Two weeks ago, while I was at my best friend’s bachelorette party, the entire Scout infrastructure decided to crumble.
I woke up early, worked from my bunk bed during off hours and came to one of the reasons why everything seemed to be falling apart: 1/3 of our users (Apple people) were no longer able to sign in because of a transfer to a company account Michael and I made two months ago. Yikes!
So what did I do? Naturally, I spent the next week working 13 hours a day to fix it. 60 hours later, and we seem to be able to recover about 95% of those folks. But instead of a sense of accomplishment, what did I feel instead? Relief. I solved this week’s crisis of the week.
It seems like every single week, there is something up and flames. One week, we find out a vendor we used went against an NDA and committed fraud. Yikes. Another week, and Price Drop is broken. Yikes. Another week and we’re onboarding so many new faces we can barely keep their names straight. Big Yikes for me, personally.
The sooner I fix something, the sooner the problem becomes a ghost, rises from the dead and evolves into a new form. Professional whack a mole player should be my new JD.
In all seriousness, I’m very grateful, I’m just very tired. We’re close to launching a bunch of new stuff very soon, but until then, I wanted to restart this newsletter — can’t promise this one will be more than monthly from now on. In addition to a little behind the curtain update, I’ll also share what we launched and shipped in the last month, in case you’re curious.
A few notable accomplishments from the last month:
We completed our CICD project (fancy way of saying automating testing when we create new code in GitHub)
We finalized analytics instrumentation
We implemented affiliate tracking, including on Amazon
We implemented Customer IO for more retargeting campaigns
We shipped an updated business strategy, including strategic adjustments to how often we’re tracking products for free (I’m confident you won’t feel a difference)
We updated our Price Drop process to a better partner system to improve accuracy and gear up for new tracking features
We filed provisional patents (!!)
Improved tracking efficiency by recategorizing stale products and not tracking them anymore
Audited our burn rate and created a path to profitability before the end of the year
Grew our TikTok following 150% (please follow us — please)
All in all, 60 PRs are now in production and we have 10 people with us full-time. I’m super grateful.
I’m exhausted, but feeling incredibly alive. Thanks for caring about what we’re building.
Madeline