The Need For Pivot

I think I need to reflect on my journey with GoodWatch so far.

Why Pivot?

I have 300 registered users, 100 people in the Discord and about 100 daily visits. These are small numbers, but still a nice accomplishment.

The impact I'd like to have on the movie community is much bigger though. To achieve that, I need to pivot. I have ideas like:

• A tinder-like app to decide what to watch together when sitting on a couch
• A more social experience with people sharing their customized taste profiles
• A browser extension that enriches Netflix and other streaming sites with GoodWatch data (score from other sites, your taste match, etc.)

The way I'm building things for GoodWatch is kind of chaotic. I see an issue and I solve it. But I can't focus enough to do it the proper way. And some problems seem to be hard to crack (like SEO).

Where is this coming from?

I worked long on my last update. But it barely caused any reactions. Because it doesn't spark emotions. It's nothing that lets people feel joy and make them share it with their friends or followers. I understand that, I would feel the same way being a user.

This is not exactly demotivating, but lets me step back a bit and think about where I want to go with this project.

What's next?

I don't have any regrets. I put money into this project and it took a lot of time to get to this point. At the same time, I learned SO MUCH. I'm grateful for every piece of feedback I've gotten, and for every person reading my updates. It's genuinely my favorite way of working. Build in public is my thing.

For now, I'll keep GoodWatch in maintenance mode and work on stabilizing existing features (I know of a few bugs that need attention).

I will also focus on my other project <#1457348989321089220> which makes me excited because I think it solves a real problem for a lot of people. I might be wrong, but I'll validate it quickly and move on if traction is too low.

In the meantime, I'll explore which pivot for GoodWatch is the most promising and continue there.

Btw...

I'll start with video content for real. TikTok I'm coming. Soon.

Your Taste Profile

This is an important release. One of the biggest merge requests I ever pushed.

What's inside:

• Taste Detection based on many different attributes
• Personalized Recommendations
• Completely revamped Onboarding

Onboarding

Guests can try the Fingerprint & Recommendations even before signing up. The whole onboarding process has been redesigned from scratch. After 20 scores, it prompts the user to sign up to not lose their progress.

Taste

The more they score, the better and more personalized the profile gets:

• Genre map
• Time travel through decades
• Actors & Director preferences
• Favorite Fingerprint attributes

SEO

Fixed some problems with canonical tags where pages with query params were indexed as duplicates. That killed my Google results completely and will hopefully start to recover now.

Tech

This took so long because I had to figure out the stack that allows me to grab recommendations in real-time. The biggest win on that matter is Qdrant.

Also, I had to wait for my data pipeline to create a significant amount of fingerprint vectors for the engine to produce satisfying results.

Check it out here: https://goodwatch.app/taste/quiz

Anti GoodWatch

I ❤️ working on GoodWatch. It's my passion project.

Still, every week I have a new idea for building something. If there's one thing I learned from this community it's that you have to bury the urge to start coding and actually validate if anyone wants such a product.

Also, every minute I spend with something else is cut from my valuable time working on GW.

So I made a decision

I will devote 10% of my project time (I still have my 9 to 5 <a:z1_oldboygrimace:994080995714289676> ) to secondary side projects.

To decide what I'll be working on I started a series of posts on X. Here you go:

Day 1 of gauging real user need for ideas in my backlog.

Day 2 of gauging real user need for ideas in my backlog.

Day 3 of gauging real user need for ideas in my backlog.

Day 4 of gauging real user need for ideas in my backlog.

Day 5 of gauging real user need for ideas in my backlog.

I need you <a:spongebob_imagine:1445265233256906853>

Please help me to understand user needs. If you have an X account, I'd really appreciate your input and thoughts over there. Otherwise, here.

The series is not finished yet, I'll continue posting more ideas daily for a while. Thanks for reading guys, a pleasure as always.