Jason Leow

I tweeted a [question](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1660586164376436736?s=20):

> "Finances had been a bit tight recently. The fam could do with a bit more. Was thinking an extra $1k a month won't hurt – not too much that it’s overwhelming, but non-trivial enough that it requires some plotting. How would you go about it if you had to earn an extra $1k/m?"

And the tweet blew up. This is why I love the Twitter Maker community. Everyone wants to help out a fellow indie. I got a lot more ideas from it!

- **Upsell a premium service to past Carrd customers**, e.g. that unlimited support idea that I've held back. Since there's some ongoing relationship, and some indirect validation from the existing business, the barrier to buying is lower. To make it sustainable I got to limit the no. of customers, or scope down the kinds of tasks that can be requested. Imagine just a $199/month subscription service × 5 customers = $1000 more in the bank monthly.
- **Cross bundle with other creators**, anything that fits well together. Sell for 1 week/month, split revenue 3 ways.
- **Live Zoom course** for 2h every Saturday for 1 month on something I'm an expert in. $100/pax, for 10pax. Design thinking?
- **Micro-consulting**: Sell 1h of my time, to help someone with a topic that I'm an expert in. Revive superpeer.com/jasonleow.
- **Build plugins for up-and-coming platform Framer**. Repurpose my Carrd plugins for Framer?!
- Find a problem that someone is willing to pay $2k/m for and **outsource/drop service** it for $1k/m.
- Launch a **simple one-feature micro-SaaS** product.
- **Freelance**! Easiest and fastest.
- Unconsidered idea: **Food delivery.**
- Leverage geo-arbitrage and **move to a low cost country**. But difficult due to family and elderly parents.

So many cool ideas to consider! 🤔

Finances had been a bit tight recently. The fam could do with a bit more. Maybe $1k more per month is a good target – not too much to shoot for that's it's overwhelming or stressful, but not too insignificant either that it doesn't require some planning and concerted effort.

So here's me writing to brainstorm how to achieve that:

**Services**
– Services are the fastest way from idea to revenue. Minimal upfront effort, but lots of recurring effort. What skills do I have right now that I can immediately offer services for?
- Carrd-related services - unlimited design, installation, unlimited support
- Web design freelance gigs
- Conduct design thinking 101 workshops - remote? Face-to-face?
- Design thinking coaching for teams
- Remote gigs - RemoteOK, Upwork, Fiverr
- Drop services - Repackage niche gigs from Upwork/Fiverr, add my own spin and expertise, charge for more, e.g. UXStoryboard.

**Info products**
– Next to services, info products are the next easiest to get off the ground, and move to revenue. Some upfront effort, but minimal recurring effort (other than marketing). What's something I'm already an expert in and can talk for hours without preparation?
- Keto ebook
- 5am club/sleep biohacking directory
- Twitter hacks directory
- Carrd helpkit - a comprehensive support directory of just about anything Carrd-related
- Design sprint guide and workbook

**SaaS/Software**
– No immediate payoff, but could be complementary to the other ideas with more fast payoffs. Some types of software can be done quickly and flipped too. What ideas in the drawer have I kept that I can execute on right now?
- Build and launch more Carrd plugins.
- Build apps with intention to flip on microacquire.
- Buy an app on microacquire, reflipped it for more months later.
- Put Sheet2Bio on sale.
- Pivot Sheet2Bio to B2B to show charts and stats.
- Build niche websites that grows from SEO, monetized via ads.
- New product idea: Plugins marketplace for any website. Repurpose Carrd plugins to be suitable for any website.
- Design thinking micro-SaaS: Storyboarding, service blueprints, journey maps, personas, stakeholder maps, insight writing, HMW AI engine, ideation prompt engines,

**Ecommerce**
– Selling stuff online is a popular trick. What can I sell that works well with what I'm good at, in niches that I'm familiar with?
- Finally kickstart my single item ecommerce site in waiting - career conversation cards.
- Indie hacker swag store? Posters, memes, tshirts, mugs, stickers.
- Use Midjourney to make physical products or printables to sell on Etsy? Tarot cards, posters?

