great Horizontal Products"). Because it's a horizontal product it has a lot of potential use cases, but some specific ones I identified were:
Agencies that build mid-budget client websites, normally for small businesses or marketing sites for larger businesses. By moderate estimates there are 75,000 of these in Europe, 45,000 in the US, and each could in theory use Editmode for multiple clients, with multiple seats. They're pretty easy to find and reach through cold email, and the value prop seems quite strong for them.
Small business owners who have a site and want to be able to edit it. I had an idea here that would be easy to hack together, of a flow that allows website owners to enter their website URL and launch a popup that shows their site in Edit Mode (before the library has been integrated 😱) - they can change any of the text and images there and then but their changes will only be visible to them, not others on the internet. Then there's a "Save" button that when they click, connects them to a contractor who can convert their existing site for them. And boom, they're converted and locked in.
Landing page builders - There seems to be a new no-code landing page builder popping up every week on ProductHunt. These are very powerful but they tend to either 1. Not export a finished site, or 2. Have no Edit Mode that doesn't also expose a high fidelity layout modifier. I'd guess there's a market of people using these generators to build sites for customers, who they'd want to give the ability to change the content to, without exposing the full-fledged builder functionality. In theory we could partner with these products and they could integrate with the Editmode API to give their users this ability in a single click. This'd be a pretty powerful Platform play.
But why am I talking about this? Isn't Uno The Big Thing I’m working on? Well, yes, but...
I was reminded in conversations this week of something that's always given me an enormous amount of joy - "Shipping". I love the process of building a product in general, but the moment it's put out into the world is by far the most exciting. Some of my strongest memories are being the engine room as the machine is turned on and watching the users begin to roll in and judge the work. It's magic. This is also true for most of the best people I've worked with. People get energy from launching. I'd estimate in a best case scenario we're still at least 12 months from shipping anything Uno related. That's a long time.
I'm a chronic non-finisher of projects. But there have been a small number that I've seen through to launch, such as 100minds, Letterbox and First Circle, that continue to provide value to others and satisfaction to me, to this day. I've sunk hundreds of hours into Editmode, and I still feel strongly that it's a thing that *should just exist* in the world.
I'm an avid listener/reader of Indie Hackers, and I love the idea of creating a thing that earns recurring revenue while I sleep, particularly if I'm about to launch into a multi-year high risk venture that's not guaranteed to succeed and is likely to burn through savings. Yesterday I read through some more of the stories on their site, like this guy who's at $22k MRR after a year with just himself, or this guy who launched a product similar to Editmode and is at $27k MRR. Here are all the projects which started as side projects which are now making over $10k MRR. I keep wondering, if I launched Editmode, could it grow slowly, semi-organically in the background, or be taken on and run by someone with more time.
All of this is to say: I've been toying with the idea of working 30% of the time on Editmode over the next few months to help keep the creative juices flowing that may be needed to sustain the long period of time before we ship anything Uno related. In a bad scenario, it doesn't take off and we kill it after a month or two. In a great scenario, it begins generating decent recurring revenue, we hand it off to someone to run it, and the revenue it generates eases the pressure when it comes to building Uno, potentially evening allowing us to fund a hire or two.
The two roadblocks here are 1. Is this actually a good idea, and 2. If so, how do I fund it. Right now, I have personal runway until the end of April, but at that point I'll need to either continue consulting work or raise a *family & friends* round to pay salary for myself and one or two contractors until Q3 when I become more liquid. I spoke to a few friends this week and the reception wasn't bad. One offered to invest $25k provided he was exposed to the Uno upside, which was a good vote of confidence. Another suggested using a safe and sending around a demo video and one-pager to gauge interest. But people understandably struggled to get their head around the Editmode/Uno thing. I'd be super interested to hear people's thoughts on this, if you want to hit the reply button.
Reflections
I really liked WeWork as a base this week. Having open space, sunlight, and people around meant I was productive while I was on the laptop and could chill out when I wasn't. I'd been a bit worried about the social isolation that'd result from not doing the 9 to 5 any more, so that was a great development. I'd say I probably got 2 to 3x more done there I would have sitting at home. Having a buddy there to bounce ideas off and take breaks with was also great - thanks Rich! Going to try to get a similar setup when I get to Manila with WeWork BGC, who wants to be my buddy?
An obvious one — but it's crazy the degree to which progress can be accelerated by setting up external obligations like scheduled meetings or emails. Interestingly travel is also a great forcing function for this. Knowing that I had a Japan flight booked on Thursday forced me to set up chats with friends and potential funders and to finesse the pitch for both Editmode & Uno. Some of those chats went better than others, but crucially I now have a lot more information than I did a week ago about how people think about the friends and family/seed round. If I was in Dublin for another few weeks this easily would have been prolonged and I'd probably be writing the exact same email at the end of February.
Most of the people I follow in the Tools For Thought space are passionate about giving people freedom to be more creative with their PCs. It struck me that my philosophy differs from theirs: I technically want to limit the range of things people can do, but make exploration of ideas within that space much more seamless. The premise is that a lot of creative energy is wasted re-building the same stuff, and if you remove that busy work by providing guard rails, you give engineers more time for needle moving things and proper creative work. So it's a little more nuanced.
ERP is technically the ultimate use case for Uno. In a way Uno is "ERP for everyone". But I still know very little about the ERP space, and haven't seen any large scale systems in action. This article was a really great primer for me. But I plan on pulling on this thread more over the coming weeks and months. I don't think selling billion dollar, years long enterprise contracts is where I want to take Uno, but I do think there'd be quite a lot of conceptual inspiration to be taken from the space.
🤓I need to sharpen my javascript skills. I much prefer working in OOP/Ruby land over functional/javascript land, but the latter are the skills I'm going to need to build out Uno, and because I've only been building as a hobby for the past year or two, my skills are rusty, to say the least. Even just improving my knowledge of the yarn/npm eco-system would be a good start. I'm planning to finish out a PWA this week with the consulting gig, so that should help a lot.
I need a better name than Uno. It’s the simplest I’ve come up with so far, but it’s not right. I like the idea of a simple one-word name that can stand on its own as a strong brand. Ideas on a postcard please…
Where to from here...
I expect the next week to be a down week with regard to Uno. I'm in Japan until Tuesday and will probably be knocked out with jet lag. I also want to focus on my contract work now that myself and Gilles are in the same country. So my focuses for the next 3 weeks are:
Finishing out contracting work.
Re-building a healthy routine.
Continuing to refine Uno thinking and pitch, particularly around the use cases and explaining it first time to people, so that it's in a better place to communicate to people if and when I get to SF again.
Completing a review on the amount of work it would take to get Editmode to launch-ready, including best and worse case revenue projections to assess whether or not it would be worth it. Have a final decision made by February 28 on whether to scrap it or continue with it.
Links & references
Last week's email - this only went out to 4 people as I didn't have much to report - it was mainly about a conversation I had with Colm Tuite, who raised $4.2m.
Nathan Latka's report with revenue numbers for hundreds of B2B saas companies. It's fascinating to compare with the Indie Hackers stories.
What is SAP? - a great review of the ERP space.
Passright - US O Visas
Nokia 2720 - $90 on Amazon
Wrapping up
Given the size of this email, it's likely that I'll lay off a big update for a few weeks. As it was the first one with the full mailing list, I'd really appreciate feedback on what you thought was good or bad, and any suggestions or thoughts.