Jordan Young

Been smaller amount of work on Reflecta over last couple weeks, as we work on nailing down the core problem we are solving. But some quick updates on some small things in the time as well:

North-star metric

• Identifying niche problem we are solving through Reflecta

What did i get done?

• Cleaning up production issues, mainly regarding accounts in bad states due to stripe integrations
• Onboarding sessions with 2 distinct user groups - founders/business owners and professionals in the finance industry (investment banking)
• Small improvements based on some consistent user feedback (mostly styling and content changes)

Learnings/New thoughts

• Having too many features in the beginning can distract users from the core of a product
• Interesting insights from talking to multiple people in finance (possible target user?), heard from multiple people in this field that they would like a sort of "central brain"
• This group is very focused on the organizational part of journaling, having their thoughts and notes indexed for them through a singular interface was an exciting thought
• From another onboarding (with founder who uses professional coaching), like's format from coaches of "you're going through X, I'd suggest Y, based on this learning from Z". Basically the "connecting of dots". Believe this could be the other potential "core functionality" for this founder user group

What is limiting right now?

• Finding founders (ideal user) to onboard and discuss with
• Need to figure out core problem we're solving, before continuing with building on new features

Goals for this week (assuming not full week again for now)

• Talk to at least 3 more people in finance space, get understanding of how they currently organize
• Ideally, figure out this "core problem" that we're solving, all though this can (and likely will) take longer than a week
• Organize code base, specifically get better separation for models/configs/prompts and hooks so is easier for other devs to work on and understand if needed

North-star metric

• Discover target customer, and get 10 paying users of this kind of user

What did i get done?

• Some tweaks to existing styling / functionality based on user feedback
• Slight changes to system prompts on afternoon cues
• Production bugs
• Tracking user feedback on generated model responses through posthog
• Account management improvements - cleaning up sign in / sign out
• Improvements to JournalEditor component, removing generated sage nodes and continued work on backspace issue

Learnings/New thoughts

• Had great insights on people working in financial sector from onboarding session - distinction between users who seek organization from journaling, and those who seek clarity / growth from it
• Being aware of testing edge cases on every aspect of a feature when working on a bug (improvement on backspace issue causing issue in production for users with more than 15 morning page entries)

What is limiting right now?

• Trying to narrow the product and which problem it is fixing - and for who?
• For current target of founders, limited access to founders to get feedback from

Goals for this week

• Define a problem for which we are fixing
• Create more of a distinction between brain and sage guide features (user feedback)
• Finalize credit card decision, if still requiring for trial, find solution for users who leave checkout session without paying (possibly a scheduled cloud function to clean up "bad" users)
• Round out user tracking via posthog
• (Possibly holding off on features but) - adding a way for users to interact with their generated cues, maybe something along the lines of having the option to load a cue into the context for sage guide (user feedback here as well)
• (Upon discussion of app release timeline) - whatsapp notification improvements
• backlog of defects

North-star metric

• Getting to 10 users who LOVE the product

What did i get done?

• Lots of production bug fixes that were found after onboarding some users the last couple of weeks
• Freemium v1 - now rather than needing a subscription to access the app what so ever, users can still make use of the journaling features of Reflecta, but are limited in the AI capabilities Sage has to offer.
• Weekly report generation - an insight that summarizes the users past week based on their userContext and progress notes is returned in a markdown format providing users a deeper level insight into their patterns.
• Re-engineering of some prompts to refine the cues that are being returned to users.

Learnings/New thoughts

• Handling edge cases of users when interacting with other products is difficult (e.g. how to handle situation if user leaves stripe checkout session then tries to sign in directly)
• Trying to design database schemas up front, to avoid changes later on. Needing to go back and change existing records or update logic to account for old use schemas becomes difficult as the system grows

Goals for this week

• Modify onboarding flow to not require credit card up front - create customer / subscription / trial in stripe via API but give users access to product without initial credit card
• Get 1 user to upgrade to premium (put in credit card) from new onboarding flow
• More thorough logging / posthog captures to prepare for rapid user growth
• Depending on mobile app timeline, tighten up whatsapp if going to be relying on these notifications for a while longer

North-star metric

• Getting onboarded users to stick around and continue to use Reflecta.

What did i get done?

• Onboarded 3 users onto Reflecta, conducted interviews gathering information about their journaling habits and journies
• Fixed production bugs that arose from onboarding finds
• Fixes for older browsers in onboarding flows
• Introduction of new prompts for morning / afternoon cues with different models
• Injection of userContext field into sage chat, along with progressNote constant regeneration of userContext object

Learnings/New thoughts

• Confusion points for users on current Reflecta build
• Features that want to be seen - reminders, afternoon check in, trackers for days journaled, etc
• Seeing which of the users onboarded enjoy the product the most - who we should be tailoring it for (currently, most active user is one who runs his own business, and already pays for mentorship / coaching)
• Users seem to want things to do, people enjoying prompts / onboarding but sometimes feel like they don't know what to do after.

What is limiting right now?

• Balancing production fixes with new features, deciding on what get's priority while users are actively on the product

Goals for this week

• onboard a few more users, do week check in with ones that have been on for a week now.
• fix production bugs that have been seen
• discuss and decide on best morning reflection cue approach.

North-star metric

• Getting 10 users that love the product

What did i get done?

• Lots of backend sage feature upgrades, e.g userContext generation, progressNotes collection, improved prompt modeling
• Improved handling of scheduled functions to account for users not in eu regions
• Production ready cleanups throughout application
• Stripe finishing touches - coupon codes, adaptive pricing, new price for production product
• Improved sage chat with injection of new userContext
• Couple of new components for better UI experience

Learnings/New thoughts

• Using different sources for debugging, e.g. cloud function logs, posthog captures, vercel logs
• Indexing on fields in new collection - if don't querying works on local but not in live / preview deployment, leading to tough debugging
• Learning how to prioritize work between bugs, features, database management, etc.

Goals for this week

• onboard 10 users onto Reflecta
• clean up any urgent bugs that come out of onboarding sessions

North-star metric

• Getting DNS switched over to new vercel build.
• Reflecta to state where we can once again onboard new users.

What did i get done?

• Production deployment on vercel with DNS switched over
• Database / Stripe customer migration scripts for existing users
• v2 editor changes, especially focused in morning reflection pages

Learnings/New thoughts

• Using scripts to speed up process of migrations
• Importance of practicing things on smaller scale in preparation for higher risk operations down the line
• Looking at design through users perspective, focusing on usability and ease of use without guidance.

Goals for this week

• fixing remaining bugs in production build (whatsapp reminders, v2 editor bugs, etc)
• Add onboarding questionnaire prompts to first morning reflection pages for user journaling guidance.
• creating "chat" breakout session and building prompt for llm around this type.
• Adding more logging through posthog captures to live build.
• Scheduling 5 onboarding sessions for the following week