Lifelog

The latest issue of the [Small Bets newsletter](https://open.substack.com/pub/cattlenotpets/p/use-optionality-dont-hoard-it
) struck a chord.

Tl;dr – Counterintuitive but true - reducing optionality actually makes us happy, or happier.

It made me think about all the time when I hoarded. It could be anything - money, time, online articles, artefacts. The more I hoarded, the more optionality I had. But in itself, optionality just sits there. You need to use it, act on it, in order to truly enjoy the fruits of your optionality.

And that's the whole point of the newsletter article – after building up optionality, you got to reduce it to enjoy it, to let it make us happy. And the most important decisions in life is when you act on the optionality and reduce it, *intentionally*. So many ways to say this:

- Money can buy happiness, but up to a point. Beyond that, more money doesn't make you any happier. You got to use it.
- Having more choices is nice, but too many choices we get paralysed. If you have too many brands to choose from, it actually gets *harder* to choose.
- Having constraints is helpful for creativity and decision-making. You'd think being creative requires unbounded space, but actually that makes it harder.
- Less is more for contentment and life satisfaction. Why does living life simply make us happier? Reducing optionality.

The caveat the author pointed out in the comments is this:

> Optionality isn't bad, it's a focus on unnecessary optionality AND not recognizing the costs of gaining the optionality that's bad. Small bets addresses both of these points because you listen to your own motivations and the bets you place are small, therefore have lower costs in time and opportunity cost. And as your small bets succeed, you gain skills which do give you more optionality. But the gaining of that optionality is something you would have done anyway. The Small Bets philosophy brings means and ends closer together in my head.

In and of itself, building up and hoarding some optionality isn't a bad or un-virtuous thing. The question is: "At what cost?"

That made me think deeply about how—even though I prefer building a lot of products as small bets to mitigate platform risk—beyond a threshold point, the extra optionality is costly in terms of mental bandwidth, time and energy. So reducing some optionality—be it timeboxing the effort, or scoping the feature set down, killing dead projects—is actually helpful. (The other side of the coin is when you just focus on 1 bet, you have no optionality, which is not ideal either)

So to be happy or happier, build some optionality so that you can get to reduce it.

My side projects always seem to end up doing better than my main projects. The ones you least expect to succeed are the ones that actually do. Either this is cruel fate, or it's a deep lesson in there about how expectations can help, or hinder. For me, it hindered, because it was not easy to be emotionally equanimous about my products. Sometimes the deep desire for expression through one's product can help propell it to success. But in my case, when it comes to making something profitable, it hindered more than helped. It blinded me to the real world market realities. So since [late last year](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1591430940290535424), my 'hack' was deciding that everything on my portfolio of products is a side project. I dropped Lifelog back then as main project to side project status.

No more main projects.
Everything's a small bet.

But there could be the exception to the rule, as I recently learned from [@jdnoc](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1655558175838584833). He talked about how he should have went hard on Closet Tools when it was on the up and how:

> ...Focusing 100% of your effort on one project for a shorter period of time is still a small bet. You're intentionally capitalizing on it to hedge against future failure. Rather than treating your businesses like you're going to work on them forever, treat them like you're going to sell when the timing is right. The serial entrepreneur mindset is still within the small bets framework - "multiple streams of income" just not all at the same time.

I love the nuance there. Timeboxing your effort on a validated opportunity and not treating it like a baby are both very small bet-esque. And if a project's growing like crazy, continuing to treat it like a side project might be hindering its potential.

So there *are* exceptions to the rule, even though I now say no more main projects, even though between focusing on 1 product versus a portfolio of small bets, I always chose the latter. If there comes a time where there's a huge opportunity in front of me amongst my different bets that demonstrably show continuous growth and has the real world market data to prove product-market fit, I should focus on it for a time, instead of holding myself back just because "small bets".

No need to be dogmatic even if we mostly prefer small bets right?

Just do what works, because ultimately the endgame is freedom, not some silly status game of which camp are you in.

Talking about [things I had to unlearn](https://golifelog.com/posts/unlearning-greater-learning-1683428184962) on my indie journey got me thinking deeper about this particular one:

Info products are not “real businesses”.

