Jason Leow

“It’s almost always better to learn from peers who are 2 years ahead of you than mentors who are 20 years ahead of you. Life evolves and most insights get outdated.” ~ James Clear

I’m actually really hungry for stories of success and failure from peers who are one or two zeros ahead of me. I’m currently below $100 MRR, so looking to learn from those who are in the $100-$1000 MRR range is actually quite refreshing and immediately useful for me. Anything beyond two zeros—$10k MRR—becomes distant and un-relatable. But these stories are hard to find.

......more about just their raw experiences, the challenges faced, lessons learned, without trying to reduce to pithy one-liner statements like it’s sage truth. Or worse, abstract them into an ebook or a course that you’re selling. Because even advice from peers in the same stage can potentially be misleading, so why prop it up more than it has to? Let us make our own inferences from the raw stories.

Just all of the learning, none of the selling.

Prototype is an Airtable online form and table view for nursing home - for them to takes misc purchase orders from residents, scan receipts, upload scans, and track purchases

I won’t be marketing, I’m building a media company.

Specifically, things I’m doing differently in April (as compared to just riffing and sharing links on Twitter and Indie Hackers.):

Research - search key words/questions, #hashtags, topics
Content plans - content categories, scheduled content, sourcing
Analytics - metrics on all platforms to measure performance
Automation - will try as much as possible to automate, e.g. Buffer, IFTTT, Zapier

You know shit got real when you have a multi-tab spreadsheet for it! But all those things are still so new to me, I might even need to add more as I go.

More here: https://navbar.carrd.co

You know shit just got real when your marketing:

- has a multiple tab spreadsheet
- you write content for the entire month ahead
- you create tools to source for content daily

March wins
- Lifelog: shipped @mention in comments, inline-editing for posts and comments, revamped community page, learned loads about marketing
- launched social impact patronage
- launched #pluginsforcarrd

March fails
- Acquire at least 2 new subscribers for Lifelog: acquired 1 new user but he’s not a paying subscriber
- Sell at least 2 copies of a Carrd clone template for Plugins For Carrd: Sold 1 copy, legit.
- Get at least 2 web design projects for Sweet Jams Sites: Sent out proposals for 2 but none confirmed

Revenue numbers
- Lifelog: $40/m
- Keto List: S$705 one-time
- Social impact patrons: $50/yr + $10/m

I totally missed my targets, felt like a failure. But saw some encouraging words on social media that failures are when you take zero shots on goal. Sincere shots taken but target missed are really just “mistakes” to learn from.

OK, I can live with that.

Onwards to April!

What’s the search intent of my customers? What key words do they use?
- writing, writing prompts, creative writing, “how to improve writing skills”, “how to start writing”, “how to start writing a book”, “smart goals”

What might be some questions my customers always ask on search engines?
- how daily writing benefits you (tangible, intangible benefits in focus, productivity, creativity, health, mental wellness)
- how to keep a writing habit - tips, hacks, techniques
- how to form good habits, like writing
- why building a streak is useful for habits
- how public accountability helps you in achieving goals
- how to find your tribe and how a tribe helps you
- how to break bad habits, like in writing
- having rituals/routines to help creativity/writing
- how to get ideas in general, and then specifically on getting ideas for writing

What’s my stance on content sharing?
- Add value directly by relevant, useful content
- Share process/journey if relevant
- Subtle branding
- Don’t dump links
- Don’t be annoying or hard sell
- Tailor content to fit each platform (research how it’s done for each)
- Flywheel folks back to one source (a Twitter thread, or blog post)
- Play long term games with long term people

What’s my content strategy? What’s my marketing flywheel?
- Write quality content
- Publish consistently
- Create once publish everywhere
- SEO
- Collab with others to amplify

What categories of content should I post? A better question: what would my customers find valuable?
- Useful/practical/relevant tips to motivate/get better at writing/goals/etc
- Featured goal from the community
- Featured community member
- Reposts from members
- Motivational quotes
- Questions (ala IH style on Twitter)
- Reposts from elsewhere/other accounts

How often should I post content? Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly?
- Blog - at least once weekly
- On IG, Twitter - Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat

Which channels should I prioritise? Which ones should I experiment with?
Priority: Blog, Twitter, Indie Hackers, Other blogs

Experiments: IG, Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook ads, Twitter ads

I definitely crossed a threshold on sleep management in the past month or so. Yawning a lot less in the day, feeling less fatigue, more alertness. So that’s good!

But my sleep quality scores on the Sleep Cycle app remain around 70%, and often dips to 60%s on nights where I woke up to pee or sleep late. Average score now for all time is 66%. I want to get my scores up to at least 80% consistently.

What else can I do?

* Increase asleep time
* Increase time in bed
* Get smart light bulb for gentler waking
* Limit power naps

More exercise in the day?
Better wind-down ritual in the night?
Using ear plugs?

