Season 4, Issue 13: Wrapped
All's Well That Ends Well
All of the rest of Good Enough is asleep, and I (James) am the only one in my co-working space, here in London.
It’s a peaceful end to 2024. Well, aside from the music I’m blasting.
Speaking of music: the top album of 2024 on AlbumWhale was, predictably, BRAT by Charlie XCX, with The Smile, Tyler the Creator and Vampire Weekend all joint for second place.
Anyway, where was I? We wanted to send a sort of “end of year recap”, because it’s been a big one for us.
We left the Maelstrom and this Serious Business started to get serious about finding markets for some of our ideas.
Pika!
We launched Pika at the end of January, and just yesterday we welcomed our 200th subscriber!
The consistent love for Pika is real validation of Barry’s intuition that people will blog again if we give them a simple yet beautiful place to write.
We’ve dipped our toes into podcast advertising with Pika, which has been an interesting experience and overall seems to be working pretty well.
Some quotes about Pika:
I actually adore it. It makes my heart happy so that says it all
Everything about Pika is filling me with the joy of what I loved about blogging back in the day
I could never have predicted how much positive feedback Pika was going to get. It’s really wonderful to receive.
Turns out you are ready for that Jelly
Hot on the heels of Pika’s launch, we had already started work on Jelly, a better way to share an inbox.
Jelly is by far our most ambitious project yet, and our biggest bet: we believe there’s a huge market of small groups and teams that would benefit from a shared inbox but who are totally underserved by Support Behemoths trying to suck up every dollar on the table.
We started using Jelly internally in mid-Feburary, and had our first Beta teams join us in May. We launched properly in September, even receiving a viral welcome on Hacker News (you will never find a more wretched hive of snark and cynicism, typically).
Intermission: New additions
Is there any sweeter moment than getting that first paying customer? Well actually, yes. One of our team (me!) also welcomed his second kid and took some generous and much needed parental leave while all of this was happening. And that was pretty sweet too.
The other new addition to the Good Enough family was Cade! While I don’t love Cade as much as either of my children, I do like and respect him a lot, and Good Enough is certainly more Gooder-er with him around. Welcome, Cade! No, I will not change your diaper.
Jelly pt. 2
We’ve now had over 200 teams sign up to Jelly, and we’re hoping that only accelerates as we turn the corner into 2025. It’s a harder sell than Pika, because it’s a bigger ask to get a team to trust you with their communication lifeblood, but we are very optimistic.
Some Jelly quotes:
the shared inbox software we always hoped for
It’s lovely
simple, aesthetically pleasing and a joy to use
Yes, yes it is. And we’re only just getting started.
Odds and ends
We did our first podcast interview! We spoke with Jeremy and Jess about Good Enough, how we work, why we work, who we work (not much about where or when we work), and about Jelly too. As a group we tend to keep our heads down, but it was a nice breather, and it’s also important for us to take a bit of time to reflect on where we are, why we are, who we are (and some of what and when we are).
Speaking of which, it’s also so affirming to see our vision — a better internet filled with less crap software — resonating with the world
I really appreciate what you all are doing to make the internet a better and more human place.
holy hell I’m in love
That last quote might be from a famous blogger who’s site rhymes with “caring wirehall”. Might be.
See you next year 🥳
Good Enough is heading off on holiday break. We have so much planned for next year, but before we turn the page to 2025, we want to share a most important message:
Thank you.
We’re incredibly grateful for the time and attention you’ve shared with us this year. Whether you’ve used one of our tools, sent us a kind email, told a friend about us, or just lurked quietly, you’ve given us plenty of fuel to keep our corner of the internet going in 2025.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
Happy holidays. Happy new year. Peace on earth.
– Barry, Cade, James, Matthew, Patrick, and sometimes Shawn