I know that that's a lie – info products can be a lucrative business. I'm no longer opposed to creating it, so it's just a matter of finding the right idea or topic that fits. I know the right info product can bring in revenue fast, which is what I need right now. I know that it doesn't need months or years of work and can be instead done quickly within a month or two, which is also something that works for a timestrapped dad like me. I did launch them before, so it's not for lack of experience:

- Keto List Singapore
- Grant Hunt
- Safe Distancing SG
- VisualAid
- Coffice City
- Public Design Vault (defunct)
- Public Design Jobs (defunct)
- Space Nomads (defunct)
- Public Design FAQs ebook (never finished)

And best of all, I got a few info products in my pocket – 80% of each one had already been written because I write them out occasionally as learnings. But I never got round to putting them together to launch:

- A [series of learnings](https://jasonleow.github.io/200wordsaday/articles/counter-intuitive-things-i-learned-about-nutrition-while-on-intermittent-fasting-and-keto-423975f00843835a30/index) from starting out on a keto diet
- A [Twitter info product](https://golifelog.com/posts/tiny-twitter-hacks-i-learned-and-love-part-6-1674712438527) containing the various tactics and hacks I used to grow my account
- A resource ebook on [sleep biohacking](https://golifelog.com/goals/26), maybe for my sleep biohacking community

So why did I not launch them?

Something that [@DmytroKrasun](https://twitter.com/DmytroKrasun/status/1654585734819454977) mentioned was the counter pushback:

> But why not? I am not joking. You have your own take, and you might have an audience for it. If you see an opportunity, it might be it.

I replied, saying something like how there's so many of such Twitter courses available (like a good one is Dagobert's), just not sure if I can add anything valuable to the knowledge pool. But truth is, that's a shite reason.

Market saturation is a poor reason to not try.
Trying to be unique is a dumb way to not try.
Worrying about others is a silly excuse to not try.

So I've run out of excuses.

*So when?*

The hardest thing being indie isn't learning marketing/coding, but unlearning old reflexes. When I started I operated from an employee mindset, thinking the more hours I put in, the better the business. That didn't work out well.. (* cue burnout)

Hard work ≠ success

Years on I find I'm still unlearning that! Looks like it take a while to shake off those conditioned reflexes after decades.

Unlearning unhelpful narratives seems to be a rite of passage for every indie.

That got me thinking... *What else did I have to unlearn along the way?*

- Money is dirty
- Billionaires are scum
- Marketing is slimey and unethical
- A real business = SaaS
- Subscription revenue (MRR) is the best type of revenue.
- If the product is great, it'll market itself and I won't need to.
- The market is too saturated is a good excuse to not try.
- If I do these habits consistently (waking at 5am, cold showers, journaling etc) I will succeed at indie hacking.
- Info products are not "real businesses".
- {Popular indie hacker} is successful because he/she got a huge audience. It won't work for me.
- I need to set up a perfect second brain note-taking system, otherwise I'll lose all my good ideas!
- What if no one cares?!

I used to think all that when it comes to indie products. I was sooo wrong. Must be this, must be that. Artificial rules about how to run a business and build a product which seems to make sense but are totally removed from reality. Ultimately, my endgame is just freedom. It shouldn't matter how I do it, as long as it's legal and I like the work. Money is money is money.

"When you're living a good day, what is one habit that tends to be part of that day? Can you find time for that habit today?" – [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/may-4-2023)

Intriguing question from James Clear's 3-2-1 newsletter. Made me think, and now I want to list out these habits and why they give me a good day:

- **Sleeping well** – 8h, with score above 90%. Waking up fresh and awake is the best feeling ever. That tends to decide how I'd feel for the rest of the day. If I slept poorly, even small challenges are a struggle. If I slept well, big problems are more manageable.

- **Meditation** – In the morning when I wake, and at night before I sleep. It grounds me, starts off my day in a calm and mindful manner. And that tends to decide the trajectory of my mood for the rest of the day too.

- **Creating something.** – Even just shipping a small feature or a plugin, or working on a creative project, a piece of writing, is super fulfilling. It could be done just within 1-2h in the early morning. Nothing makes me feel more accomplished than having *made* something out. Anything.

