Jason Leow

Whats worse than a product that totally and clearly flopped?

A product that’s neither a huge success or a total failure. Slow growth. Getting revenue but not enough to survive on, yet not neglible either.

Because when you get zero customers, it's a clear signal you either need to pivot, or you need to scrap it and focus on something else. But with a half-assed success or failure, you get mixed signals, tainted with hope and bias of *wanting it to work*. You'll continue to invest time and energy into it, thinking it’ll work out eventually. You just need "impatience with action, patience with results". Maybe it does eventually, after years, a decade. It works if you got enough runway of cash, time and motivation. It's more likely that it doesn’t work out, or you simply run out of juice.

True story.

I held out for two years before finally deciding to do set that project aside as a side project, to build it slowly while I focused on other projects that moved the needle. I was so relieved I finally did that. Because that lost time is more painful than anything.

These days, my indie hacker serenity prayer is not to pray for huge success, but to ask for total failure if it's not meant to be. With a [8.5% hit rate](https://golifelog.com/posts/all-the-products-i-made-1676710309695) or less, it's fair to say, asking for total failure is a safer, better bet.

This indie solopreneur journey seem to get more bad days than good ones. I dare say, in a ratio of 9:1 probably.

Every day, a new challenge, a difficult customer, or some platform risk or failure you never expected. I'm so used to firefighting and running on adrenaline that I sometimes forget to enjoy the good days when it happens. And to take a moment at least to celebrate it.

What makes a good day for you as an indie hacker, solopreneur?

I got 3 sales of my Carrd plugins today. That's rare. And that's a good day for me.


And one of it dropped at 1:53am when I was asleep. Such payment notifications bring double the joy, because there's no better alarm clock and jet fuel to start the day than to see it when you wake. Despite the fact that I've been getting payments for my plugins for 2 years now, it still never ceases to amaze me to receive them. Because I'm completely clueless where these customers come from! Marketing is like the dark arts to me. The causation loops are loose and lagging, and I can never be totally sure if anything I did for marketing was effective. So grateful that despite me not knowing how it all works, it still somehow works.

Little wins, for the win. 😊

Latest stage of diet: One meal a day...ish.

I've been on some major diet changes for the past few years. Every year it evolves. In September 2019 I started on keto while doing 16:8 intermittent fasting, eating less than 20g of carbs, high fat and moderate protein. I lost a lot of weight. Actually lost too much and looked unhealthily thin. I did a lot of fats, non-starchy leafy vegetables, and tried lots of keto foods.

Then I prioritized more meat and protein, and ate normally. No fasting. Gained all my weight back in mass, but stayed lean (the way to tell is if your pants stayed loose). I ate almost no vegetables and went all in on meat, mainly pork and beef. It was almost 100% carnivore. No cheating still. And over time, stayed away from keto bakes as my gut didn't like sugar alcohols. But still 3 meals a day.

Now, I'm still on on meat-heavy diet, but eating more vegetables. And sprinkling a lot more carbs in. Cheating a lot more too! But moving towards more intuitive eating, and realising that I only needed 1 heavy meal a day. I would have some butter in the morning, otherwise I would fast. Then a huge meat-heavy meal, with maybe a pastry treat after. Then at most a snack for dinner, like 2 eggs... or nothing.

So I'm on a one-meal-a-day-ish sort of diet now. Seems like the OMAD approach helps counter the carb intake. I don't gain weight like I used too, or feel too bloated. But starting back on carbs definitely feels familiar. That strange carb craving... I never had that when I was carnivore. Easy to see how easy it is to go back to the old ways. Thankfully, the practice of intuitive eating helps counter that.

Now, I get to stay healthy, but still live a little.

Diet is like sleep. An infinite game. It's interesting to see how it evolves over time.

I wonder what my way of eating will look like next year!

I enjoy building in public, but I'll be honest with you:

**Building in public is overrated.**

Not sure why but as the building in public movement grows on Twitter, it also takes on the level of hubris that other hype bubbles have (e.g. web3, AI). It's now like the best thing since sliced bread. The hype is baffling.

I guess because a lot of the push comes from gurus coaching others how to build in public on Twitter. Obviously there's skin in the game to make it sound like a miracle pill, a silver bullet, and that it's the only thing there is.

But it's just ONE tool amongst many to market your products. It's not the ONLY tool, and not always the RIGHT one. I got other products where I don't build in public but still earns money.

Maybe building in public as a form of marketing makes sense when:

- Your users/customers find value in and appreciate building in public updates. Say you're building for fellow makers who are active Twitter users.
- Users want transparency and realtime data, say during a hurricane or a crisis, or some event that people are watching closely.

I can't think of many situations where building in public matters to the product and customers. It's definitely not *mandatory*.

The problem arises when the ones who fall for it are often those new to the game, and easily impressed by the experienced indies who only show the highlight reels and now the other channels they use. They build in public, tweet daily, and burn out because of low returns on that investment in time and energy, when the channel-offer fit isn't there. Some products just don't need to build in public. Some need ads. Others require email marketing. Most benefit from SEO and content marketing.

And the best reason I enjoy building in public is not so much as a form of marketing marketing but just as a way to share cool stories by the campfire and make friends.

So tl;dr – don't hop on it first thing, unless it makes business sense.

Today my first-born turns 3. That means I'm turning 3 too, as a dad.

Some reflections:
- I lived through what "The days are long but the years are short" truly means. It's nothing like anything else I experienced.
- There's no burden greater when caring for another smaller human being whom you love to bits. But there's also no burden better.
- I never thought I could enjoy the world through the eyes of a toddler. I've always assumed as humans, we're islands of consciousness even while together. But we're only islands above the water surface. Underneath we're all linked.
- Caring for your child and learning to be a dad is an infinite game. There's always new rules that come up, new side quests to solve, new levels to clear. Letting expectations go that we can ever be *done* done, helps.
- Year 1 was a hazy, tumbling, bumbling, struggle. Year 2 was about finding our footing as a family, surviving. Is Year 3 the year where we all start thriving?

