Day 843 - Sun on Sundays - https://golifelog.com/posts/sun-on-sundays-1682248209951
Sundays are best spent under the sun.
We cycled at the beach today. Blue skies. Blazing hot sun. Breeze lightly brushing our hair.
Everyone's out. It's a long weekend after all. Hundreds of picnics. A bunch of beach volleyball players. Whole families on family cart bikes. We're usually here on weekdays to avoid the crowd, but it's interesting to see different people who come here on weekends.
We make a stop at a breakwater. Then a tiny jetty. And then head off to the cafe to hide from the sweltering heat, for some much-needed lunch. Like any normal family on a Sunday. Just hanging out and chilling.
*I don't do this enough. We don't do this enough.*
I remember I just said to my wife that at our life stage, our time with our kid and our elderly parents are limited. And decreasing fast everyday. The less time spent in front of a computer, the more time spent out in the sun with them, is how winning at life looks like.
Not accolades, money, or status.
A question I heard about recently that stuck with me, and almost brings me to tears each time i think about it:
"Imagine you're 80 and you're given the opportunity to travel back in time back to this moment, with your kid/parent. Only this moment. How would you choose to spend it?"
I'll definitely spend it with full presence with them. Soak it in. Enjoy it.
Everything else doesn't matter.
We cycled at the beach today. Blue skies. Blazing hot sun. Breeze lightly brushing our hair.
Everyone's out. It's a long weekend after all. Hundreds of picnics. A bunch of beach volleyball players. Whole families on family cart bikes. We're usually here on weekdays to avoid the crowd, but it's interesting to see different people who come here on weekends.
We make a stop at a breakwater. Then a tiny jetty. And then head off to the cafe to hide from the sweltering heat, for some much-needed lunch. Like any normal family on a Sunday. Just hanging out and chilling.
*I don't do this enough. We don't do this enough.*
I remember I just said to my wife that at our life stage, our time with our kid and our elderly parents are limited. And decreasing fast everyday. The less time spent in front of a computer, the more time spent out in the sun with them, is how winning at life looks like.
Not accolades, money, or status.
A question I heard about recently that stuck with me, and almost brings me to tears each time i think about it:
"Imagine you're 80 and you're given the opportunity to travel back in time back to this moment, with your kid/parent. Only this moment. How would you choose to spend it?"
I'll definitely spend it with full presence with them. Soak it in. Enjoy it.
Everything else doesn't matter.
Day 842 - Don't play infinite games using finite game rules - https://golifelog.com/posts/dont-play-infinite-games-using-finite-game-rules-1682169318287
[Alex Hormonzi](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrRUih8q5y9/) talked about infinite games vs finite games:
> "The infinite frame always conquers the finite. You don't win by getting in shape but staying in shape. You don't win at business but stay in business and keep doing business. The point of the game is to keep playing. If you put all those together success is an inifnite game."
This is so damned true.
If I were to sum up my failings and therefore learnings from the past 3-5 years, this is it. I was simply applying finite game rules on infinite games.
I thought winning was:
- Going viral for my tweets and posts
- Getting 100K followers, having a huge audience
- Posting hockey stick MRR growth screenshots
- Hitting $10k MRR
- Going for moonshots, like aiming for $1M revenue in 1 year
- Winning awards
- Getting acquired, making a grand multi-million exit
But winning was actually:
- Blank calendar, time freedom with my family
- Location freedom to work and live anywhere, even with kids
- Staying in business, not having to go back to 9-to-5
- Jumping out of bed to work on my products, enjoying it
- Happy times with my kiddo
- Being physically and mentally healthy
Notice how the things on the second list don't have an end date, a destination, a target. Winning is when you get to keep doing it, as much and as deeply as you want. They are infinite games. And my folly was using the finite rules and goals of the first list to measure if I'm achieving the second. It seldom does. In fact, it often contradicts! The more I get after finite goals, the harder to achieve the inifinite ones.
Infinite games > finite games
> "The infinite frame always conquers the finite. You don't win by getting in shape but staying in shape. You don't win at business but stay in business and keep doing business. The point of the game is to keep playing. If you put all those together success is an inifnite game."
