Jason Leow

https://carouselslider.carrd.co/#doublecarousel

🚀 NEW LIFELOG FEATURES

⬇️ Download all your posts - either on Google Sheet (which you can then save as CSV or Excel), or download as JSON. Side-note though: If you got years of posts, it'll take quite a long while!

⌛️ Time hop is here. See what you wrote last year today. I've always felt we got so much writings in archive, and occasionally pulling these up might be helpful to reminiscence, or to review progress.

🛠 Also fixed bug on registration page that's been bugging me for the longest time!

Let's go with [play-driven development](https://golifelog.com/posts/play-based-development-1692499812341). What should I play with?

I looked through all my open browser tabs to see what I've opened and wanted to keep opened for reference again. Looked through my notes in Telegram, and saved bookmarks on social media. Just creating of quick list of fun and interesting things I'm curious about right now:

- Play with [grammY](https://grammy.dev/), a JS framework for Telegram bots
- Building fun features for Lifelog, like bots, lifespan view,
- Use Pushmore.io Telegram bot for notifications
- Use Logsnag to show iOS notifications
- Use [Postmark](https://postmarkapp.com/) and [Crontap](https://crontap.com)/[Cron-job](https://cron-job.org/) to create a email drip course?
- Create ghetto versions of analytics, A/B testing plugins
- Create simple tools for people on Twitter. Start simple, like just a form to generate something. An image, a 5s video, something, anything.
- Simple database to store small pieces of standalone data, like using Google Sheets to store text for an announcement banner I made. Like instead of an entire table of a db, I just need 1 row out of the whole table where I can CRUD. Or not even a row, but a key/value pair, or just a snippet of JSON.
- Websites or writings that would last 'forever' on the internet, even past my lifetime.

Some patterns I'm observing about my curiosities:

- No AI. Still feels out of my league to try.
- Lots of stuff about Telegram I realised. I truly love that app.
- Tiny tools - easier to try and use, get set up.
- Ghetto tools - goes with my rookie dev status

*What are you curious about?*

[A masterclass hidden in a long reply here by @levelsio](https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1688910420273197056?s=20), on how he got started with the whole AI game:

- started 11 months ago
- played with Stable Diffusion, realised it was good for generating beautiful architecture homes
- made thishousedoesnotexist.org, realised people used it for interior a lot
- pivoted to interiorai.com, it went viral and made $50k MRR
- realised can add pics of himself and made avatarai.me, made $100k
- realised avatars are a fad, pivoted to photo shoots and made photoai.com

Love this approach. There’s no masterplan, no vision (at least at the start). Every idea gave more ideas and led to the next breakthrough one. Everything is emergent, and all you need to do is to take the next step.

Start with curiosity.
Build one thing.
One thing leads to building another thing.
And another…
Profit!

And my favourite part of this is... it all started from curiosity, from just playing with something – a new technology, a new tool, or something shiny.

Get curious
Play, have fun
Ship something
Sense opportunity
Respond, pivot

Probably one of my top favourite way to start any product, through play!

It's perfect timing of a message, as I'm trying to rest and play more first right now after my [consulting season](https://golifelog.com/posts/how-the-body-teaches-rest-1692238180728).

Play, and maybe something good will come out of it. If not, I still won because of the mental break I got.

Approach
- click a link of existing Google Sheet document (with embedded script in Apps Script) to make a force copy it to user's Google Drive
- copy and paste a import JSON formula into cell of Sheet
- all posts load into Sheet

Yesterday I wrote about my [1700 consecutive days streak](https://golifelog.com/posts/makerlog-1700-1692319643083) of shipping on Makerlog.

I wish I can you how crazily successful I am because I shipped everyday for over 4 years.

But I'm not.

Faaar from it, in fact.

I'm just at $1k monthly revenue. That's like rookie numbers. I'm at the indie hacker baby stage only. I'm still struggling to grow my products. I've not hit any product with growth potential to go to say, $10k per month. Hell, I'm even struggling to even [launch new ones right now](https://golifelog.com/posts/how-the-body-teaches-rest-1692238180728).

That streak number means nothing in the larger scheme of things. At least for me. My goals, my dreams. It's really a throughput metric, not the output or outcome. Not the endgame.

The final endgame, the real number that ultimately matters is money in the bank, the blank days in your calendar.

It's how many laughs I've seen my kid laughed.
It's how many smiles I've seen my wife smiled.
It's how many trips I went on with my family.
It's how many night we slept soundly knowing we're well-provided for.
It's the assurance my parents feel in their retirement years.

Those are the real numbers.

Post-mortem: Got new ideas and proposals to pitch for new work!

Just hit 1700 day streak on Makerlog.

This might be the last time I talk about my Makerlog streak because by 31 Oct it will be gone - the new Makerlog will no longer have streaks.

So... some parting thoughts:

- It's not as crazy or unhealthy as you think. It's not about working like crazy 24/7, weekdays and weekends. It's just 1 task a day. The task can be small. But it has to be a real task. For me, the one task that ensured I kept up this long was my daily writing here on Lifelog, about indie hacking, products, experiments, ideas, or just life. I write, then log it over at Makerlog. As long as I write, my streak will keep going.

- In a way, 1700 could have been my writing streak too because I started on Makerlog on the same day I started daily writing on the now-defunct 200wordsaday. That is if I didn't intentionally break the writing streak to build Lifelog (after 200WAD closed down). Pretty nostalgic to think about those days when I started logging and writing... I was on a digital nomad trip in Ubud, Bali. First time nomading, and in my early days of indie hacking. I remember working from cafes every day, and launching my Wordpress-based products there (that's the only tech stack I knew back then). 1700 days is over 4 years, which sounds about right how long I've been shipping.

- Even though I 'celebrate' the streak, it's hardly the main motivation anymore. In the initial days, yes. Not wanting to break the streak does help a bit in maintaining the habit. But I remember, after about 2 years, that number doesn't matter no more. The habit's ingrained, the system runs itself, and I'm doing it because of a deeper why, because I enjoy it (I mean, daily writing). It's no longer about the streak. At some points I remember the Makerlog logging API going down, and I wondered if the streak will break. After a few minutes, I realised I don't really care that much. But that is not to say that the streak is a useless mechanism. It's super useful in the early days of habit formation, at least for me. But once instrinsic motivation takes over, it becomes just a nice-to-have external artefact to look at.

- Enthusiasm is easy, endurance is hard. Over the 1700 days, I seen so many promising indie makers come and go on Makerlog. Some burn out and drop out, others move on to fulltime jobs, some just disappear without a trace. All burst into the scene with fireworks, and a fire in their eyes and belly. What separates enthusiasm from the endurance? I wish I had some pithy wisdom bomb to share. I wish I knew. But one thing's for sure, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Here's to the 1700. And to the old Makerlog being witness to my indie hacker baby days.

🍻🍻

- Mention + link in Youtube bio
- Mention + link in their carrd, community post or tweet

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[UPDATE:] And he bought it!
[UPDATE 2:] And he asked for refund cos it wasn't up to his expectations 😩 Refunded.