Jason Leow

So with the Twitter API pricing announcement, most small indie Twitter tools will be going out of business. $42,000 per month—almost half a million per year—for API access is just too much for mere mortals. The trade-off they had to make for networks effects over platform risk, and now platform risk had reared its ugly head.

The tool I've been using, Zlappo, is likely going down. 😢

So it's a sad day for indies. Imagine building your SaaS for years, hitting thousands or tens of thousands in MRR... only to get rug-pulled like that. My heart goes out to those fellow indies. It sucks balls.

That also means I'm out in the market *yet again* for a new Twitter tool. This time, it'll likely cost more due to the increase in costs for Twitter tools to run. So I'm not optimistic, even though a few of the survivors had not yet announced any price increases:

- Typefully
- Hypefury
- Tweet Hunter
- Black Magic
- Publer

It's probably a bad time to think about building anything on Twitter... but that got me thinking of an idea: Twitter API has a [free plan](https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222783601631233) which is very bare bones – just 1500 tweets per month, media upload endpoints and login with Twitter. Very basic, but I'm not a super power user. I just need a tool to schedule a tweet, and auto-retweet it twice at a 8h time interval. No need for analytics, auto-DMs, AI writing tools, thread composer, none of those fancy bells and whistles.

I wonder if we can make a Twitter scheduler wrapper tool where we consumers sign up for a free dev account and bring our own API keys, very much like ChatGPT wrapper apps. Buy a one-time license for the app, download/install or open in browser, and run using your own API key.

I would buy that!

[Update:] From reading the docs, maybe the auto-RT features are not possible using the free plan. 🙃 Maybe someone can make a Twitter scheduler tool for intermediate users using the $100/month plan then? Just getting 10 customers on a $10/month plan would break even on the cost already. Surely the $100 plan can support 10 users?!

Tao's Artgrab page: https://artgrab.co/art/tao

Used it on my Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jasonleow/

More follow-up deploys today:

✅ Fixed the bug on mobile view where the back to home button overlapped with the preview button on the /write page.

✅ Added toggle off to markdown preview button on the /write page so that don't have to click on text to disable rich text preview mode. Thanks for feedback, @tao! 👍

🔑 Added NEW feature: hit the Esc key shortcut to preview in rich text.

Last week I decided that [weekends shall be reserved for side projects](https://golifelog.com/posts/side-project-weekends-1679711565154). And it felt great actually starting it this weekend!

It was a productive weekend of coding, building and shipping. What I did:

> 👁 Updated Markdown preview. Previously you hover your cursor outside of the text area to preview in rich text. Based on feedback and dogfooding, found that the hover preview tend to trigger 'jumpy' spurious previews. So now it's a preview button on the top editing toolbar.
>
> 🔑 Added a keyboard shortcut: Hit the Esc key shortcut to preview in rich text.
>
> ✅ Fixed some bugs where the raw text was overflowing out of preview mode.
>
> ✅ Fixed the bug on mobile view where the back to home button overlapped with the preview button on the `/write` page.
>
> ✅ Added toggle off to markdown preview button on the `/write` page so that don't have to click on text to disable rich text preview mode. Thanks for feedback, @tao!

It always feels like coming home cracking open VSCode and diving into Vue.js/Nuxt.js again.
It always feels great to make some progress—no matter how tiny—on this special passion project.
It always feels nice to be able to update Lifeloggers on the new features and engaging them on feedback, and not feel like I'm letting them down.

I found myself looking forward to this side project weekend... more than I realised. Literally jumped out of bed earlier to get cracking, foregoing some quality sleep. I guess that's a good sign?

Weekends had not felt more fun in a while.

Apparently the algo punishes you if your following:follower ratio is above 0.6.

I was at 2180:6558 this morning, so that's about 0.3 – I passed, but that got me thinking about spring cleaning my follows.

So bit the bullet, culled it to 695.

Will see if it matters at all!

I started my first day of April cleaning up my Twitter follows, unfollowing more than 1000 of my 2k follows. Now I follow about 700, a good ratio, thanks to the analyses from the Twitter alogorithm going open source.

Perhaps that's a sign that April is going to be a month of purging and spring cleaning.

My desk is cluttered af. I've not touched it for more than a year. My work space is slowly becoming a warehouse, with cardboard boxes and unused furniture crowding up behind and beside me. My cabinet and bookshelves have not seen a cleaning towel for *years*. I have old letters I kept from more than 5 years ago. Around the house, things are starting to break down. A flickering light bulb. Badly flaking paint. Many tiny repair jobs that needs the man of the house to work on.

