The early days of Journal

Next week we’ll share Journal, the product we’ve been building over the past few months, with a small group of family members and close friends.

We’ve talked to hundreds of people to build our understanding of the problem we’re solving, and to choose an initial direction for the product. We’ve written about the problem, and we’ll share product details in an upcoming post. 

As we get ready to share Journal, Mark, Avi, Samiur, and I are grateful to everyone who has talked to us and agreed to use the product at such an early stage. 

To friends who ask us how we’re feeling days before we share our product, we’d like to shed light on the emotions swirling around us…

We’re excited and nervous.

We’ve spent so much time researching, thinking, and talking about Journal — but nothing is quite like giving it to people to use. 

Some aspects of the product will fall flat. Something major could be missing. We’ve made assumptions, but we won’t know for sure until people tell us. What if no one likes it? That’s more data than we have today. What if people are indifferent? We’ll know we’re missing the mark. What if people use it and love it? We’ll be a little suspicious! (And we’ll be glad to know we’re on the right track.)

Every piece of feedback we collect is an opportunity — an opportunity to learn about our future users, their pain points, and where our product can be most helpful. The feedback we’ll gather next week will be more valuable than it has at any point over the past months — it will be the first time we learn from people actually using Journal. We will learn how they work, how we can make them feel more capable, and what parts of the product aren’t useful.

Building something from scratch has been a lesson in humility. 

We’ve spent our days wrestling with the uncertainties of what Journal is, why it’s worth building, who it’s for, and how it’s helpful. Answering confidently when people ask those questions is not easy. All four of us have deflected questions about our startup. 

We’re ready for those conversations to get a bit easier now that we have a product we can point to.

I’ll speak for the rest of the team and admit, we’re f*cking excited to share Journal.

Following our Journey 

After next week’s limited rollout, we’ll continue to make changes to Journal. As we incorporate feedback to make the product more useful, we’ll invite more people to kick it around.

If you’d like to follow our journey and take Journal for a spin, we’d love to meet you. Join the Journal waitlist and don’t be surprised when an email from me shows up in your inbox; we want to know more about you!

It’s early, and we know that our product isn’t perfect — Journal will change a lot before we release it to the world.

We hope you’ll root for us along the way.

This post was originally published on Medium