“Captain’s Logs” are quick, weekly snapshots of how things are progressing across the ministry. Subscribe for the latest with Lightworks!
Captain’s log, stardate: May 23, 2022
High/Low(s):
HIGH - We launched our digital discipleship platform MVP! Check it out at dship.org. It’s a small piece of the broader platform vision. We think a valuable entry point to discipleship is via a question & answer platform where believers can share real stories addressing real life questions in a micro-mentorship or micro-disicpleship format. Building an effective micro-discipleship format is something we’re excited to explore further.
We launched the first workflow of the app this week and are building the internal screens/workflows this upcoming week. Aiming to go live with the full MVP right after memorial day.
High - Built our MVP via a no-code app (Bubble.io) in about 1.5 weeks! This was a completely new platform to me, so to be able to learn the platform and build a completely custom page from scratch, including deciding the 1) branding, 2) language, 3) copy strategy, 4) workflow for submitting a question, etc. — there was a lot of decisions that we made in the past week. If we had already made most of these decisions, I’m sure building it out would have been far faster. But starting here means that I have WAY more confidence for building out the rest of the internal app pages.
For our engineering friends & readers, don’t worry, we will still need your help building this platform out to scale! We’re excited about the possibility of using this no-code tool as a sandbox for rapidly testing, iterating, and learning from users - QUICKLY. That means that when we do go to build this app out fully, ideally we’ll spend less time in code-revisions, and more time building things that you can KNOW will make a difference based on preliminary data.
High - Learned how to implement ads ourselves for the first time! This was Leah’s arena, and I’m super proud of her hard work this week to go from scratch to fully designing and implementing 7 ads on social. This will be a significant portion of this experiment to learn how to communicate with users in a way they resonate with.
High - Huge confidence boost that we were able to accomplish so much in so little time after wrapping up our research learnings! Feels really good to be able to move from theory to implementation in 2 weeks time.
Low - This was an intense work-focus week! So much amazing progress in such a short period of time. BUT, it meant we weren’t able to do several things outside of work that were really important to us. It can be hard to balance life/work priorities, but the investment last week was well worth it to enable us to start getting real first-hand user feedback.
Something I’m processing:
One thing I’m processing or learning personally
Leah and I have a lot of different aspects to our relationship. We’re cofounders. We’re husband/wife. We’re new parents. We’re friends. We have our own friends. We have the same friends. In general, we probably spend 98% of every week together.
It’s really easy to invest heavily in the co-founder aspect of our relationship while our marriage gets the scraps. We saw this play out several years before we started a ministry together. A few years ago we were both heavily involved in our former work. We had both been pouring ourselves so much into our work that we both began thinking of each other as coworkers rather than spouses. Thankfully, we began to recognize what was happening long before it became an issue and took some time to reset together.
Since then, we’ve made it a priority to invest in our relationship in every facet - not just a few. Date nights have become a high priority for us, especially in this startup season. It is way too easy to let work conversations bleed into evening hangout times after our daughter goes to bed.
Even this past week, in the midst of such a hard product push where we worked several long days to accomplish our goal, we made an intentional decision to carve out time to have a date night at the end of the week. We had to say to no to a few other things and reimagine our schedule a bit, but it was so worth it. Getting to sit at a dinner table and ask each other how we’re doing emotionally in this season and what God has been teaching us… that time was probably the most impactful few hours of my entire week. And that is a bigger win than all the others listed above.
tl;dr - Date your spouse. Especially when you work together. Especially, especially when she’s also your cofounder. Life is so much sweeter, and everything works so much better when you do.
Prayer Requests:
Pray for the further development of our MVP this week! Aiming to build more internal workflows and start matchmaking answerers with questions by the start of next week.
Pray for our the work we’ve done this far to be effective! Even if we don’t hit the numbers we’d like to see, pray that we can gather the right learnings we need to make this platform something really valuable.
Answer to prayer - thank you for praying for Leah’s sickness! If you didn’t know, Leah has been sick 5x in the past 3 months. 3 negative covid tests, and the bug seemed to come back worse and different each time. We went to a doctor for the 2nd time this week and got a blast of antibiotics, thinking it was a bacterial infection that never fully resolved. She’s still on the mend, but doing much better. Thank you for praying!