Bird Rise had its best month yet. We crossed the $10k revenue mark. There are still some very annoying bugs that need to be fixed, though.
Smart Keys is the opposite story. The hard-paywall test showed lower trial conversion from day one, the Meta ads just aren’t performing, and putting its numbers next to Bird Rise is honestly brutal.
Prospera Forms is still the steady ground.
The social media agents keep getting better. Got the SWC one publishing, Bird Rise looks good, and Smart Keys is still the hard one (too many screen recordings). A few videos are sneaking up close to 1k views.
Writing more. Shipped a post about why Bird Rise is working and started shaping an article about what actually makes a “tribe” (it’s not a subreddit or a demographic, it’s something people are proud to wear on a t-shirt). I keep telling myself to block one full day a week just to organize cards and write. Maybe I actually will.
Relaxing
Spend Mother’s Day with family in a cozy café on a farm. (I caught the flu from my nephew :p)
Still enjoying my time here in Ratones, with birds joining us during breakfast and lunch. Playing with Polen and Liz. We had such a great time hanging out in Santo Antonio and at Ratonarte, the local art and gastronomic fair where I used to run the smallest, biggest cinema for kids. I was so surprised when I found out that Leandra and I were featured on a billboard celebrating the 31 years of the grassroots organization that runs the event (Amora – Associação dos Moradores de Ratones).
I finished Clear Thinking. Some chapters are interesting, but others are like “how to be a high achiever” guides, which is not what I’m looking for in my reading. I’m reading now Making Sense of Word HIstory.
Took a couple of days off to celebrate the $10k milestone. Funny thing though, the numbers keep climbing and I keep refreshing RevenueCat every hour, but it’s bringing me less joy than I expected. A bit of a low-mood stretch. I’m trying to check RC less and feel a little more.
Got my passport sorted so fast. Small win, weirdly satisfying.
Exercise
Honest update: May knocked me down for a bit. Got sick mid-month, even had some blurry vision that made working hard. Feeling better now, not 100% yet. Easing back toward the stubborn goal of the year: move every single f**ing day.
Still working on Prospera Forms. This is an amazing project that reduces company costs, allows the creation of better tools for clients, and provides full control over the tool.
Progressively going back to Bird Rise, fixed some bugs (created another), and started the campaigns again, either running a pool of creatives and scaling the winners. The app seems to be more stable now. We are creating some agents to help us curate content, images, and social media. Since we don’t want to use AI-generated images, the agents need to edit real footage (image and videos), which is an interesting challenge.
I finally experienced the famous Ad Fatigue on Smart Keys. It’s time to create new ones.
SWC is doing a different Earth Month this year, it’s a Green Movie Night, and I’m helping the team with some graphics.
Relaxing
Still enjoying my time here in Ratones, with birds joining us during breakfast and lunch. Playing with Polen and Liz.
Starting to read new books, back to Clear Thinking. Some chapters are interesting, but others are like “how to be a high achiever” guides, which is not what I’m looking for in my reading. My Kindle will soon be unable to purchase new ones because Amazon is ending support for the 10-year-old model. So, I downloaded many books I wanted to read, mostly classics.
Had some fun meeting some old friends. It’s funny to meet people you used to see every day, and then 100 years later, we meet again.
Trying to balance work and spending time with family, I think I should focus more on the family side, especially on seeing my parents more often.
Exercise
Gradually going back to exercising after the surgery. This is my main goal this year: to exercise every single f**ing day. Running around this neighborhood is not that easy. There are many dogs and no sidewalks, but it has some nice views.
I spent all of March working on a tool for Prospera. The goal was to migrate many forms from different vendors to a proprietary system, and we did an incredible job. This was the first time I used Claude Code to manage the project; I had used Gemini Pro in previous projects. The development was very fast and of high quality. The biggest effort was actually migrating the forms themselves and testing the rules and conditions. The product is so cool that I considered turning it into a full product, but a quick research made me realize that marketing it will be a big initiative. I’d be tapping into the market of SurveyMonkey and TypeForm. I’ll need to use different strategies than those I’ve used for my iOS apps.
Bird Rise Bird Rise was a bit paused because it had some annoying bugs caused by the new AlarmKit for iOS 26. At first, I was relieved that Apple finally launched an API to trigger alarms, so I wouldn’t need to use a workaround to keep the app running in the background to ring an alarm. But since this is a new API, it still has some issues. Also, my code is not that simple—I play a different sound every day, which is different from a regular alarm.
SWC is doing a different Earth Month this year, it’s a Green Movie Night, and I’m helping the team with some graphics.
Relaxing
Spending some time in Ratones reminds me of when we lived here. I also get a strange feeling of actually being in the mountains of Peru, on the border between the Andes and the Amazon. Years ago, we spent some time there helping a family on an organic coffee farm. There was no electricity, and it rained a lot. Sometimes, when I look out the window and see the forest here with some fog or light rain, I teleport back to that place and time. Have I talked about the toucans we see while having breakfast or lunch? Oh my, so beautiful.
I finished The Sum of Us, that was heavy reading and a slap in the face as well. I haven’t read much this month though. 🙁
Had some fun meeting some old friends. It’s funny to meet people you used to see every day, and then 100 years later, we meet again.
Trying to balance work and spending time with family, I think I should focus more on the family side, especially on seeing my parents more often.
We went to some art exhibitions at CIC and Deti Peixeira’s stand-up comedy show. We really wanted to see her and even bought some of her t-shirts.
Exercise
Gradually going back to exercising after the surgery. This is my main goal this year: to exercise every single f**ing day. Running around this neighborhood is not that easy. There are many dogs and no sidewalks, but it has some nice views.
Ah, toucans! Sometimes there are as many as ten of them.
Bird Rise is off to a great start with some solid numbers. We’ve made a bunch of improvements and we’re still really excited about this project, especially since we staying in a place full of birds. Especially the Toucans, oh my, they are beautiful. I wish I had my tele lens and camera here. Anyway, we decided to focus more of our time on it instead other projects.
Still helping Prospera with tech-related challenges. It’s my mission-driven quota working with awesome people.
SWC is doing a different Earth Month this year, it’s a Green Movie Night, and I’m helping the team with some graphics.
Relaxing
I’ve been really chill while my mom and dad took care of me after my surgery, super grateful for their support in every part of my life. The first few days were tough, but now I’m breathing great. I met some relatives I hadn’t seen in years, like Nata, Marquinhos, and Tati. I’m also hanging out in Ratones with Leandra’s family.
This was a tricky month. We were moving out, selling some stuff, and wrapping up our season in WC. We’ll spend some time with family members in Brazil until April. I’ll also have a surgery that I’ve been postponing for a while.
Work
We soft-launched Bird Rise and started getting some interesting initial numbers. Memo Rise also received some organic downloads. It was just an MVP and has some issues I need to address before considering it a real project.
I finally added multilanguage layouts on Smart Keys.
