Blogs

Last Week Last week, I broadened the marketing surface for Shokken. Door-to-door restaurant visits had produced useful conversations, but they were too slow and draining to be my only way of finding customers. I started looking for more targeted and more scalable ways to reach restaurant operators. This week, that broad idea became two concrete areas of work: improving how Shokken appears in the app stores and publishing short product videos for the people who might actually use it....

One-Shot Coding Is the Wrong Standard I keep seeing AI coding models evaluated with a one-shot challenge: describe an entire application in one enormous prompt, wait, and see whether the result runs. That can be entertaining, but I do not think it represents a serious software-development workflow. Production software is not normally created by one person moving directly from an idea to deployment without review. There are product decisions, implementation plans, tests, hooks, code review, and deployment controls....

Last Week Last week, I paused restaurant visits long enough to reconsider how I was finding potential Shokken customers. The first dozen conversations had divided restaurants into a few broad groups. Some already had a waitlist system and no reason to replace it. Some did not have enough regular demand to justify adding another tool. Others only expected the problem to become important during a busier season. The conversations were useful, but they also showed that a list of restaurants with complaints about long waits was not a strong enough targeting strategy....

Last Week Last week made the marketing problem much clearer. After roughly ten targeted restaurant visits, I had three useful categories: restaurants with established waitlist systems that were difficult to displace, restaurants without enough current waitlist pain to justify another tool, and restaurants with visible guest waits that did not see those waits as an operational problem. The visits did not produce the first real Shokken customer, but they made the limits of Google Maps review research very obvious....

Last Week Last week was almost entirely a loss to COVID. I had a high fever, recovered from that part quickly after seeing a doctor, and then spent the rest of the week without much energy or motivation to work. The only meaningful progress was a small update to Shokken’s public-facing sites: the product site and the guest status site where guests join a waitlist and review menus. Both updates made it to integration, but I deliberately left them out of production because they still needed testing....

Last Week Last week was the first real door-to-door marketing run for Shokken. I visited six restaurants around Las Vegas and learned quickly that a busy restaurant with wait complaints is not automatically a good early customer. Some restaurants already have established waitlist systems. Others have seasonal demand, hard-to-reach managers, or guest-facing language needs that Shokken does not yet handle well enough. The most useful outcome was a clearer target: restaurants with real waitlist pain, lightweight or manual tooling, and an owner or manager who is open to trying something new....

Last Week Last week was about configuration management. Shokken is now public on both Android and iOS, which means every release has to account for the awkward split between mobile app binaries and backend deployments. Backend changes can go live quickly. App changes have to pass through Google Play or the App Store, and users do not necessarily update immediately. That created a practical problem for new feature work. If the app contains frontend code for a feature before the backend is ready, I need a way to keep that feature hidden without blocking unrelated bug fixes....

Last Week Last week was about a tooling decision that became more important than I expected. Shokken was already live on both Google Play and the iOS App Store in the United States, and the first organic signups had appeared. The next visible milestone was supposed to be marketing: finishing the pitch, testing the flyer flow, and starting real conversations with restaurants. But the development pipeline was getting in the way....

Last Week Last week was the first week where Shokken felt less like an app under construction and more like a product that needed to be sold. Android was live on Google Play. iOS was live on the App Store. The first post-approval iOS update moved through review quickly, which made the release process feel less frightening than the initial approval loop. I also finished the first real short-form marketing video and got the physical flyer into a shape I could actually hand to a restaurant....

Last Week Last week was about marketing preparation after the App Store approval finally landed. Android was already live on Google Play, iOS had cleared review, and the center of gravity moved away from building the MVP toward making Shokken look trustworthy enough for real operators to evaluate. That meant working on the surfaces around the app: the website, app store listings, screenshots, Google/search presence, social profiles, and physical flyers for local outreach....