Hi friends,
October was the month the two interns turned into real contributors, ArbTask became an actual installable app, and signups finally started trickling in on their own. Also a couple of Wix headaches worth venting about.
William and Saimonas, leveling up
Last month’s two new interns spent October doing real work. William picked apart the deal picker (it was showing raw IDs instead of names, now fixed, with the search feature kept intact), cleaned up a tangle of inconsistent naming across the organization settings page, and built out multi-language support for the default text shown when someone signs up. Saimonas rebuilt the timereports table to break hours down per day and per week, with working CSV exports. I deployed that one and had a user tell me, unprompted, how happy they were with it. Good feeling, shipping something a student built and having a real customer notice.
ArbTask, now installable
The bigger feature this month: ArbTask is now a proper installable web app. Add it to your home screen or desktop and it behaves like a native app, no app store required. Alongside that, logging in with a one-time code instead of only the magic link. That one also just fixes a real annoyance: open the magic link email on your phone and it tends to open in a different browser than the one you’re actually logged in with, so you’d land on the site logged out. A code you type in yourself sidesteps that entirely.
Unas and Shoptet: more customers, more maintenance
Unas keeps picking up real merchants, attributes and descriptions mapped for a new one (Antikvariat Odon) this month. Also more filters, more features, and a proper offer processing screen built out this month. The flip side of more merchants is more support: a rate-limiting issue, a round of stock sync fixes, and a new IP filtering requirement Shoptet sprang on us that needed sorting on our end too. Growing pains, but the good kind.
Wix, two headaches
First one: I added JSON-LD schema to the Google Reviews app (good for SEO). Went out fine on our end, but a release on Wix’s own side changed some internal settings around the same time, and the result was every new install of the Google Reviews app, our best performing product, showing an error. For more than a week. Took real effort to get Wix’s own team to actually look into it and fix it on their end.
Second: a Wix payout went missing. Turned out to be a Tipalti problem (the payment processor Wix uses) with sending a local transfer to Sweden. The fix was switching to wire transfer and waiting for the next payout cycle. Worse than the delay itself: we got zero notification that the payout had even failed. I had to notice it myself and chase down both Wix and Tipalti support to get it resolved.
Signups, finally on their own
Early October, outreach was rough: three signups after a direct message push, and one meeting I sat in alone feeling a bit lonely about it. By the end of the month that flipped: daily signups without us pushing, a couple of people reaching out to us directly, and Rocci’s reworked outreach (rewritten DM script, UTM tracking to see where visitors actually come from) clearly helping.
Personal
Treework still ate a lot of my week, support for the ecommerce integrations ate most of the rest. Also finally got the ArbTask blog properly migrated off the old setup, one less thing hanging open from last month.
— Pavel