This is so damned true.
If I were to sum up my failings and therefore learnings from the past 3-5 years, this is it. I was simply applying finite game rules on infinite games.
I thought winning was:
- Going viral for my tweets and posts
- Getting 100K followers, having a huge audience
- Posting hockey stick MRR growth screenshots
- Hitting $10k MRR
- Going for moonshots, like aiming for $1M revenue in 1 year
- Winning awards
- Getting acquired, making a grand multi-million exit
But winning was actually:
- Blank calendar, time freedom with my family
- Location freedom to work and live anywhere, even with kids
- Staying in business, not having to go back to 9-to-5
- Jumping out of bed to work on my products, enjoying it
- Happy times with my kiddo
- Being physically and mentally healthy
Notice how the things on the second list don't have an end date, a destination, a target. Winning is when you get to keep doing it, as much and as deeply as you want. They are infinite games. And my folly was using the finite rules and goals of the first list to measure if I'm achieving the second. It seldom does. In fact, it often contradicts! The more I get after finite goals, the harder to achieve the inifinite ones.
Infinite games > finite games
Day 841 - The unholy trinity of indie products - https://golifelog.com/posts/the-unholy-trinity-of-indie-products-1682042648146
Someone made a [remark](https://twitter.com/Domthenic_H/status/1649065684511625217) about my products:
> Sounds like either there is no p/m fit, no distribution or no market for the products. Shouldn't be that slow.
It was kind of blunt, but sharp and on point 100%. What struck me like a tonne of bricks was how my 3 main products each suffers from one of the factors mentioned:
Sheet2Bio has no product-market fit.
Lifelog has no distribution.
Plugins serves a small, niche market.
Damn. 😅
The unholy trinity of bad product performance, and I got them all.
Sheet2Bio was dead on arrival. I launched it on Twitter, it got lots of attention, but no one paid. Bio links managed via Google Sheets just wasn't something that mattered to people. Worse: Recently Instagram introduced a new feature where you can have up to 5 bio links. The market's gone now. Sheet2Bio needs a pivot for sure.
I've struggled with distribution for Lifelog for the longest. Back in the early days I even did a #100daysofmarketing challenge to find a distribution channel for it. The conclusion from that challenge was Twitter was the channel. But I kid myself. When I was marketing it like crazy, there were some new customers, but not enough to really say Twitter was a *the* distribution channel. Most of the sign-ups didn't stick around either. And once I stopped sharing it, the sign-ups all but disappeared. Even leaving it on my Twitter bio didn't help, despite having 6k followers. So suffice to say, I've not found a distribution for Lifelog. Basically, it's hard to find my target customers – creators who want to build a daily writing habit and write long form for the long game. There's not one place where they seem to hang out. I probably need to reposition Lifelog's marketing angle so that I know where to find my customer, or continue to build it out and figure it out along the way.
Carrd plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for "carrd plugins" on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can't even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By "small", that's of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. It might be big enough if you have a lower target. Right now, I'm trying to grow it by building more plugins, be in more distribution channels. But the nagging concern is that there's a natural cap to its growth. I can and want to keep growing it, but realistically speaking, I can't bank on working my way up to $5k in small increments... it'll take too long. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
Damn...these realisations hit **hard**.
But it's good pain, good lesson.
At least now I know what went wrong, and what I should look out for and do the next time.
> Sounds like either there is no p/m fit, no distribution or no market for the products. Shouldn't be that slow.
It was kind of blunt, but sharp and on point 100%. What struck me like a tonne of bricks was how my 3 main products each suffers from one of the factors mentioned:
Sheet2Bio has no product-market fit.
Lifelog has no distribution.
Plugins serves a small, niche market.
Damn. 😅
The unholy trinity of bad product performance, and I got them all.
Sheet2Bio was dead on arrival. I launched it on Twitter, it got lots of attention, but no one paid. Bio links managed via Google Sheets just wasn't something that mattered to people. Worse: Recently Instagram introduced a new feature where you can have up to 5 bio links. The market's gone now. Sheet2Bio needs a pivot for sure.
