What's been blooming in June?

Seven days, Sunny June. Was it long enough to bloom? Cheesy buns aside, it's not been going to plan. Let me explain what's been going on. So it's been a while since my last update, the weekly fortnightly updates. And after the hiatus of launching our web app, I've just been on a bit of a slump, if I'm honest, trying to get back into a routine of all the good stuff we were doing through the last couple of, well, the last six months. I had a much needed break and I went off to Cornwall for a week with my wife. We had a nice break down time. No computers, weren't allowed computers. So we did actually get to enjoy ourselves and not look at any screens, which was refreshing. But that doesn't mean I stopped thinking about everything I've been working on and what I want to do next. So basically we went live, got got it out there, did a launch sort of announcement and then we decided to continue just working away at all the little things that we'd noticed. Some of our users were sending us feedback on, like what was not working or whether just confused. So we wanted to make sure that that was done properly and that we're listening to them. So we've been chipping away. My goal for this season, for the summer season was to really work towards like a more of a paid model, a premium model, but I think we're jumping ahead too fast there. What I have noticed since we've gone live is we have a handful of organizations that are using it regularly, really kind of using Petals in earnest to nurture their team health. But I don't think we've got enough users to, to really understand what people want to do with Petals. And I don't think we're really kind of articulating the true benefits of what Petals can do for you and your teams. So my focus this season for the summer really is to improve engagement, get a lot more users working with Petals, trying the app to see how it helps them and then we can continue reiterating over those features, features and user journeys to really understand how people want to use petals if they don't know how to already. So in June, amongst many other things that was going on, I actually head down to the LDX3 conference in London for two days of engineering leadership talks. Great opportunity to go and see what the rest of the industry are doing, maybe understand what we could try differently across the board, especially in the day job as well as what with petals. And I actually used it as an opportunity to get the word out about petals, I took some stickers and some promo codes with me to hand out as through the networking and just like just hanging around with a different bunch of people. But it didn't really work and I don't know why or what happened. But honestly not many people jumped into petals. I think I really to think about the marketing messages here and do something a bit different. Even saw this content. I love making content like this. I really enjoy it. But if it's not engaging I need to work out why and I want to really work out a different angle to this because obviously what I'm doing is not working. So that's the focus for this season. I will be taking a long break as well at the end of this month. So we're in July now. We've just sort of crept into July and on the 23rd of July I'm taking three weeks out to have some quality time with my wife. It's our 20th wedding anniversary this year so we just want to have a good quality holiday together and we are taking the kids with us as well. It's going to be a nice time out with the family. I won't turn off. I know I'm like I will be thinking about petals and all the other stuff that I like to do in the side time but it is an opportunity to take stock, have a fresh think about everything that I'm doing and work out how we can move forward with the Petals app and the whole Petals framework. Brian and Adrian are helping me to continue chip away at all the little features. We've got some interesting marketing ideas we're going to play around with. I won't give too much away yet, but there are ways that we want to kind of promote what Pestles is good for with visuals and fast feedback. And we are looking at maybe building a very rapid demo version for people to play around with as well. But early days and I don't give too much away until we have cleared that up. We are continuing our Friday lunchtime calls though we do get jump on a Google hangout every Friday afternoon. Talk about what we've been doing, just catch up generally just a bit of a chit chat, but we also try and think about what problems are we trying to solve at the moment. We've got a backlog of items that we want to work through on our GitHub project. There's some that are ready to go, there's some that just need a little bit more thought behind it as well. So we are chipping away. And again, it's all kind of voluntary work at the moment. No one's taking anything from this yet. It's a free project, it's a free product to play with, but we will have to sell the books at some point. So if we can look at a way of introducing the paid model to subsidize all the tech and the development that we do, then that'll be one of my main goals for the the end of this year, I think now, rather than for the end of summer. Anyway, enough of my rambling. I just wanted to provide a bit of an update as to what's going on. It's in a bit more of an informal setting here as well. This is my little record corner, as you can probably tell. I just wanted to put something out there and make sure that people were aware of what's going on with Petals. I am really keen to do something more exciting with Petals. I love BOT on trying to achieve with this. It's all about growing team health across the industry, not within the teams that I work with. So any way I can get the word out there, I will definitely do something, but I'm still trying to work out the narrative, the right tone. I'm storyboarding some explainer videos as well that I really want to kind of put together. I was trying to do them in July, but I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew. And I want to do something good quality as well, so I probably will draft in some help to get me through that. In the meantime, keep in touch. Go to the website Petals team to find out what's going on. We are redesigning that website, but I think we might be jumping ahead a little bit too far. At the moment, the app is live. If you go to petals.team app, we've got free promo codes for first three months of our paid tier when that goes live. So reach out if you are interested. I'll put something in the show notes as well and then I'll be back probably in August. Now, just to give you an update of what's been going on through the summer months, take care of yourself and your teams.