This is a monthly update where I share what I’ve been working on recently. For the previous installment, check out my December 2022 Update.

It’s been nice getting back into the swing of things after some time off around the holidays! As I talked about in my 2022 year in review, I’m trying to shake off my product tunnel vision and focus on marketing and sales in the new year.

Getting down to business

Before I actually got into sales and marketing, though, I had to do some adulting.

After some debate about C corps vs. LLCs and home-state vs. Delaware, I created an Oregon LLC for Teaminal, so I’m no longer a sole proprietor. I can’t wait for the junk mail to start rolling in!

I also opened a dedicated business bank account with Mercury, which was a very slick experience. Next up, I have to decide between Xero and QuickBooks Online. Fun stuff!

Sales and marketing

For marketing, I think technical people mostly don’t want to be sold to, they want to search for solutions. So I’m hoping to build up traffic with SEO, which means link building and content creation.

Blog overhaul

In anticipation of writing more content, I added images to blog posts, updated the blog page to look a little nicer, and added tags to posts.

Sales

I followed up with some prospects I’d been chatting with before the holidays, but need to start pounding the pavement more.

Product

I also shipped some product improvements! Nothing huge, just keeping things rolling. I am getting real excited about some GPT-powered AI features I have in the works, though.

Improved navigation

I think this is the second or third major tweak to the top nav, but I think I’ve finally settled on something that works, and it’s a lot more obvious now how to create a retro, poker, or refine.

Show issue titles

On status updates and retros where I show recent activity, I wanted to provide a bit more context. So now instead of just “Brad closed DEV-123”, I show “Brad closed DEV-123: Show title in status/retro issues”.

Slack improvements

For status updates and retros, I now show the associated Jira issues and GitHub PRs in the Slack message about them, vs. previously I just showed the count. This makes it easier to see what’s going on without having to click through to Teaminal.

Fixes & Improvements

In addition to the items above, I also shipped a few small fixes and improvements:

• Fix bug where “Your contributions” would show up on retros for the wrong time period
• Fix bug where the initial retro, pointing poker, and refine that’s created when you sign up was sending notification emails
• Improve loading time of team settings page by consolidating duplicate API calls
• Send an email to users when their account is deleted

Update: The February 2023 Update is the next post in this series.