I've struggled with distribution for Lifelog for the longest. Back in the early days I even did a #100daysofmarketing challenge to find a distribution channel for it. The conclusion from that challenge was Twitter was the channel. But I kid myself. When I was marketing it like crazy, there were some new customers, but not enough to really say Twitter was a *the* distribution channel. Most of the sign-ups didn't stick around either. And once I stopped sharing it, the sign-ups all but disappeared. Even leaving it on my Twitter bio didn't help, despite having 6k followers. So suffice to say, I've not found a distribution for Lifelog. Basically, it's hard to find my target customers – creators who want to build a daily writing habit and write long form for the long game. There's not one place where they seem to hang out. I probably need to reposition Lifelog's marketing angle so that I know where to find my customer, or continue to build it out and figure it out along the way.
Carrd plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for "carrd plugins" on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can't even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By "small", that's of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. It might be big enough if you have a lower target. Right now, I'm trying to grow it by building more plugins, be in more distribution channels. But the nagging concern is that there's a natural cap to its growth. I can and want to keep growing it, but realistically speaking, I can't bank on working my way up to $5k in small increments... it'll take too long. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
Damn...these realisations hit **hard**.
But it's good pain, good lesson.
At least now I know what went wrong, and what I should look out for and do the next time.
Day 840 - My Twitter mastermind - https://golifelog.com/posts/my-twitter-mastermind-1681967839726
So I shared about the dismal [$6200 I earned from my indie products last year](https://golifelog.com/posts/hard-truths-from-my-2022-indie-revenue-1681698643587) on Twitter and [it went viral](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1648627500338282496). Beyond the fancy engagement stats, the real gold was in the replies. I felt supported, encouraged, and above all, given new perspectives, questions to ask, and possible answers ahead.
***Now this*** is why I'm on Twitter. This kind of support and peer learning on this depth and breadth is not found anywhere else in my life or work. It's like a mastermind group with thousands of peers and experts.
Summing up to do justice to the great points there:
### Affirmations
- *"It took me 10 years before finding the right thing. Picked the wrong market. Bet on the wrong horse. Worked on shitty products no one needed. Worked on things with no product / founder fit but didn't realize. I think this is what most people must endure, unless lucky / outlier."* I don't feel like I'm betting it right yet too with my products. The past years were definitely to endure those hard lessons, for sure.
- *"Took us over three years to start making proper money too."* I suspect my chart is still in the no-to-low traction phase too, as James shared:
### New questions to ask
- Why has it been this slow?
- What needs to change to accelerate things?
- What beliefs do you have that are holding you back from progressing?
- What do you need to reach that 5k MRR milestone faster? What needs to be done? Visualise yourself in 3-5 years. Then work backward.
- Where do you want to be and what do you think are the barriers to you reaching your goal?
- Think about the market you're in
- Think about your way of marketing products
- Think about how to spend more time on revenue-generating activities
### New point of views
- Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought of "3 years is too slow" has some association with the successful outliers I follow on Twitter. Definitely a non-zero influence. Why should I compare my journey to others? I have to run my own race.
- Not harshly labelling myself and giving some emotional distance by saying something like "My products didn't earn enough." instead of "***I*** didn't earn enough."
- Maybe I should see $6.2k profit not as an absolute measure of my progress but as a signal that I can do it and should keep going. I *must*.
- *"If progress were linear, nobody would quit."* I'm still in the phase where there's nothing huge happening even though there's enough incremental progress to keep me motivated and going.
- *"The "total" lens is a harsh one. Since building indie products is a compounding process, it much kinder to look at the trajectory of your revenue than at the total. I bet the graph is (ever so slightly) exponential. The best way to think of compounding for me is "gradually and then suddenly". And the things that compound aren't just code, users and marketing exposure, it's also your skills and experience, which are even harder to account for."* Perhaps assuming progress in 3 years to be incremental and linear is unhelpful, because often nothing happens and then something happens.
- *"I am calling it The Reverse Tuition Fee - think of it as being paid to learn how to be an indie builder."* Reverse tuition fee is a great way to put it. I do feel like a lot of why it felt slow for the past years were due to learning and unlearning, and only recently started to feel like I'm getting more of the hang of it.
