2011 Wrap-up

The year after the year we make contact is nearly done.

In January I set four major goals for myself: keep running, start a software company that turns any amount of profit, practice making music for fun (and no other reason but fun,) and refresh all of my open source GitHub repositories.

All told, I think I did pretty well: I run a 5k every other day. GetCloak is profitable and is going to hit v1.0 quite soon. On the music front, I’m nearly done with the 52.WKS Project!

It’s not all roses, though. Aside from keeping my iOS Artwork Extractor up to date, I didn’t have time to keep GitHub in good shape. Cloak is beset with fraud and abuse; we’re barely keeping on top of it. We’ve been forced to build a number of new “bad guy detection” features that have taken time away from building the cool new features that our honest users will actually care about. And while Cloak is profitable, it’s not yet profitable to the point where Nick, Peter, and I can pay ourselves solid market salaries.

To be fair, when we started Bourgeois Bits LLC we thought that we were going to be an Apple “product factory.” We were going to crank out maybe two top-shelf apps per year and sell them in the Mac and iOS App Stores. We still like that vision, but GetCloak doesn’t quite fit it: after all, we’ve built a service. It’s now clear that our highest priority is to grow that service and make sure we’ve found a meaningful product/market fit — at the moment, we’re far too small to know whether we’ve found it.

Oh, and I didn’t get a chance to do any dangercasts. Nor did Amy and I get a chance to travel abroad this year.

What will 2012 bring? I plan to: keep running, try to build Cloak into a meaningfully profitable company (or make the hard call and abandon it by the end of the year,) ship one piece of solo software for fun, study Chopin’s preludes, and travel somewhere for at least a couple of weeks.