Jason Leow

Since writing the course outline for our cohort-based writing course for introverts, I got a bit stuck.

A few hard questions and polarities I’m dealing with:

1. Write daily versus write as-and-when - consistency vs intensity?
2. Peer learning versus trainer-led coaching - what's the best mix?
3. One man’s thrash versus another man’s treasure - how to accommodate everyone's goals?

Wrote to think in this post here.. would love to hear what you think of the hard questions, and my proposed solutions!

https://subdomains.carrd.co/
https://ethereum.carrd.co/
https://customtemplates.carrd.co/
https://cohortcourse.carrd.co/

Imagine: A subdomain marketplace for Carrd, where people can trade, exchange, buy or sell their .carrd.co subdomains with one another.

Kind of like domaining (or negatively known as domain squatting) but for just within the Carrd ecosystem. I think these domains might work well if you’re building a product/service for the Carrd ecosystem, so that the domain name is an exact match (e.g. selling Carrd templates using templates.carrd.co is a great domain name to have).

It’s a beautiful day today. A day that’s two years in the making.

Today is the day when the government lift most of the social distancing restrictions for Singapore. So it’s almost Freedom Day for us.

What it really means to me:

Relief.

That it’s finally over. We made it.

We made it through a global pandemic, the crisis of our generation.

Now, time to heal. And to re-build.

Nothing to see here...yet - https://unlimiteddesign.carrd.co/

Kinda like a social proof, that's it's not a ghost town here, and people are actually using it

What I learned about domain-driven business from Peter Askew aka @searchbound, I used it in my side business Plugins For Carrd

• Get a domain name that’s descriptive - says directly what it is/does
• Create a product/service with said domain

Yep, no fancy startup-ish names! And for my plugins, not even a .com domain!

I just checked today, and it’s the #1 Google search result!

- the screenshot is underrated as a build in public tool (for me at least). Share more screenshots/screen recordings!

https://i.imgur.com/AAdlF8r.png

Writing to think is one of the main reasons why I stuck to writing daily here on Lifelog. And I do the same when building a product.

So often I start writing my daily post here with no inkling of what point I’m try to make. I take the seed of an idea, a barely formed title, and just start typing. As the words form, the thoughts form. As the thoughts form, the original idea evolves. And I loop through this multiple times to eventually end up ‘discovering’ the real point I was try to make, the realisation I was try to get to.

The point, the insight, is an emergent property of the writing. I could not have ever predicted what will come out of the writing. The outcome, the end result, is unknown and can never be certain prior. The only thing I’m certain is: The writing will show the way.

Likewise, I realised I like doing that with my products.

There’s more to just launching a scrappy MVP in the style of an indie hacker trying to validate product-market fit. It’s not the minimum version of a pre-formed vision of the product I have in my head. Maybe many other indie hackers do that, but not for me.

I build to figure it out.

Talking to @knight about unlimited nocode productized service got me thinking about the idea I had for Carrd:

Unlimited design and support for Carrd.

I DMed Carrd founder AJ to ask what he thinks about it:

“despite carrd being pretty easy to use there are still a lot of folks who’d rather have someone else handle it for them”

That was a nice affirmation! Carrd being so much easier to use than Wordpress is one reason why I thought unlimited design/support might not work for Carrd… but if he thinks otherwise, that’s promising! Also, looking at the questions I see being asked all the time in Carrd communities (some are even simple ones covered by the documentation), seems like there’s definitely an opportunity here.

I might start off with this pricing:

• $199 unlimited Carrd web design + support for 1 site
• $499 unlimited Carrd web design + support for unlimited sites

Carrd tasks includes:
• creating a marketing landing page
• setting up a Carrd template
• adding payment buttons
• improving SEO
• setting up custom domain
• integrating Carrd plugins
• integrating 3rd party apps like Mailchimp or Zapier
• no custom coding
• troubleshooting anything required

Next: To go launch that quick and scrappy Carrd landing page to test if there’s demand!

What do you think?

In my hurry to get to the future that I envision and desire, I think I might have over-compensated and looked past the value of my past.

This is about my career.

I wanted my products to work so bad, that I unknowingly high-nosed my past expertise in design consulting.

But now I truly accept it back into the fold of my portfolio of businesses.

I mean, nothing’s changed. It was in my portfolio before, and it still is.

What changed is the mindset and intention. And the effort put into it.

I was kind of being ungrateful for that past career, and failed to see how it supported me thus far. I stopped putting effort into getting myself out there in terms of consulting, so gigs dried up.

Yet there’s so much potential still. Wasted opportunity.

That’s why I’m re-starting my content distribution on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/jasonleowsg), only this time, it’s not about writing or for Lifelog but about design.

It certainly feels great to have a channel now to push all the insights I built up and learned over the 8 years being a design consultant in the public sector. Already it’s showing more views than my previous writing content!

Design innovation in government is something I’m good at. It’s something I can still grow in. I should acknowledge it.

I want to acknowledge it. Now.

I’m back.

This concept of $10 work vs $10k work by @khemaridh is interesting.

It’s tedious, low impact admin work vs work that truly moves the needle.
It’s a way to think about and to prioritize your tasks at work.
It’s about “penny wise, pound foolish” in productivity.
It’s tactic vs strategy.

In particular, I like the 2x2 matrix

$10 work - low skill, low leverage: Checking email
$100 work - low skill, high leverage: Writing documentation
$1000 work - high skill, low leverage: Developing a keystone skill
$10,000 work - high skill, high leverage: Spotting an opportunity that will 1000x your revenue

The key question to ask is:

Where are the $10k force multipliers in my work?

Let’s take stock.