Living in a tidy, clean and sane space is a form of self care.

And since the start of the pandemic, I mostly forgot about self care because I was either too sleep deprived, too tired, too busy, or too stretched to care. But things are fine now. I don't need to be in crisis mode anymore. I can self care beyond the immediate, to the nice-to-have stuff like clutter.

It's also timely, because I have about one month before the start of my next sprint of coaching and consulting in May. I do need some downtime. And there's no better time during this downtime to finally spring clean my space and by extension, my mindscape.

Not just physical space, but mental, for work, life and everything else.

👁 Updated Markdown preview is here. Previously you hover your cursor outside of the text area to preview in rich text. Based on feedback and dogfooding, found that the hover preview tend to trigger 'jumpy' spurious previews. So now it's a preview button on the top editing toolbar.

✅ Fixed some bugs where the raw text was overflowing out of preview mode.

The last time it happened it ($1027) was due to Black Friday sales, in Nov 2022 last year. This time, it grew to that organically. 🤑

The nice momentum in February for building didn’t last through March. Fact is, I got busy with consulting and coaching. Public speaking always takes a lot out of me, so with that meant I had limited energy for indie hacking.

All good though. The consulting was necessary. Funds are running low again and that helped eased the anxiety.

Ultimately, there is no hurry. It’s a marathon. Even if I thought I was a charging elephant.


Mar revenue:
Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
One-off revenue: $896 (↑$141)
Total revenue: $1005 (↑$141)
Total costs = $323
Total profit: $682 (↑$203) (excl. consulting revenue)
Profit margin: 68%

https://plugins.carrd.co/#scrolltotop

Testing new freemium biz model for plugins!

https://plugins.carrd.co/#mobilenavbarpro

Yesterday I fell into a rabbit hole of building. Here's what went down:

- Added [animated gradient buy buttons](https://plugins.carrd.co/#mobilenavbarpro) to my site just for fun. Wasn't serious nor thinking about conversion rates. Just wanted to try something random, learn some new CSS, for a few minutes.
- "Oh that was fun!" Then went on to add it to the "power up" part of my [hero tagline](https://plugins.carrd.co) – "Plugins, widgets, scripts to power up your Carrd sites". The animated gradient works well here as it made "power up" look like it's charging.
- Felt inspired! Then went on to create a all-new product - an [animated gradient buttons template](https://animatedgradientbuttons.carrd.co) on Carrd.

And that was most of my day gone by the time the dust settled. All because of surge of random inspiration.

The weird thing is... You know what people often say about inspiration: Don't wait for it. Inspiration is fickle. Go with consistency instead.

I used to be that guy. I was the "consistency guy". Defending consistency over inspiration was a hill I'd die on.

But lately, I'm having a more nuanced view.

It's not inspiration *versus* consistency.
It's inspiration AND consistency.

Like... *why not both?* Consistency matters, yes. Consistency saved my ass so many times where inspiration was dry and motivation low. But when inspiration does show up, don't just ignore it and do the usual consistency stuff. Leverage the hell out of that surge of energy and ideas! It's a great opportunity to kickstart something from nothing. It's a 10x productivity moment that would be so silly to waste on doing the 'boring' consistent stuff. Do the exciting shit happening right here right now.

> Inspiration is perishable - act on it immediately." – [@naval](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1204670141734109184)

The way I see it now: Consistency is for the boring days when inspiration's away. Consistency keeps you around and ready... till inspiration returns. When it does return, drop consistency and act on inspiration. Immediately. Without guilt and holding back.

Drink it all up.

Taking time to stare into space and daydream is also part of indie hacking.


I've come to realise that this is not a nice-to-have, but a necessity. A biological need, like hunger and thirst. Anytime I get too busy and skip my weekly reviews (as I had been guilt of doing the last two months), I can feel the 'weight' of my mind bearing down on me. Everything feels more hazy and crazy. I'm carrying too many ideas and thoughts.

The staring into space and daydreaming, somehow... feels like purging. A nice kind of purging. Like spring cleaning, re-organising furniture around the house. The total amount of things inside are probably still the same, but tidier, neater, saner.

It's not like it feels like work, or like working on a task or something. Sometimes at the end, I don't feel like I've actually *done* anything. Other than just sitting there, staring blankly, listening to my music, daydreaming a bit maybe.

But perhaps this is how it really works. Just like sleep, but done when awake. You let it unfold on its own, then get up and move on like it's the most natural thing. Like waking up in the morning.