- **Eating well** – This is all too easy to screw up, and easy to go unnoticed, but when I eat well, I feel strong, alert but light, no bloat, no gas, no mental heaviness. If the first 2 sets the tone of the day, diet is the thing that can mess it all up.

- **Being out in nature** – My morning walks in the park is one thing that I've come to appreciate a lot. On rainy or busy days when I don't get to do it, I feel lesser for it. On weekends when I spend time outside instead of in shopping malls, I naturally feel better too.

- **Being out with my wife and son** – No explanation needed. Being with my loves, is always a joy.

That's it. Just 6 things.

Calling it now. You first heard it here:

**The 10x AI-powered developer.**

I'm generally cautious about being overly bullish about AI, because there's so much snakeoil hyperbole right now. But I also recognise that my restraint is not homogenuous. For specific niches and use cases, I actually feel pretty excited and optimistic about it.

Like for software development.

Two types of tweets that's been recurring in my timeline that made me think so:

1. Non-technical folks who never coded a day in their life shipping apps like nothing
2. Devs who know code but become 10x more productive

Like Charlie here. A maker but don't know how to code. Now making apps using [ChatGPT and Replit](https://twitter.com/charlierward/status/1637887392626384903?s=20):

> Everyone’s laughing at all the ChatGPT threads, but I (a man who can’t code), just built and shipped a functioning and IMO useful Chrome Extension in ~45 minutes using just that and @Replit - it was the weirdest feeling ever.

He even [showed us](https://twitter.com/charlierward/status/1638303596595892224?s=20) how he did it:

> You asked for it, and here it is.
>
> "How I built a functioning Chrome Extension in 10 steps and 45 minutes, with no coding experience. Using ChatGPT + Replit."
>
> Let's dive in people. 👾

Adam's a dev, but he made [a year's worth of apps in one month](https://twitter.com/adamlyttleapps/status/1653603465757855744?s=20):

> Last month I shipped 9 new apps ✨
>
> (a year of apps in a single month 🤯)
>
> My secret?
>
> ⭐️ Boilerplate created by GPT-4(better results)
> ⭐️ Debugging with GPT-3.5(faster)
> ⭐️ Bigger bugs in GPT-4(smarter)
> ⭐️ Icons by Mid-Journey
>
> Then: I polish clean it up and release it ✨
>
> 

Two great examples demonstrating how powerful AI can be if you know how to work it for your specific niche or industry. With *real* proof of work and output. But I don't think normies will be able to do it just yet. You do need to be relatively well-versed at prompting, knowing the ins and outs of how ChatGPT works to be able to get to production-ready apps, and be savvy enough to navigate the bugs and errors that crop up. But it just goes to show how low the barrier is now and can go in the future.

And I thought nocode was great for lowering the barrier to entry for coding.

Now with AI it's like writing code in plain English!

I was a competitive sportsperson in school. All my life in school till early adulthood, I believed in mind over body. Great quality to have for sports and grades, but brought to extremes, the downside is that I became pretty disembodied.

And that disembodiment is the root of my chronic stress, burnouts, acute to chronic health conditions right now.

Lately I've been trying to learn to be more embodied, specifically in exericse, diet and sleep.

The first big epiphany: After decades of being disembodied, it’s not easy to listen to the body because I’ve wired myself to ignore the whispers the body sends me, until it becomes screams (in the form of acute/chronic health conditions). I simply didn’t have the capacity and capability to listen, so it’s hard to use the body as an indicator how to act at first, not because body is unreliable but my listening was unreliable.

So in the beginning, trying to be embodied gives mixed signals, and seem like the whole "listen to your body" advice is ineffective. If the connection between your mind and body is a relationship, there just isn't much trust at the start.

That's why having rules and structure in the beginning helps. Like when I started on keto, I followed the rules strictly. Now after more than 3 years, I'm getting the hang of intuitive eating, of catching and trusting what the body tells me. Similarly for sleep - after 3 years of sleep biohacking, I'm starting to know when I need more rest and naps.

Gradually, then suddenly.

