Last Friday, I received the unfortunate news that our investors didn't want to give enough funding to sustain a salary for both me and the CSO, maintaining a low burn rate until a more advanced round. That left me with the ability to only work 14 hours a week with my previous rate. Because of this, I've started to look elsewhere for employment, because even though I really enjoy the work environment and even the product that we're working on, I can't really sustain myself on that low of an income.
Regardless, going back to earlier in the week, my main goal was to change our trial system. The CEO wanted me to change it so that the CC trial prompt started after you did all the onboarding stuff instead of in the middle, and this was surprisingly complex.
The way the code was set up was a needlessly complex web of back and forth handshakes between the frontend and the backend, a process that could definitely stand to be made a lot neater and less error-prone. It took me an entire day just to figure out how it was even doing this back-and-forth exchange without absolutely letting the house of cards fall flat.
After much trial and error, I did manage to get a preliminary version of it working, but I ran into two bugs, in which you were able to skip the trial prompt and use the full app if you just refreshed the page on the last step, and there was also another bug where it would skip the last message and thus the bot would not have the proper prompt to get you initiated on working on a to-do list.
These two were relatively easy to remedy, just took a lot of effort due to the very delicate nature of the aforementioned web of handshakes that it had to go through. To add a single prompt, you have to make sure it gets added to at least five different points in the code, across both the backend and the frontend. This was also the cause of a bug the prior week that broke the onboarding functionality again because there were just way too many points to update every time. I need to engineer a better solution for that.
After that was solved and pushed out to production, I wanted to get our new customer service platform Intercom integrated into the site, but I was met with the unfortunate news that I mentioned in the first paragraph, so I felt a little demotivated from continuing my work there.
I do have hopes that the investors change their mind and do end up giving us more funding, because the app is really important to everyone involved, but such things unfortunately cannot be forced. I will continue searching regardless. Hopefully I can find a part-time job or a contract that will keep me busy until we get seeded, because Comigo is definitely something I like working on.
Anyway, until next time, cheers.
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