u/Stegles

Hi Team,

I've recently filled a team lead/manager role of a small engineering team. 2 months in I had 1 guy leave, I hadn't properlly taken over the team and as I have recently found out, he was somewhat pushed out. It took almost 4 months to find a replacement and get them onboard.

The end of my new hires first week, my senior has resigned on a friday. He requested access removal from prod (fair) to avoid liability, but I still need him to do a proper knowledge transfer and train up our new hire to replace him properlly.

After 2 work days after resigning, i've barely seen him online. His handover was honestly terrible (not that he should have even done one yet), and is WFH due to a medical issue impacting his mobility (which I confimed he could do, but I needed his support still). His medical issue does not impact his ability to do the job.

With his lack of engagement and support, and really, his lack of willingness to support, i'm thinking to simply ask HR to put him on gardnening leave instead of serving out his notice perriod of 1 month. I feel he will just be a liability and distraction to others rather than a productive or supportive team member.

Technically he is great, but his output for the last 3 months has been very poor anyway so I don't really see the value in keeping him around the office outside of the handover.

FWIW I have no ill will towards him, his reasons for leaving I fully understand and i feel are justified (nothing bad), at the same time, the performance i've seen of him, and his past reviews, I probably wouldn't consider him for rehire. He's a dedicated family man and ultimately the role (by his own admission) was a stepping stone to relocation and never a long term prospect for him anyway, so its run its course.

I'm interested in some other perspective, happy to clarify any points, but I want to assess if i'm in the wrong here.

TIA.

Hi friends, some of you might remember my post from a. Few weeks back about when to launch. Well the app after multiple rounds of back and forth with Apple, landed on the App Store and is live in most countries. First review took about 2 weeks then follow ups took usually within 24-48 hours for minor fixes. All in all about 3 weeks not including the week I got nothing done due to being bed ridden sick for 3 days.

Now as much as I would love to spam my app that’s against the sub rules, if a mod gives me direct approval I can drop the name.

To briefly explain it though, it collects form news sources around the world in many different languages, classified stories and aggregates. By doing this it removes some bias as a byproduct (think if you had news form 2 opposing sides of a war, you get an average), and gives you access to news markets in languages you can’t read normally. That’s a bit of the back end but barely scratches the surface.

It the delivers to you, a personalised news podcast, with the news you want to hear, and removing the scrolling and duplication of stories. Honestly if you’re good with ai agents, you’re probably doing this already but I packaged it nicely.

The infrastructure behind it is pretty insane for what it is, but it’s built for scale. I won’t go too much into it because that’s not my point here.

Obviously dropping it on the App Store and hoping for the best is unlikely to yield results, I realise I need to advertise, and I’m building a blog like story about the development of it for my linked in (I have in the ball park of about 1200 connections, so reasonable reach.

I’ve built everything on a budget. But in doing so I’ve heavily optimised. I realise at some point I will need to spend some money on advertising, but today is not that day. My goal now is to get to 500ish trial users with around 100-200 conversions to paid users within a 2-3 months, is that realistic?

My big concern and an honest one is the infra while scalable, is hardware intense. If I scale beyond 1000 daily users I will be in trouble hardware wise and will need to spend significant money (around 10-20k in compute hardware minimum, small potatoes really in the bigger picture). I mention this only because I don’t want to rapidly explode in users. I know my product is good, but I also know there are limits to the actual user base I can serve presently before service degrades. So if I can get 100 monthly users that keeps the lights on and lets me plan infra, 200 puts me in the ball park of buying second hand hardware, 500 puts me squarely in the take a day out of my day job and go and spend money today and ramp up user capacity.

My focus initially is getting friends to download it, get some stats on the board for it. If they like it, maybe they show a friend or family member etc and I get some users that way, slow growth.

Anyway happy to answer any questions around it, any advice would be great, comments and criticism also are welcome. If you want to nerd out on some of the architecture happy to go there too but with limits publicly. This isn’t something that can easily be built and replicated so I’m not concerned about that happening.

TIA.

Hi all,

This has been somewhat eating me up. I’ve built an app which so far I’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback on, I’m not here to pitch it so I’ll simply say it’s for personalised news delivery in a different way to what’s on the market.

I’m a network engineer by trade with a very deep tech understanding of software development, systems engineering, a/b testing, edge case handling etc. so I’ve made my app and infrastructure extremely robust.

It uses AI for content sorting and delivery, but not creation. It cannot be done deterministically, I’ve tried many times, and obviously ai has a cost.

Some of the challenges I’ve had is making it cost viable, which is where I’m almost at, initially I estimated my operating costs to be around 5
$3-5 a day however it has ballooned out to be about. $15-20, not huge but plenty of room for optimisation. I believe I’ve now optimised costs enough by reducing ai token usage by about 70+%, most importantly, I have reduced the number I’ve called down from up to 2600 per hour down to about 80. I’ve managed to do this with about a 3-7% reduction in quality, which I think is acceptable. I still have some further optimisations to do but that’s the bulk of it.

Currently my infrastructure can support around anout 1200 daily users, more than that and I have to invest in better dedicated hardware or duplicating my current physical environments, very doable and I’ve built everything to be scalable to the point I can stand up an entire instance in about 10 minutes and have it fully integrate and load balance within 30 minutes. Essentially I’ve built it to scale easily from day 1.

If I can onboard 100 paying customers (billed at $8 usd/mo), it covers my current costs, so I think that bar is pretty low and pretty attainable. If I hit 1000, i will need to scale, and it goes beyond 10k, even for 1 month, I would be taking out loans to scale rapidly and taking some time away from my full time work.

So there is some level of a plan.

I’ve been building this for about 5 months and I think it’s ready but I’ve never done anything like this before. I have no marketing background, no idea how to do it nothing.

I guess what I’m looking for is traps, gotchas and things to watch out for when building subscription model apps. Obviously there’s user retention to maintain revenue, the app itself isn’t one which will simply go out of fashion, it isn’t a gimmick and it’s something that is genuinely useful to literally anyone in the productivity and information space.

How do you know when you’ve got enough of the bugs out to launch, and get yourself away from polishing everything out till it sparkles, and balancing the acceptable bugs with launching sooner? I’m really struggling with this part. It’s not scope creep holding me back, I genuinely have a feature list for if and when it takes off.

Hoping for some words of wisdom. Sorry for the length, this is literally my source of anxiety right now.

Edit: forgot to add one of my biggest concerns, if there is a failure which impacts users, how do I handle this? The general idea would be to give users an extended sub, but doing this has real costs, I can do this once I’m going but on launch it could be crippling. On the flip side it’s far easier to compensate 100 users than 10000

Edit 2: I would just like to extend my gratitude to all of you who have responded with supportive advice, and really validating my process, it really lets me know I’m on the right track in terms of process, priorities and mindset for the most part. Thank you to those of you who shared your experience.

I’ve run the pre-work run (it takes a full 24 hours to run due to the nature of the app ingesting real world data and keeping it both fresh and valid within a rolling 24 hour window), and I’m in the process of setting up the final parts for iOS store launch. For the first week or so I’ll only be posting it in limited counties of those who I know will take a look, ie friends and family, and if there’s any organic pickup, great, if not it’s more about the initial listing and getting a wider audience test base.
After a week or so of real user testing, I’ll open it up to the rest of the world and see how it goes.

Some minor bugs I know exist: notification sounds not working, notification icon using the original temporary generic icon. Can’t seem to fix these but not 100% important.