Where do creators of all kinds hang out? Not strictly writers/authors, but anymore who creates but blogs/published words daily/often:

Product Hunt - launches
Twitter - #ship30for30, writing habit, #100wordsaday, followers of James Clear/#atomichabits, @david_perell @neil_strauss @IAmMarkManson
Indie Hackers groups - Deals, Goal Setters, Indie Publishing, Self-development,
Facebook groups - Atomic Habits Limitless Life, MentalChai, SaaS Growth Hacks
Google search - organic search keywords like writing, writing prompts, creative writing, “how to improve writing skills”, “how to start writing”, “how to start writing a book”
Instagram - writing communities
Reddit? - bujo (bullet journal), writing
Hacker News, Dev.to, Medium?
Newsletter emailing lists - writing newsletters
Product directories - Product Hunt, Betalist, Product Startups, SaaS directory, any Nuxt or Vue directories

Anything else?

What job are they hiring Lifelog to do? (see Jobs To Be Done framework)
* Attract opportunity (career/biz)
* Achieve success
* Grow as a person

...and they do that by (high level goals/behaviour change):
- Writing more
- Publishing in public more frequently
- Get better at writing
- Clarity of goals
- Imagining plans and future
- Achieve progress
- Journaling

Learning marketing now is like rewiring my brain:

Preference for ignore-everything deep focus vs marketing all the time
Introvert vs having to talk about myself and my product
Hating marketing because of annoying, hard selling salesmen/charlatans

I'd been using Makerlog for 2+ years now, and initially I'd just log my tasks just as everyone did. But it didn't quite do much for me. It felt mostly like a one way street - I fed Makerlog tasks, but it didn't quite feed anything back to me.

Lately I'd experimenting with using Makerlog as a learning log. I would write these [long-form logs](https://getmakerlog.com/products/lifelog) capturing stuff I'd learned from making my product [Lifelog](https://golifelog.com), the difficulties I faced, the emotional responses I had, new coding tricks I learned, and the intricacies of why I made certain technical decisions.

That's when Makerlog started getting really useful. When I needed to debug the code, I could refer back to these logs to recap what I was thinking, why I made certain decisions, why I did things a certain way. That would have not been possible if I continued to just log one-liner tasks with little to zero context.

The learning logs had also started to be really useful in conjunction to my practice of writing monthly goals and reviews. We only have limited space in our heads to remember so many things we did in a month, and often I would be under an impression that I didn't do much that month, only to be gladly proven wrong when I scroll through my logs for the month. It complements my monthly recaps really well now.

Right now I liken it to being like a ship captain's log, or the blackbox recording of an airplane. It's not just the quantitative data like streak count and no. of tasks logged, but also the qualitative aspect of writing these learnings down. For sure, it does take more effort and time, which not everyone might be down for.

But I would love to encourage more Makerloggers to try this. I love reading other makers' learnings, their struggles, how they overcame it, etc. I think we'll all be better off—individually as makers, and as a community as well—if more of such learnings are shared openly on the Makerlog feed.

I start projects by starting a new browser window with lots of tabs of research. This time, collaborating with Common Ground, a social enterprise in Singapore, to help young working adults with/concerned about their mental health and wellbeing.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/in-focus-young-people-mental-health-singapore-treatment-13002934
https://www.mindline.sg/
https://stayprepared.sg/mymentalhealth/

Hot take: Why should I tweet and just be known for ONE thing? Because we’re after all, complex human beings with a diversity of interests. I’d rather engage on that messy, multi-layered authenticity than repeat myself all the time, about just one thing. That’s just being naggy.

I care about being expressive and authentic, rather than being consistent and convenient. More importantly, I care about engaging you and knowing you on that level.

Don’t give me the signal, I want all the noise.

...while writing down a marketing brief - just learning points along the way, and decisions about who/what/where/when/why for marketing Lifelog

With updated image and copy. Let's see if this works better:

* photo image
* shorter, concise text
* used familiar terms that social sector professionals know, eg "social service", "one-stop", "SG"
* more ref to local SG context 🇸🇬

Who exactly is Lifelog for?

Writing about your goals everyday is not an easy sell because it’s rare and unconventional. Even amongst the Lifeloggers who have years of streaks, we don’t do that everyday. Me included. We write about a whole bunch of other stuff too, besides our goals. There’s the writing aspect to Lifelog, the more creative expression of it. And there’s the part that’s more concrete and utilitarian, about goal-setting, productivity, success, self-improvement.

Lifelog seems to be situated at the intersection of two social circles – the “writing” tribe vs “goals” tribe.

It’s not much in absolute terms...just $15 for the Carrd navbar plugin. But boy does it feel nice!

Used Simply Static plugin to convert Wordpress site to static html files
Upload files to Github
Host on Netlify
Change DNS records

Voila! A 'Wordpress' site on Netlify without all the pain of bad security and slow speed