[@joelfirenze](https://joelfirenze.medium.com/having-a-kid-in-the-anthropocene-37f3ac747157) recently wrote about being a new dad:

“What might be a good reason to have a child in these turbulent times? ...The best argument I can find so far is that having a child in the world is an expression of optimism and hope in the future.”

I love that answer. 🙌

It's not pinning hope on the child to bring some material benefit in the future. To even decide to have a child in itself is an expression of hope, that the future *will* be better.

I hope so. I pray so.

"If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, consult." That's the management consultancy adage you heard a lot.

I used to hate coaching and teaching. I'd rather be doing – even though I'm technically a consultant, I see myself as doing the hard work of doing, as a practitioner than someone who just doles out "strategy".

But lately I've taken to coaching a lot. It started out of necessity, for survival. I needed the money. In the past, I normally wouldn't do it, especially if I had options. But I find myself starting to actually *enjoy* it now. It still tires the hell out of me everytime, but it's no longer done degrudgingly, or with anxiety. I look forward to sharing what I know, and bonus if there's a receptive audience.

It's been 10 years since I started as a designer. I wonder if it's the time span, that after a (long) while you gain enough confidence and stories that training and coaching starts to feel more normal. I wonder if it's due to my recent inner shift in dismantling of old narratives that no longer serve me. I don't know if it was age or life stage that triggered it – turning mid-40s soon and becoming a new dad can be a powerful cocktail to catalyse change.

I don't have the origin answers, but in practice it's all coming together nicely now.

Many things I used to have hangups about, no longer are. In my work, life, lifestyle, family, the world.

That's all that matters.

There's a series of [viral](https://twitter.com/marckohlbrugge/status/1629810355781369859) [tweets](https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1630813028156579841) going around about the things you don't need to launch a product. Things like favicon, logo, a registered business, business cards, a website, privacy or cookie policy, optimisation, dark mode. As long as you deliver on the value that you bring, customers don't really care. As always, I know this is generalising, and there's sure to be some outlier cases where a favicon matters.

But the main point that most who object fail to see is that we can get away with a lot more than we assumed. Waaay more than we're comfortable, than we normally expect.

I know this to be true, from experience:

- Started Outsprint, my consulting biz without a logo, website, favicon, or even registered business. My first invoice was paid to my personal bank account. People trusted *me* because of my track record and past work. It helped that I worked with the organisation before I started the biz. They were hiring *me* specifically to do the work, and the logo, website and what not are just tiny details in the bigger scheme of things. Not a dealbreaker. I only got the business entity, website, logo, business cards and stuff after a few months.
- I started so many indie MVPs with just emoji icon as logo. Some of them are still using it, even though profitable! Keto List Singapore, Grant Hunt, Safe Distancing SG are examples. Using an emoji not just saves time, but you can also easily use the icon *like* a logo in messages and marketing!
- After I had a registered business, I used it as a holding company for all the products I made. No need to register a separate entity until it needs one (e.g. when thinking of selling). At launch, you won't even know if it'll get there so why bother!
- I hardly ever optimise the websites of my products. Plugins For Carrd is now 2 years in, getting some substantial revenue, and only recently did some minor optimisation, like compressing pngs and gifs. Spending time getting all the Lighthouse scores to 100 is pure vanity at play – the last few points are the hardest to overcome and the difference in user experience are hardly noticeable.
- Dark mode is just developer fetish. Most websites and apps don't need need it. All my profitable products do not have dark mode.

I can go on.

Tl;dr - if you're over-thinking these things that don't matter, you 're more likely to fail when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Hard truth.

I know I know, what a dramatic post title. But I really do feel it.

For the past 3 years I've been so stressed and anxious. About work, finances, feeding the fam, indie hacking, the pandemic, my health, everyone's health, the state of the world.

Like the weight of the whole world's on my shoulders.

It's only until recently did I realised just how heavy the load I've been carrying was.

And it's during these past 3 years that I started on sleep biohacking. To tragi-comic results. I could never quite nail it. There's always something wrong, something that went well going wrong again, and countless issues to getting proper sleep, in quantity and quality. Quantity I could still influence somewhat, but it's the sleep quality that are often out of my control. I would toss and turn, depsite having done everything in the book to help me sleep well. You name it I've tried it – magnesium, fluid intake, blue light, screentime, EMF, sleep tracking, exercise, daylight viewing, quantum energy... EVERYTHING. But sleep would sometimes inexplicably get worse without warning.

Sleep is an infinite game, I used to belabour the point.

But recently, I've been getting relatively good sleep without much effort. In fact, I've been lazy and not been the most disciplined with sleeping early and pre-bed screentime. Yet, better sleep was easier to achieve. The sleep scores are at least 10% higher than usual, if I had slept the same amount in the past. And the only factor I can attribute it to is stress and anxiety.

I'm not the most embodied person. I charge ahead, while not being very aware that I'm holding in a lot stress and anxiety. And that undercurrent of stress ate into my sleep quality. What's not expressed and managed well in the day, rears its ugly head at night. And that went on in the background for 3 years. I didn't realise it was that long. I should have.

But [things changed for the better this year](https://golifelog.com/posts/here-comes-the-sun-1676784259686). And with most of the root causes of my stress gone or diminished, I naturally slept better. Thankfully.

Stress truly is the sleep killer.

Stress biohacking = sleep biohacking.