The Compounding Value of Small Improvements
Or iterating because that's what you have to do.
Hey folks!
I’m Christmas Eve and so I finally have some time to pen a few non-AI-generated notes to our small (but growing!) community of users who are now better prepared for the inevitable.
Over the last few months I honestly haven’t had to do much other than review the any updated packages, libraries, and breaking changes that might be made as a result. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about it’s pretty simple: I’m doing routine maintenance on our system — like getting an old change for your car — and ensuring that everything is in tip-top shape.
In other words, our solid foundation gives us confidence and peace of mind that the fundamental service will never fail, at least in terms of the things we can control.
Consequently, this has allowed me and my partner to hammer on the few things that are less important technically but can ultimately help clarify our brand, messaging, and our approach to this growing “Industry of Death”. Here are a few things that took a lot of time to think through:
We had a much more colorful approach originally with our H1 and text but moving that to all black was a much more “pro” move, even though I didn’t like the reduction of color. But, removing the colorations upscale our brand and make it much more easy to manage new pages that might be created where I was building unique color palettes every single time. No more.
We killed the global music player which was a retro-style Winamp built right into the app layer and I even had a mobile version that scaled nicely tiny the full frame. I had 80 tracks that played while you put your note together. This was a personal project that took way too much time to get right and it added unnecessary load and confusion. The reality is that no one is coming to DeathNote to listen to midi music from the 90’s. Goodbye.
Moved away from Twitter wholesale and that’s a huge win for us as it’s one less thing to manage and, most importantly, no one was coming to our site from Twitter / X and nearly 100% is coming from (programmatic) SEO work that has continued to grow our signups every single week. One less thing to manage and one less distraction for everyone. A very nice win.
Removing the obvious references to the Death Note anime series was hard for me since the anime was a huge part of the genesis of this work and one of my favorite series of all time. But, our implementation bloated the theme switcher and had tons of fancy animations that most users do not care about. I left one fun version of the animation here if you’d like to see it but the “Shinigami” theme is no longer available and we didn’t lose anyone in the transition.
Etc, etc, etc.
These are the more obvious examples but what’s most important to note is that these conversations started months ago, within weeks of us launching v1.0 and it took months of conversation and thinking to produce small but meaningful changes that we know will serve us on the short and long-term.
We’re not waiting around (and not hoping) that folks pass and that their death notes get sent out (although that’s happening as you can see in the screenshots) but we do want to make sure that our experience is always trustworthy, always consistent, always on time, as you’d expect.
The compounding effects of small thoughts and small conversations over a long enough timeframe is completely underrated. I suppose the key is that you need good conversation partner to make it all work and thankfully I’ve got one and our growing community that, occasionally, sends us really good feedback.
Onward my friends! Have a great Xmas and Happy New Year! Hopefully there won’t be any death notes sent in the next week.
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