Jason Leow

I took a goalless June to rest and to just be. Do whatever inspires me, whenever.

I definitely did more rest than doing, and it was good for my creative burnout.

But I feel like I can rest some more, but yet, starting to feel kind of restless to start moving. Not moving as in getting after business targets, but to just move. To move on something, anything…

Anything other than nothing.

I talked about my burnout builds as a way to create and feel alive again. That’s a good way to restart my momentum again, to start moving again.

But the build list I had consisted of many practical, useful stuff. I can do that but i want to start even lower down the bar. Maybe I can start by building something 100% useless but 100% fun. Totally zero stress, no expectations, ultimate play.

Taking inspiration from funny/fun sites like:

• istheshipstillstuck.com - joke site about that ship stuck in Panama Canal
• burgers.dev - a rivalry about burgers between 2 devs
• codingweekmarketingweek.com - is it coding week or marketing week?

So fun projects it’ll be.

Onwards!

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/maybe-growing-a-community-slowly-is-better-a23bdbb145

📈 MRR: $109
💵 One-off revenue: $367
👀 Tweet impressions: 304k
💬 Engagement rate: 4.4%
📣 Profile visits: 69.9k
🏃🏻‍♂️ New followers: 217

—

Goalless June was a success. I succeeded in doing nothing. Probably the only time I pass with flying colours lol. Seriously though… taking intentional downtime had always been difficult for me. So I consider this a win.

June had been hard though. Lots of minor ailments here and there. Health isn’t great. Sleep was poor. It was my birthday month – I turned 43, yet the month didn’t quite feel quite celebratory. It felt like… just another month. Just another month struggling to keep up with everything.

The month passed by in a blink. The days are long, but the months are short. I guess that’s the life of a new parent, a clueless new dad? Just making it through to bedtime often feels like an achievement in itself.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve already won juggling these many roles and challenges. But yet, I don’t feel victorious.

Much to reflect on.

Included a CTA button to a google form to capture emails:

https://jasonleow.carrd.co

Link to slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uyysIfNkNGrIbVVqy0o5-BdGSJuQsFSI6qutZADk6Yc/edit?usp=sharing

What do you think?

I did it again.

Overstrained my Achilles tendon by standing on one foot for too long while working at my standing desk.

Made worse because I'm usually barefoot so there's no cushion to reduce repetitive stress on the ankle. Made even worser because when I work I get into disembodied, focused mode and become less aware of any sensations in the body. The worst of all: I think standing is 'healthy' or at least healthier than sitting.

Fatal combination of work-from-home practices and mindsets.

What can I do then?

- First, heal. Rest. No exercise. Ice the swollen tendon. Use painkiller patches in interim. Go to traditional Chinese medicine doctor for resetting if it gets worse.
- Add a foot cushion. There's many anti-fatigue foot mats for standing desks to explore for future use, but in the meantime I'll make do with a cheap yoga mat cut up to the width of a foot mat, overlaid with an actual foot mat.
- Wear bedroom slippers for additional cushion for now.
- Move more. Don't just sit or stand. Work 30min, get up, move about, get a glass of water. Not great for deep work, but good for health.
- Future prevention:
• Exercise more. Walk more. I already do heel raises but can do more through the day
• No more standing on one foot to work! Set alarms? Pomodoro timers?
• Get better, anti-fatigue, ergonomic foot mats - these ones from [Fully looks promising!](https://www.fully.com/accessories/standing-desk-mats.html)

What else can I do/get?

👀 Demo: https://videobutton.carrd.co/

💳 Buy: https://plugins.carrd.co/#videobutton

Current MRR: $109

At this rate, doubt I'd hit my goal of $200 MRR by end 2022.

New lesson about growing communities: Grow slowly.

Fast growth is like the holy grail of the startup world. But that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes fast growth can backfire. Especially when it comes to community building. Just learned this the hard way from growing the 5am club for creators.

What happened - I took more than a year to grow the Telegram chat group to 100 members. Because I posted my 5am wake times on Twitter every day, people would discover it occasionally, and 1 or 2 new members would join every few days or so. It was drip growth. A slow growth approach for sure.