Maybe this is an indie hacking approach we can double down on:

**Making many small bets within one small bet.**

That's what I've been doing for my Carrd plugins, and recently doubled down on it and starting to see some nice results. Some benefits I see from making many small bets within one small bet:

- I get to channel my itch for creating new things by creating new free/paid plugins.
- I get to help individuals solve their problems because usually my plugins are inspired by someone asking a question in a forum.
- I get to give value to the wider community, generate goodwill and word of mouth for my brand.
- Not just marketing but I get financial returns too – affiliate revenue goes up when people sign up for Carrd in order to download one of my plugins. Seller revenue goes up too when they donate or pay for one of my templates.
- The free plugins are like top of the funnel capture, warming leads and bringing more potentials customers in. The paid plugins are more preium offerings lower down the funnel.
- All the plugins are like stand-alone products, but they amplify one another in terms of marketing and utility, and together act as a multiplier for my plugins project.

I feel optimistic about this project and approach. And seeing these successful small-bets-in-small-bet projects made me feel even more hopeful!

- [tinywow.com](https://tinywow.com) is a productivity tools page where you can use free internet tools to edit/format PDFs, images, videos, AI writing, files. It's super comprehensive, and recently did 7M page views in just March alone, at $20k revenue that month.
- [Finsweet Attributes](https://finsweet.com/attributes) is like Webflow plugins without the code. Passed 140,000,000 page loads permonth!
- And of course, the OG indie hacker, Pieter Levels - he build Nomadlist, a travel listing directory for digital nomads, then moved into an adjacent space of remote work that many digital nomads are doing with RemoteOK. Now building out Rebase, an immigration-as-a-service SaaS.
- Oh can't forget to mention, the OGs I followed when I just started building were the builders of Wordpress templates/themes! They built many themes, some free, some paid. I think deep down that influenced my view of how to make money on the web. My Carrd plugins project were totally influenced by those WP builders. Even choosing to use the word "plugins" is a WP thing! (I could have called it components, scripts, widgets as others did).

The key here is to build many small bets but all within a specific niche or problem space, so that despite being separate products they all converge in one particular direction or topic. You kinda get to have your cake and eat it – the benefits of diversity, variety and resilience from having multiple products, yet all centered around a singular focus.

*What do you think? Is this the best indie hacking approach ever or what?*

Now there's two schools of thought when it comes to product focus: Go all in on one product, or go for many small bets.

I'm usually not a fan of going all in on one product, especially if you're just starting off. All too often, those who find the ONE true product on first try is super rare. Your shipping muscles and instincts just aren't as developed yet. And if there's some incremental results, it seduces you to keep trying on that one thing. All it takes is a rug pull event, some platform risk, like Twitter API price hike, for the castle to fall into pieces. Over night their MRR goes to zero. It was heartbreaking to watch. There's no diversity, very little resilience to shock with this approach.

Personally I tend to prefer building a portfolio of small bets, but it's not without downsides. Observing others who try the same, it sure is a spectacle to witness, fun to watch, but after a while, after like the 10th product or beyond, I don't even remember what they are building, what they stand for. All the different products starts to blend into one another. Most of the time they continue to struggle with revenue. They're launching a lot, it feels like progress, but it's *false* progress, especially if their aim is to make money and be ramen profitable. If there's no happy ending, it starts to get poignantly painful to watch.

So I think the reality is somewhere in the middle for indie hackers who succeed at the game:

Launch many small bets serially, one after another not all at once. Focus more on one that has potential. Build it out to stable state. Find a reliable distribution channel for customer acquisition. Grow revenue to steady state. Then sell it, or keep it running for stable revenue. Try another small bet(s) again. Rinse and repeat, while only working on a 2-3 products at any one time.

After a few years trying small bets, it feels like I'm settling on this approach. A happy middle where you're not over-exposed to risk nor grasping at straws.

*What do you think? What's your happy middle?*

May's going to be consulting season again. Back to juggling product work and consulting. Busy times ahead.

I realised recently I have to work in sync with my energy seasons. Working against it is a recipe for burnout or poor moods. An example: I feel low in energy and in spirits. I try to work anything. Force myself a bit. Feel even worse after that. Mood gets worse. The mind and body doesn't get what it needs. Rinse and repeat every day for a few weeks, and you'll burnout. It's a viscious, lose-lose cycle.

The month of April set an example for that.

Come May I don't have the luxury of dwadling in those negative whirlpools.

