Jira Household

Mar 31
First things first - Jira Household is an April Fools joke!

Joking aside though - I learned a lot putting it together, so I figured I'd share the process so others can learn from it.

Also, Jira CAN be used to manage your personal life like bills, events and other things.

How it began

Last year I had set a "snoozed" email in GMail to remind me about April fools day. The original idea was to use Statuspage as a joke to indicate a specific person who was responsible for an outage :
Personally I still get a kick out of this! That said, I wanted to do something a bit more in-depth... Unfortunately, I only started planning on March 30th, so I got to work using Google Gemini to help me come up with ideas.

Prompts!

This prompt is insanely light... (especially as I learn more about prompting!). That said, it gave me three options... 

Option 1: The "Jira-Life" Integration (The Satire)
Option 2: The "Confluence AI" Overlord (The Subtle Jab)
Option 3: The "Feature Request" Irony (The Deep Cut)

Personally I found "The Satire" to be the funniest, so I ran with that.. I did, however, seriously consider taking one of the older support tickets and mocking up a fix for it.

I ended up with "The Satire" - which became Jira Household - because I felt it had more "runway" and was something I could expand on quite a bit. I could easily ssee how it could be an entire "product" that I could talk up, build a landing page for and more.

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Things Get Learn-y

I could have stopped there and written up a quick LinkedIn post... instead, I asked myself "How can I use this to build a skill?". I thought though my tech-stack, and focused in on MailerLite.

MailerLite is the tool I use to track subscribers. It's basic function is to track who is interested in what, and let me share info via emails or sites. It can, however, also host landing pages - something I haven't really leveraged yet.

So, instead of just doing a LinkedIn post on Jira Household, I decided to go a bit deeper and build a product landing page. The challenge was I didn't know much about the feature other than "it exists". Luckily between "beating my head into the keyboard" and my friend Gemini, I got some good ideas on how to set things up.

What's in a Logo?

In addition to a landing site, I knew my new "product" had to have a logo. Now this won't really surprise you, but I'm not a graphic designer... so I spun up Canva (the free version!) and got to work. I added in the Jira logo (shoutout to Lina for getting me a "dark mode" one!) and put it over the home icon. I then colored the icon (and text on the screen) the Atlassian blue and wham - I had a logo!

The logo also doubles as the Favicon of the page - lending it a little more credibility as the default is the MailerLite logo.

Better Together

Some time between swearing at MailerLite and trying to think up a name for this thing, I realized that things were better together and leaned on my Discord community for help.

Discord is a chat platform that I use to help connect folks and share information. I find it's great for extending YouTube chat as it gives a single place to go for continuing live chat (and a lot of other stuff). I've also got a few hundred folks in there, some of which are very keen on helping me do crazy/random stuff.

For example - "Robmit" came from this community (specifically Emily and Ana).
In Discord I made a private channel called "march-special-project" and limited it's membership to folks who have a "Role". Roles are basically tags on users which signal interest, or help control access to things, like channels.

(Side note, the image above has been named "Robmit" by my Discord community.. full credit Ana and Emily for making it!)

There is a bot I use in Discord called MEE6 (pronounced Me-seeks) which automates tasks and helps manage things. One thing MEE6 can do is automate group membership based on emoji reactions to messages. So I quickly setup a message in the channel asking if folks wanted to help with a "special project". All they had to do was react to it and they'd get access to the channel
This was a great step! Not only did it help me update and improve the landing page and auto-email, but it also helped me build legitimacy by getting folks to comment and engage with my social posts, which, in turn, increased exposure and got more engagement.

For example, Lina was part of my group:
This, however, led to others also commenting and engaging, which further spread the message and made everything seem more "legit".

The Automation

The MailerLite landing page helped tell the story of "Jira Household", but I wanted to take it a step further. Product launches typically have a "signup to get more info" button - so I added one.

When someone signs up to get on the launch list, MailerLite automatically emails them something... in this case, what amounts to an apology.
The email is automatically sent whenever someone signs up for more Jira Household updates. This removes any need for me to monitor anything, and ensures a consistent "signup" experience for everyone. The email clearly explains it's an April Fools joke, and then goes to offer more information about my site and blog (and an apology coupon in case folks want one!).

The Reception

Folks had one of three reactions
1. That's awesome, give it to me
2. Skeptical...
3. Clearly didn't ready anything

First up - an example of a skeptic, and one reaction that got me laughing:
One from the "that's awesome" category - I love this one since I would actually like to talk about this process. While the product is fake (at least for now :D) I still learned a lot about how to setup a launch.
Then there's the "clearly didn't read it" bucket... this one gave me a chuckle since some recruiter referenced my "Project Casa" launch. I'm sorely tempted to ask them what they think is so amazing about it...

Conclusion?

I've started to measure success not only in terms of clicks or dollars to view time, but also in my own personal enjoyment. By that metric, this was a clear success! Not only did I have fun doing it, but it helped me learn new tools (mainly MailerLite), but also helped involve my Discord community in something (another area I am exploring more).

These skills have immediate application in other projects I'm working on - including one for Team '26 - and I'm sure I'll keep building on them.
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