But as it grew, I also realised people started chatting more. The first 6 months was just 90% me posting. Soon after, it started to have more discussions. More sharing of wake times and all. Promising!

Then all that engagement got wiped out when my article about the 5am club went viral on Indie Hackers in April. There was a rush of new members, and within 1-2 months I doubled the size of the community to near 200. It was nice and all to grow so fast, but the influx created a lot of ‘low value’ or spammy messages (like notifications of people joining, welcome messages etc), which probably turned off the regular commenters, or got them to switch off notifications.

Engagement plummeted even though membership rose like a rocket.

And after the viral growth spurt, it’s like back to a quiet room, again with me posting through April to May. Only recently in mid-June did the conversations start coming back.

So which was better:

An engaged community with slow growth, or
A disengaged community with hyper growth?
I’m leaning more to option #1 now. In fact, I’ve stopped tweeting my wake times on Twitter to intentionally stop growing for a while, so that we can refocus on the community again, and give it some breathing space to pick itself back up again.

Sometimes slow growth isn’t just a ideal that lifestyle businesses favour. It can be for very practical reasons too, like this.

This made me reflect on growing this community here too on Lifelog. I like the growth rate so far. The revenue is dismal yes, but we’re having new people in at a rate that’s not spammy or noisy. It still feels small and cosy, where everyone knows everyone. I value that experience way more than growing it fast, to be honest. People join for the writing, but stay for the community. The relationships and the interactions are what matters.

Also started scheduling LinkedIn posts in Hootsuite (free plan)
- only 5 scheduled posts any one time
- only 2 channels for free

- Removed Store in nav menu of outsprint.io
- Updated store in Portfolio page as temporarily closed

Part 4 of tiny yet cool Twitter hacks that I’m slowly accumulating over all the daily practice and observing how others do it:

• MRR. Joined for monthly recurring revenue, stayed for the monthly recurring relationships
• Not overthinking each tweet. I used to spend hours over a single tweet, first drafting it, then editing it multiple times. The nature of Twitter, its effort:reward ratio, just doesn’t work that way. That if you put in more effort means you get more likes, followers, conversions. Just put out cool ideas and move on. “If you’re spending more than a minute on a tweet you’re doing it wrong. Editing is for stuff that lasts.” – @getpaidwrite
• Committing to Twitter growth for the decade had been such a gamechanger in terms of how I feel about the work. Then the immediate highs and lows of likes and engagement will drop away. Not much likes on a tweet? That’s ok. try again tomorrow. And tomorrow.
• Batch content. 2-3h within 1 day versus 1h every morning? No-brainer.
• Systems/templates. With batching content means having systems and templates becomes more important (because you’re not tweeting offhand now). You don’t get extra credit for trying to be original every single time and tweeting offhand. You’re also not any lesser of a creator if you use templates/systems.
• Engagement tools. New breed of Twitter tools to help you know who to engage (not scheduling tools) - Engagement Builder and Lab Social. This seems to be the answer to the other part of Twitter growth narrative where they tell you to reply to other accounts as much as you tweet consistently.
• DM approach. DMs means your tweets will be more likely to show up on people’s tweets. So have a DM strategy. But don’t use DMs in a transactional way. Use DMs to build relationships. Be authentic. Make friends.
• Twitter Spaces. Spoke at my first Space last week and I love it! It’s like a podcast but more informal, unstructured and free-flowing. More conversational than most podcasts. Also feels like a great way to build relationships and also just have fun.
• Replies are best tweets. My best tweets are from replies to other people’s tweets. There’s something about being able to interact and bounce off each other’s words that bring out latent content/ideas… So the solution to not having enough content ideas? Be the reply guy.
• Asking questions is one of the best ways to create lots of engagement. But as always, be authentic.
• Have a spiky point of view (ala @MeetKevon style), not just a niche. Provides contrast, makes you stand out, but be real too (don’t just say controversial things for sake of stirring sh*t and getting attention).
• Being entertaining is just as viable a Twitter growth strategy as being educational. Because entertainment is value too. If you also resonated and connected emotionally, that’s value as well.
• Profile page makeovers. When launching a new product, do a complete makeover for banner, profile and bio.
• Birthdays are great excuses to get lots of engagement. Don’t squander the opportunity!
• Restrained distribution. You don’t have to post your link every day. Jab jab jab jab jab jab jab jab jab hook. Give give give give give give give give give ask. Compress the spring before an ask.

