July 2026 Wrap-up

I’ve been yo-yoing a bit about what kind of things I should write about on Substack. Should I write about product content? Life content? Building in public?

The truth is I’m still not sure. But for now, I’ve decided I don’t want to narrow myself down to only writing about one thing. There is already an entire internet of people writing about all those things. So while I figure out what I want to write about I’m going to keep writing a mix of different things, and to kick it off I want to get back into writing monthly wrap-ups.

July was a really great month.

It felt like the month where all the seeds I started to plant earlier this year started to sprout. There was a lot that happened, so let’s get straight into it.

I started my first fractional Head of Product role

At the start of July I started my first fractional role, as Head of Product for a company in the renewable energy space.

I’m super excited to be working in this space. It feels great to be working with smart people trying to solve important problems.

Working fractionally is something I’ve been curious about for a while.

I have a few friends and colleagues who have gone down this route, and the idea of being able to contribute to working on interesting problems, and still have time to do a variety of things is very appealing to me.

I’m only a month in, but so far this feels like a really good fit for me. I feel like I’m part of the company and able to have an impact, while still having time and flexibility to pursue my own projects.

I’ve been feeling more creative and confident

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel going back to a job after having the last 5 months off.

I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough time (or energy) to keep working on my side projects.

But I’m happy to report that it’s actually helped kick my brain back into product thinking mode, which has then given me new energy, excitement and creativity which is sparking ideas, and helping my side projects gain momentum.

A lot of folks assume that when people have side projects it’s because they’re trying to build something to escape their day job, but for me it’s not that.

My side projects give me space to experiment, to explore ideas, to build new skills, and I find it really really fun.

In the last month I’ve found myself getting back into late evening creative sessions, not because I have to, but because I want to. And I’ve been enjoying it a lot.

I think it’s because I don’t feel stressed about my side projects needing to become my primary income stream. And that takes the pressure off, which helps me be more creative, enjoy the process more and actually create better products.

I launched Fern Pro and got my first paid users

About a month ago I realised that Fern (my journalling app), was starting to rank well on google. So I decided to spend some more time working on it.

I launched a ‘Pro’ upgrade - adding voice notes, and improving the AI summaries so that it automatically pulled out key things such as wins, ideas and action items to made them more accessible to users.

I’ve been kinda blown away by how many users are upgrading and trying it out. I was telling my husband last week how different it feels when it’s your own product that you made by yourself.

In my day job I’m often dealing with products that have thousands to millions of users, but I still get so excited when I see that there’s a single new subscriber for one of my own. Like literally happy dance excited. And theres been a lot of dancing recently.

Since adding a paid tier, downloads and usage has increased. Total users is still small, which I am totally ok with. Early metrics are looking promising, and I’m feeling excited to keep chipping away at it slowly adding new features and continuing to improve the product.

If you’re looking for a simple, guilt free journalling app, you can check it out here.

Introducing Zena - a strength training app

For the past few months, I’ve been quietly building an app to help manage my strength training better.

It started off as just wanting to solve my own personal problem — to take the thinking out of planning workouts, and to be able to see my own progress easier. But as I spoke to friends, I realised that so many people have this same problem.

After months of iterating and improving, it’s turning into something that I actually feel really proud of. It’s not only helped me hit new PBs in the gym, but it’s also helping me train smarter.

Which I know sounds cliché. But I’m finding it’s legitimately helpful to have data that helps me understand when I need to take a rest day, and when I’ve not been pushing myself enough.

For this project I kinda did it backwards to how I normally work. I focussed on getting the mechanics and logic right first, and now I’m going back and working on branding.

Yesterday I spent most of the day in Figma working on new branding and website designs. And it was so fun! I’m super excited to be launching it this month.

If you want to be one of the first to test it out, let me know in the comments or send me a DM and I’ll send you a referral code so you can test it out for free.

Preview of Zena’s new branding and website

Improving my own internal systems

I’ve also been doing a lot of work improving my personal systems. Building myself roadmaps, dashboards and spreadsheets to help track not only my projects, but also my life and goals in general. This is still very much a work in progress, and I don’t think I’ve quite got it there yet.

But each month it feels like I make a bit more progress. I’ve experimented with AI a lot here, but interestingly I’ve gone back to using Notion as my source of truth. I’m now building my own internal tool to help connect everything together and help alert me to things so I spend less time checking dashboards and reports and more time taking action.

Family Fun and our first EV Road Trip

It sounds like I spent a lot of July working, but I still managed to make time for some family fun.

I ticked off a long-time goal and bought an EV in late June. So to celebrate and kick off July, I took my 5 year old on a spur of the moment overnight roadtrip from Townsville to Cairns (via Atherton). And it went great!

I wasn’t sure how accurate the range was and was nervous about running out of battery before we reached our destination, but charging was actually a breeze. We stopped at a charging station that was conveniently positioned right next to a playground. In the time it took for my kid to have a quick play, and go to the toilet, we were able to get the car back up to nearly fully charged. For the drive back we made it from Cairns to Townsville (~400km) without stopping to charge. Total cost for charging for the (~800km trip) was less than $40AUD. Petrol for the same trip would have cost us $160+.

Visiting a strawberry farm. Aka touching grass.

It was really nice to have a little mini 1:1 break with just the two of us and something I’d like to do more of.

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If you made it this far, thanks for reading! July felt like a really good month, with a lot of highlights.

Lessons from July

• Going back to work reactivated my brain - strategically and creatively, and has actually given me energy and ideas to do better work across my personal projects as well.

• Taking pressure off my side projects has made me enjoy building more, which ironically has helped them grow.

• A month is longer than it feels. All the little things add up and it’s good to look back and see how much progress you actually made.

This year has been quite an unpredictable one, and I’m sure the next few months will be just as unpredicatable. But I’m starting to see that as fun, instead of daunting.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to hear me write about? I’d love to hear from you.