What Am I Doing Now?

Last Thursday, I went to the Warwick Incubator's Demo Day and met River Tam, one of the judges for the event. I have connected with River on #startup slack chat a while back and was happy to meet him in person. As we were getting to know each other better, he asked me a simple question, which got me thinking quite a bit. "What are you doing now [in general]?"

I realised that I was not doing anything in particular. I was doing a lot of little things here and there. For instance, since the start of the year, I built a website for my triathlon club and made poster design and trailer video for our cycling event. However, none of them turned into side projects that I would work on consistently.

Personally, I am not sure if this is good or bad. I guess I could say that while it was bad that I am not consistent with my efforts, it was also good that I tried many things and invested in myself by improving myself (even if it was just a slight bit). (What do you think?)

Nevertheless, I would like to be working on a side project consistently and be proud of it. I am very inspired by Buffer's team with regards to this. Apart from their full time job, they have side projects for things they are passionate about. For example, Brian Lovin co-founded Mvsic.co for discovering the best music on the web and started a design podcast, Design Details; Rodolphe Dutel curates nice art works at OhiLikeArt and remote and productivity articles at Remotive.io; Andrew Yates recently started SF Side Projects Meetup and an app, Alpenglow, to inform us if the skies are looking good so that we do not miss an amazing sunrise or sunset.

Hence, I decided to look at what I'm interested in for a side project. After some thought, I decided to work on the area of customer service and support! Personally, I had many bad experiences with customer service so I hope that it could be improved.

At first, I thought about building a product to solve the problem of bad customer service or help people in customer service to provide better experiences. However, I could not think of any ideas that could potentially solve bad customer service. Also, I have not properly worked in customer service or support or worked with people in the area to gain sufficient insights about the field. I reckoned that it would be quite silly to come up with something without really knowing what they need. However, I did not want that to stop me from starting a side project.

Being inspired by Rodolphe's weekly Remotive newsletter, I decided to start a weekly newsletter on customer service and support, BeNice, curating articles, resources and examples of good customer service. Also, to improve my customer service and support "mind", I would share a thought I have on the topic in the newsletter each week. While I hope to be able to write articles in this area in the future, I thought that it would be better to start with small steps :)

So yep, that is what I'm doing now! Here's the first issue. If you are interested in the newsletter, you can sign up here! :D