What other tiny Twitter hacks do you know?

Why I’m self-employed and always come back to it even though I was employed in the past:

Freedom.

But unfortunately that word often feels fluffy and grandiose.

It’s not some abstract rebel ideal, though. It’s a lot more practical than it sounds. This tweet by Naval sums it up well:

"Don’t outsource your happiness or success to other people’s decisions." – @naval

That’s totally what I’m doing. It’s also built off my experience being employed, how I felt that there’s always a gap between compensation versus competency, effort and talent. Oftentimes a huge gap. So, someone else’s decision getting in the way of my success. I realised I needed to create my own game rather than play someone’s else’s rigged one. In the end it was just a pragmatic decision. To get to a more efficient competency:compensation ratio.

The best part? Even if I don’t get there, I know it’s my own doing (or failing). It’s within my control. There’s no one else to blame. No what-ifs.

My creator journey is totally showing me this. I have only myself to blame or congratulate. There’s exhilarating highs and depressing lows. It’s not a stable, no-drama life for sure.

But I love it.

I wrote this travelogue article for a local newspaper The Straits Times on 25 Sep 2007, describing my life-changing experience staying in 2 monasteries in France over 4 months practising meditation. I was 28 then. This story represents a pivotal moment in my life where nothing was the same again after. Sometimes people ask me about it, so I’m reproducing it here for onward sharing. I originally titled it “Inner Sanctums” but obviously too cryptic so the editor changed it to “Buddhism in Bordeaux”......

We often think of burnout as overwork.

Working long hours.
Working 7 days a week.
Not getting enough rest/sleep.

And the antidote to burnout is removal from work. Rest. Do nothing. Passive.

That works for physical burnout. But there’s many types of burnout. Some might need you to do more stuff instead to recover.

“You often feel tired not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.” – Alexander den Heijer

That quote just about sums up what this other type of burnout is.

I call it creative burnout.

Not from working too long or too hard, but from not working on things that give you joy. Too little play, too much serious.

In such cases, sure I can benefit from the usual approach of walking away and taking some downtime. But the best way to recover from creative burnout is to do more.

Active rest, not passive rest.

The close parallel is when you’ve been working all day sitting down in front of a computer, and instead of resting by sitting on a couch watching Netflix, you go for a walk outdoors. Get some blood running. You feel more revitalized afterwards.

But huge caveat: Not do more of the previous work that is causing the creative burnout. Do less of that, yes. But do more play and fun. This isn’t some weird self-deception move to trick yourself to working more. Do stuff that makes you come alive. Stuff that you do even if no one is watching. Even if you don’t get impressions, likes, and retweets. Stuff for it’s own sake, just because.

So that’s what I’ll do.

“Nearly impossible to worry about anything if you’ve already decided you’ll stick to it for a decade.” – @OneJKMolina

It’s amazing what a non-negotiable commitment to a crazy long time can do to your motivation.

I’ve been recently feeling somewhat demoralised by my poor product launch for Sheet2Bio. But a friend on Twitter asked me this:

"It’s a figure of speech, I’m not saying it will necessarily take 10 years. But those who succeed often don’t mind investing 10 years into it. Because it really means that much to them. Besides. what else are you going to do in the next 10 years? Give up and work a 9-5?"

That made me laugh, at myself. Sooo true. Loved it. Felt so much better. Went away asking… “What was the problem again?”

I’m not going anywhere else. So what else is there? Just be ok with the disappointment, sit with it for a few days. Then just get back to work. There’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

This isn’t the first time I heard a creator say that. The OG of indie hackers @levelsio also said something similar about his own journey, how he’s committing to indie hacking for ten years, because he observed how many of his peers in electronic music (something he used to do in the past) found success after crossing the ten year mark.

Commit a decade to it.

And all the lows (and highs) that come during this ten years will be but a blimp in calendar. A decade commitment puts real big picture perspective to your tiny every day experiences.

Customer asked if my listings plugins can handle 200 items. I replied no.

But now I have an idea for an upgraded version of the plugin - one that links the json data to Google Sheets!