🙈 Sending it into the wild 🙈
When you click that "submit" button and it eats your heart out
I’m sitting here at the edge of my seat. Do I send it? Does it need a few more sets of eyes on it? Does it even matter what other people have to say…The mind chatter is unbearable. It’s overbearing. It’s overpowering. It’s normal though. We all jostle with our inner voice. That’s why I built Emote. I built Emote to help get out of my own head and onto the page.I undulate between grateful, selfish, joyous, depressed, excitable, ravenous, fearless, fear-stricken, and everything in between. I live with doubt. I battle self-confidence but yet I have the greatest gifts in life. I had to build a beautiful answer to my own problem. I built Emote for everyone who is going through the same thing that I’m going through. I had to build a solution that has a been a time tested method of coping for myself. I had to build something that enabled a daily journaling habit. I intuitively knew journaling could help someone manage their anxiety or improve their mental resiliency but scientifically I was vindicated. I wanted to use technology to help someone start their journey, stay on the journey and build a community around the journey of journaling.
When I officially launched the project I had some pre-conceived notions about what users would want. I had spoken to numerous people about what to incorporate in the product. I had spoken with data scientists on how to structure emotional/sentiment analysis. I had spoken with designers about how to set up the user flow. I had interviewed life-long journalers about their practice. While you can always talk to more people, I had to take my early findings and get building. I hoped my first version would be good enough. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect but there’s power in going public, in putting it all out there, even when its not perfect. So, following startup ethos, I had to move fast and ship it. I was expecting this…
We survived though!
Sure, users didn’t come knocking down our doors on day one. We found that we struck a deep emotional chord with a few power users. We found a bunch of people signed up out of curiosity, only to abandon ship shortly after. We found that a lot of people complimented the landing page and design but few told us how sparkling and wonderful the actual product is. The beauty of all this is that it’s just the beginning. None of this is permanent and what you see today is not what it will ultimately become. We’re on a journey by building Emote, the way our users go through their own journey writing on Emote.
If you’re excited about this project, drop me a line and I’ll keep you posted on our progress & updates (eric@writeemote.com)