**Grants**
– There's funders who are keen to give you money. Who are these funders and what can I do to apply?
- Ask for money to build tech for good apps from local philanthropic grants - SGStrong, Lien Foundation
- Ask for government productivity grants for local SMEs

**Slash big item spends**
- We dropped plans for an overseas trip in June.
- No staycations for time being.
- Relook insurance payments.

*What else can I do to quickly earn $1k more per month?*

It had been a fruitful and fufilling side project weekend! Launched 2 features for Lifelog:

- Typing sounds to improve productivity and writing experience.
- Placeholder text shows goal reminders as writing prompts.

This energizing experience really shined light on how being able to ship fast is such a key part of the motivation equation for indie hackers.

You get the dopamine rush of building something quickly and launching it out into the wild.
You get the satisfaction and fulfilment of using it yourself, or seeing your customers use it almost immediately.
You discover gaps and erros, and areas of improvements quickly, leading to an iterative build-launch-tweak virtuous loop.
You feel productive that tangible outputs were delivered.
You get more motivated and inspired by the fast feedback loops.
You had fun. That's the most important part.

Previously I didn't ship anything much for Lifelog for 2 years, and with that, the motivation also stagnated. Now, I look forward to every weekend when I get to ship something new, something fun. And there's an ensuing boost of fresh creative energy that spills over to everything else.

The end result is being able to sustain the long indie journey, to play the long game, to outlast.

Shipping fast, staying last.

I've been having a pretty sucky past few weeks to be honest.

But somehow being able to code and deploy something new for Lifelog this weekend lifted me up again. Now I'm enjoying the new audible feedback feature that I made myself. Every keystroke punctured by the sound of a mechanical keyboard. Relishing the fruits of my creative labour.

They say there's different kinds of indie hackers. There's the builder sort who just loves to code and make things. There's the marketing sort who enjoys storytelling and engaging and persuading others. And there's the CEO, entrepreneur sort who loves building and running businesses.

I'm totally the first kind - the builder. Just being able to build and code is such joy. It's not about the marketing or the cool stories I can tell. It's not whether I can make a business or boatloads of money out of this. Just the pure unadulterated joy of making a widget that does something when I push the button. I don't know why that gives me joy but it just does. It always feels like magic when I do. Especially with coding.

And on days or weeks when it feels sucky, getting in touch with that side of me had always helped uplift my spirits somewhat.

Joy is the ultimate creator.
But creating is also the ultimate joy.

https://jasonleow.substack.com/p/when-play-becomes-work

[Jay's post-mortem](https://twitter.com/therealjayber/status/1658985390391586816) about how and why Zlappo (the Twitter scheduling tool I used) failed was instructive. The point about baked-in virality and product-led growth is particularly resonant.

The idea is that you want to bake in some sort of virality into the product itself, to make it easier to market your product. Like say you can set up a free website but at the bottom of the free site there's a "Powered by X" link. Mailchimp does that/ Carrd does that. Many successful products have that. The benefit of baked-in virality is how marketing becomes user-generated. When users share their websites, they are unintentionally marketing your platform for you, without even trying. You don't even need them to be affiliates – as part of the transaction of getting a free thing from you, they willingly accept the branding on their site, and the unintentional marketing they're doing for you.

Building a product is hard enough, and marketing makes it even harder. Make that 10x more if you're a solo founder. So anything that can automate or outsource that even a little will go a long way. Product-led growth is the way.

The hard question I had to ask myself: ***If I stopped marketing and the product stops selling, did I really have a good product?***

The real honest answer: No.

I look at Lifelog, and that was it's fate back then when I stopped mentioning it on Twitter. And Twitter wasn't even a great distribution channel for it.

I look at my Carrd plugins projects. It marketed itself in a small way, through SEO, word of mouth, free tools as top of funnel, and some baked-in viral elements like adding a link to my main site in the templates. Not enough to go super viral, but had some semblance to baked-in virality which was what made it promising. Promising, *but* not great.