*Just follow your energy. Trust it, dammit.*

And that's it. That's my intention for May. That's all of it.

As for the spring cleaning and Marie Kondo-ing I didn't achieve in April? Back to basics. 1% compounding rules. I'll spring clean a piece at a time. Remove/re-arrange one item a day.

Just 1 item a day. A scrap piece of paper. An old reciept. An stray pen lying around.

Shouldn't be hard right? Right?

Onwards!

APRIL METRICS:
📈 Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $99 (↓$10)
💰 One-off revenue: $907 (↑$11)
💵 Total revenue: $1006 (↑$1) 🎉
💸 Total costs = $165
💎 Total profit: $841 (↑$159) (excl. consulting revenue)
📊 Profit margin: 84%

At the start of April I thought this month will be a month of self care and rest, while doing some spring cleaning. I had the month for downtime before the pace picks up again for my consulting in May, so I thought I can finally spring clean my work space and by extension, my mindscape.

BUT no Marie Kondo-ing happened.

I was heading into an energy slump, and no number of plans could pull me back up. It sucked being in low spirits, being neither here nor there. I thought I accomplished nothing this month. But as monthly reviews go, the amount of output always surprises me, in a good way. In the end, it wasn’t half bad.

My mood just added a negative lens to everything, but thankfully, the real data showed otherwise. Despite it all inwardly, things were going just fine outwardly.

Another important demonstration of why I do these monthly wrap-ups so religiously. It shows the work without ambiguity, based on objective reality. Even if the impression in my head was otherwise. And my mind’s wrong pretty often.

NGL..had been in a slump lately. When that happens, I build for FUN to feel better.

Today's fun build:

Added typing sounds of a mechanical keyboard when writing a post. I have a mech kb but this audible feedback makes me feel like a typing maestro! 🤓

🔊 Turn on sound 👇

Mood these days.


It's uncanny how life's seasons work, with its characteristic peaks and valleys. In February and March I was consumed with an energy to build build build. I shedded some of the anxeity I'd been unconsciously carrying and charged ahead. Yet very soon after that epiphany, work happened, life happened, and challenges happened. When April started, things started to dip every so slowly but noticeably, till now – the slump. The build energy all but faded. The excitement and sense of adventure of starting anew, gone. I wrote about how these are [the hardest days](https://golifelog.com/posts/hardest-days-1682673017554), yet a part of me knows...

***This too, shall pass.***

It had always done so. It always does. It always will. Just as the sun rise and set. Just as the seasons come and go. The seasons of life, the summers and winters of the inner world, arise and fade. Knowing that, makes it easy to not celebrate too soon or worry too much, today. Maybe there's no need to jump in to set things right, since time itself will fix most of it. Maybe there's no need to hold on too tight to our wins, when time itself will loosen them.

***All shall be in place, in time.***

The hardest days aren't days when there's fires to fight, bugs to squash, customer crises to solve.

Those are—in fact—the easy days.

Because you know what to do. Immediately. The direction is clear. The task is obvious. The need is expressed.

The hardest days are the days when you're slumping in your chair, running on fumes, low on energy and motivation, unsure why you're feeling so 'off', and the day passes in a hazy daze. You're clicking around online looking for something to bite into, but nothing bites. And you just wish for the day to pass and night to come because you hope tomorrow you'll find your normal self again.

Except that it doesn't.

The next day comes and it's the same old same old.

For the nth day. You've lost count already by now.

And day by day the self-doubt creeps in. *What if this doesn't go away? What if I need to get some serious work done? When will I see the daylight of optimism and adventure again?*

Self-doubt gives way to anxiety. Anxiety unfolds into fear. Fear grows into panic.

These are the hardest days.

I saw this funny meme yesterday but saw the seed of wisdom in there.


I was all in on Vue.js and Nuxt.js back when I got serious on coding. With Nuxt I got to make this very app I'm writing on. I love being able to build SaaS on frontend frameworks. I thought I can write less code, use battle-tested code that others used, and not need to reinvent the wheel all the time. I assumed with the added abstraction, I can ship fast.

