inprogress.works is a lightweight accountability community and journal for your side projects. Each week you'll get an email reminder to post your WIP update and get to see your progress through an archive.

I believe creating and making things is the surest path to self actualization and engaging with the world. The key aspect that makes it different from other social networks is that you cannot see anyone else's update post until you post yourself.

So far it's been 3 months, with 600+ posts, and around 30-40 weekly active users!

Features

Landing page that shows the core feature of inprogress.works as an accountability journal, features the weekly post and posts from the week in the background.

The primary color corresponds with the calendar and changes with each week showing the progression of the seasons.

Ways to express yourself abstractly in the profile. Adding these facts is a hidden feature but surprisngly 10% of all users have added one!

I explored how to make it easier for users to traverse their feed and find what they want. Navigate between linear and grid view, play with different filters, and sort through popular/recent/following!

Browsing and then clicking in to view post details for the grid view!

Because it isn't a native mobile app, I knew it might be hard to get users to return. I created a weekly reminder email that users can reply to and automatically post, I also experimented with a monthly recap email to reactivate users.

Reflection

Learning from my past projects, I wanted to spend more time iterating quickly and adjusting on user feedback.

I created the MVP of this over the course of two weeks in winter and then released it to some close friends. Timing it with January and New Years resolutions, I released it on Twitter (surprisingly going viral!). Now having users I didn't know, and all over the world, I relied on a feedback form, DM's, and noticing issues in the supabase.

I planned out certain features, such as following, likes on comments, and a sunsetted financial mode based on a combination of requests, observing usage, and the size of WAU.

Although my initial landing page wasn't up to my taste, it was better to ship, learn, and re-release it! I was more strategic this time of how I went from Figma to code and keeping my code base clean. I used Tailwind and made my own components, often revisiting my design to simplify my use of color and certain variants.

This was also my first time working with users and large amounts of data. I learned a bit about caching and how to improve load times. Let me know if you have any questions!