I look at Sheet2Bio, and it had the elements of baked-in virality with the "Made by sheet2Bio" link at the bottom of each bio page. But product-market fit was lacking, and my execution of it even more so. So this was instructive too - baked-in virality is not a magic pill - it won't solve all your problems.

Each one of my 3 products provided a different facet and nuance to baked-in virality.

I wonder if my next product will look like if I combined all that I learned into it...

https://pluginsforcarrd.substack.com/p/different-background-images-for-different

https://m.facebook.com/groups/carrdusers/permalink/1289569234974463/?mibextid=qC1gEa

https://pluginsforcarrd.substack.com/p/different-background-images-for-different

https://www.reddit.com/r/Carrd/comments/13kn0iq/different_background_images_on_different_sections/

https://t.me/carrdchat/3949

https://discord.com/channels/408153478309871616/873611623472975924/1108617256935624734

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/different-background-images-for-different-sections-in-carrd-21d3950f10

https://twitter.com/pluginsforcarrd/status/1659066498625961985

Email sent

They say, when work becomes play, you’ll never work another day in your life. That's always been how I tried to do it. No matter which job, it had to be fun in some way. That's a major reason why I indie hack, because building new things is so fun. Trying to make work like play makes it easy.

But lately, I'm also realising over time, making work like play can bring about an opposite effect too:

**When play becomes work, you’ll never play another day in your life.**

It's like what they say about how it can be fun to do knitting but once your livelihood—your very survivial—depends on it, the fun bit gets killed. Certain hobbies are better off staying as hobbies.

Sometimes I wonder that a lot for my indie making.

I enjoy the building aspect of indie making. The selling and making a business part, a lot less enjoyable. Would I be better off and happier having a main job and making projects on the side? But I can hardly imagine having any bandwidth or time after a demanding 9-5, toddler care, and still have any energy left in the evenings or weekends to build for fun. I can't imagine never building anything ever.

So even if being self-employed is the means towards being able to enjoy building, play becomes work problem persists. It creeps up on you. Sometimes I wonder if I had lost the ability to play and have fun for myself. Everything "fun" is also intimately tied up with making it profitable.

Was it when my consulting revenue dried up and survival became an issue?
Was it when I became a new dad and felt that I needed to provide more?
Was it when I got serious on Twitter and got influenced by all the successful indie folks?

Or it could be that life just got waaay busier in the past 3 years and I simply lost touch with my ability to play. It's easy to lost yourself in work, and parenthood.

Do I want my son to not remember seeing me play ever?
Do I want to just be that kind of father who protected and provided for everyone else other than himself?
Do I want my wife to see me not smile that kind of smile whenever I have fun with abandon?

No.

*When was the last time you played in a way that gave you deep joy?*

"Sometimes all you need for exceptional results is average effort repeated for an above-average amount of time." – [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/may-11-2023)

OK so if I followed what James Clear said for my indie hacking journey, what average effort should I be repeating for an above-average amount of time?

- I keep building and launching new average products with average performance, didn't go viral. But I keep building and launching for years. One day, I might hit an exceptional opportunity, or my skills at shipping fast or shipping complex apps get to a point where I can leverage on exceptional opportunities that way.
- Every week and month I put myself out there learning how to sell and market my stuff. The posts, emails, DMs, side projects do only average, but over years, I learn how to engage with customers and occasionally some go viral.
- Building an audience. Tweet and post on social media every day, and 90% of time it only gets average views. But over years I get the hang of the vibe and start to know what is most engaging.
- Staying healthy. Health is so underrated. We sit down for long hours, work 24/7, and wonder why we're less productive compared to a year ago. By keeping fit, having daily movement, eating well every single day for average effort, I keep my energy levels high so keep at the long game.
- Staying in business, not having to go back to fulltime employment. Just staying in business long enough means average effort put in for a long time. And in a long enough time span, you watch the competitors fade away.
-

*What other average effort in indie hacking is often underrated, but if repeated for a long enough time, would help us get to exceptional results?*