But 3 years in, I'm feeling the burden. What I thought initially were the savings on time/effort were simply offloaded elsewhere. Less code to write but more tooling to install, more dependencies and points of failure, packages to maintain, configs to set, less cross-platform, transferrable code etc... To be honest, I'm tired of the convoluted and bloated ways to build software. Same reasons why I no longer use Wordpress. A lot of the performance and optimization benefits seems more geared towards enterprise teams, not a solo dev like me.

The funny flipside is, I'm rather enjoying using just plain vanilla Javascript now. I've been building Carrd plugins in plain JS, and because they need to be standalone in 1 code block, I'm essentially making a lot of single `index.html` micro-apps. And with just the holy trinity of plain HTML, CSS and Javascipt (and the occasional CDN script or nocode tool), it's been so much fun. Zero build. No fuss whatsoever.

People say you should just use the tech you know best. I'm actually more familiar with Vue/Nuxt, but recently building more in plain vanilla Javascript and surprisingly enjoyed it more even though less familiar. So contemplating if possible to switch.

*Is it possible to build a modern SaaS these days on just plain vanilla JS?*

I asked this [question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1651164219646025728), and got some good examples from the indie hackers I follow:

- [Zlappo](https://zlappo.com/)
- [Closet Tools](https://closet.tools/)
- [MentorCruise](https://mentorcruise.com/)

Most of them end up creating their own resuable components, some rudimentary form of a framework. And with [browser-native web components](https://gomakethings.com/how-to-create-a-web-component-with-vanilla-js/), you now can do that.

I also learned about ["the stackless way"](https://tutorials.yax.com/articles/build-websites-the-yax-way/quicktakes/what-is-the-yax-way.html). It sounds really interesting, and checks off all the boxes!

> Build websites without frameworks or build tools:
>
> - use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
> - use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
> - match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
> - stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Maybe my next tech stack could be:

Frontend: Plain vanilla Javascript
Style: Plain CSS
Backend: Headless CMS like Strapi/Contentful or a nocode API generator for
Database: SQL/PostgresQL

*What do you think?* 🤔

The other day I was [complaining](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1650462628614123523) about having to do 3 times the work because my products are on 3 different ecommerce platforms – Gumroad, Payhip and Lemon Squeezy.

It started being a hedge against platform risk, after what I experienced when Flurly shut down. Then it took me a week or more to migrate everything out of Flurly. Maybe I over-compensated a bit by going for 3 platforms. 😅 Now I'm realising that it's real tedious everytime I wanted to add new products. Worse that every platform is ever slightly so different, so you can't really copy-paste directly and be done. The optimal image formats are slightly different. Some have fields that others don't.

A real PAIN. IN. THE. ASS.

I wished there's a Buffer equivalent for ecommerce platforms. Where I key in once, and it creates the products in the respective formats for each platform. Upload an image, and it auto-crops into the right format or size for the platform. The problem is not every platform has APIs for that. So far only Gumroad seems to have a more fleshed out API endpoints. Lemon Squeezy is read-only. Payhip has only webhooks and Zapier integration.

To save time, maybe what I can do is to build an asset generating app where I key in the fields and it auto-generates the required assets and text for me, with copy buttons for easy copy-paste. A bit like what [Headlime version 1](https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1277497120090537989?s=20) looks like. A side panel to key in my product information, and the right panel where it spits out the text and images for Payhip, Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad.

*What do you think? Worth building?*

Here's a hot take for ya:

Those who think focusing on one project is a better approach to indie hacking just needs to learn how to better organise their time/costs of context switching.

I might be biased because I'm already all in on the portfolio approach. But that doesn't mean that I don't face challenges managing multiple products. Context switching is the hardest. And it's not even the time. It's the cognitive costs of switching. And worse if you switch multiple times within a day! I think my brain would turn to mush doing that (and it did on some crazy days).

So even while we small bettors run multiple products, there's definitely a skill to doing it well versus doing it poorly. It's something like a muscle. If all along you're used to doing just one thing, then the muscle of context switching will be under-trained, and the first few weeks you'll struggle, and then call it quits because it's too hard or unproductive.

Truth is, there's many ways to better manage the costs of context switching. The most common seems to be building products *serially*. Build, launch, iterate till stable state, automate, then move on to the next bet. Influential makers like Pieter Levels and Tony Dinh comes to mind for this approach. If you create digital downloads, self-paced courses, info products, or any product where the after-purchase support is minimal, doing it serially is even easier.

Another way is to timebox. Jon Yongfook does the 1 week coding, 1 week marketing approach exactly to manage the cognitive costs of context switching. It could be 1 week Product A, then another week Product B. It doesn't have to be 1 week if that's too short for you. Think in sprints, 1 week to 1 month.

So here's my point: Running multiple bets is possible and can be done sanely. But it's an approach amongst many. Focusing on one is an approach too. Sometimes it's a personality preference. Ultimately it's a choice and comes with different trade-offs.

But saying it costs too much in context switching isn't one of those trade-offs you have to make.

It's intellectually dishonest and disingeuous to say so, because context switching can be managed. At best, you can say you don't *prefer* it. You can't say it doesn't work when you've never committed to learning and doing it well. It's like saying running doesn't benefit you because you get out of breath the moment you try.

Context switching is a muscle. Use it or lose it.

I've been musing over some new approaches for new product ideas:

- The SEO product
- The simple and helpful product
- The single feature micro-SaaS
- The info product
- The premium/B2B product

### The SEO product
This follows [Danny's approach](https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1646368426246680579?s=20) of researching SEO keyword difficulty and keyword volume, and finding opportunities for products where the KD is low and volume is relatively high. I like this because the customer intent/demand is somewhat verified. But the downside is also aligning the SEO opportunities to a product that I enjoy making and have personal insight to. Perhaps I can consider the current spaces I'm already in, and search for keywords for that. Maybe this could be a way to pivot Sheet2Bio as well...?

### The simple and helpful product
This follow [Peter's approach](https://twitter.com/searchbound/status/1648811605935681536?s=20) of him finding an opportunity in an available domain and building a scrappy static site showing seating views for his alma mater's football stadium. It started off as a very simple HTML website, and now it's Wordpress. But helpful because people often wanted to preview the seating's viewpoint of the field before buying tickets. So it served a niche need. And he peppered it with Google ads to monetize. This approach made me realise I'm probably overthinking things when it comes to my new product ideas. What opportunities are there where I can buy a good descriptive domain, be helpful in addressing a niche need, and let SEO do the rest? My directory products like Keto List Singapore, Public Design Jobs, Inclusive Design SG could fall into this category.

### The single feature micro-SaaS
Recently discovered fixmyspeakers.com, which is a site that plays a sounds to expell water from your phone speakers. Knew the indie hacker from Makerlog and he mentioned he's making $5k/m from ads from it! Super impressed by that. A single feature micro-SaaS, just doing one thing - play an audio file. But addressing a super common pain - when your smartphone gets water damage. I love this because it's closer to what I enjoy - coding a product. That it's a micro-SaaS feels way less intimidating as well, because that's what I've been pretty much doing all along with my Carrd plugins. Micro, or even nano software apps that does one thing, provides one feature. Maybe I can build a micro-SaaS for other builders, for Twitter users, or in a problem space I'm familiar with right now. Writing, Carrd, Twitter. What else?

### The info product
This is the easiest path to launching something new. Launch a quick info product on Gumroad, sell it on Twitter. Templates, ebook, guides, mini-courses. About sleep, writing, Twitter engagement, building in public, keto. Maybe this won't be a high revenue-generating product, but it could be a gateway to something else, an attractor for new ideas that I can use the other approaches for.

### The premuim offering &/or B2B product
Recent Twitter discussions got me thinking – the belief that I have to work my way up incrementally in small steps is actually holding me back. "Small incremental steps" because that's what I expect for B2C. If I can charge a higher premium for a product, my steps will be bigger, and hitting my revenue goal will be faster. I could offer a premium offering for an existing project, or go B2B for my next new product. The funnel for my Carrd plugins is now free tools to $15-30 products. It's captures the top half of the funnel. But I could potentially offer a premium offering that's Carrd-related, like premium, same day support for Carrd. Or Carrd done-for-you design or premium templates that integrates my various plugins (e.g. a SaaS template). A B2B offering could be related to my consulting, since that's my only in-road to corporate world right now. All along, I keep thinking I will eventually transit away from consulting. But what if I built an indie product related to my design consulting work? How would that look like?

*Any other good approaches to product development that you use?*