- Eli lays out the journey in an insightful way here. I think I'm still somewhere in between #2 and #3:
> Here are four stages of progress:
>
> 1. You're doing nothing and just dreaming
> 2. You're doing but not enough
> 3. You're doing enough but the universe hasn't caught on yet
> 4. The universe has caught on
>
> What you're supposed to do at each stage is pretty obvious:
> 1. Do something
> 2. Do more / different
> 3. Wait for universe to catch up
> 4. Celebrate
### Possible answers
- *"Launch 10x more things, try 10x more markets, etc. (my strategy, not the only strategy)"* Despite the diversity in my portfolio, I feel I'm still not trying enough bets. There's something to Pieter's advice here that points to what that phrase I often hear: To get good ideas, you need to generate many, many ideas. I need to go for volume, to arrive at the good bets.
- Likely barriers for past years, and therefore what to remove or get better at:
- Didn't know how to do marketing/reach my customers when started
- Unlearning unhelpful narratives/ideas about startups
- Lots of false starts and time wasted in the past years
- Market for my products are niche/narrow
- Not enough time because got a kid, but kid is also my motivation to go indie
- Spend more time on revenue-generating activities and less time on non revenue-generating activities, like spending too much time on Twitter
- *"Sometimes half the battle is stopping this belief that you have to earn your way up to your goal. You gotta ask for your goal right away. find someone who will pay $5k/mo for something you can build, and then go build it. Rather than earning your way up, you get immediate feedback on what people will or won't pay for, and just having to get 1-2 customers is 1000x easier than tens or hundreds of customers. And then if you want to double your revenue, you just add one more customer."* B2B is definitely something worth considering. But the main point is in breaking down the belief of small, incremental steps. It can be big steps because my target revenue is a finite, achieveable number!
- *"It's also about solving problems that are just big enough to go with your goal."* My products' had been pretty niche. Perhaps the market's pretty small, and so the revenue might have a natural cap. I do feel I need to continue building new ones to find that problem big enough for my goal.
***Now this*** is why I'm on Twitter. This kind of support and peer learning on this depth and breadth is not found anywhere else in my life or work. It's like a mastermind group with thousands of peers and experts.
Summing up to do justice to the great points there:
### Affirmations
- *"It took me 10 years before finding the right thing. Picked the wrong market. Bet on the wrong horse. Worked on shitty products no one needed. Worked on things with no product / founder fit but didn't realize. I think this is what most people must endure, unless lucky / outlier."* I don't feel like I'm betting it right yet too with my products. The past years were definitely to endure those hard lessons, for sure.
- *"Took us over three years to start making proper money too."* I suspect my chart is still in the no-to-low traction phase too, as James shared:
### New questions to ask
- Why has it been this slow?
- What needs to change to accelerate things?
- What beliefs do you have that are holding you back from progressing?
- What do you need to reach that 5k MRR milestone faster? What needs to be done? Visualise yourself in 3-5 years. Then work backward.
- Where do you want to be and what do you think are the barriers to you reaching your goal?
- Think about the market you're in
- Think about your way of marketing products
- Think about how to spend more time on revenue-generating activities
### New point of views
- Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought of "3 years is too slow" has some association with the successful outliers I follow on Twitter. Definitely a non-zero influence. Why should I compare my journey to others? I have to run my own race.
- Not harshly labelling myself and giving some emotional distance by saying something like "My products didn't earn enough." instead of "***I*** didn't earn enough."
- Maybe I should see $6.2k profit not as an absolute measure of my progress but as a signal that I can do it and should keep going. I *must*.
- *"If progress were linear, nobody would quit."* I'm still in the phase where there's nothing huge happening even though there's enough incremental progress to keep me motivated and going.
- *"The "total" lens is a harsh one. Since building indie products is a compounding process, it much kinder to look at the trajectory of your revenue than at the total. I bet the graph is (ever so slightly) exponential. The best way to think of compounding for me is "gradually and then suddenly". And the things that compound aren't just code, users and marketing exposure, it's also your skills and experience, which are even harder to account for."* Perhaps assuming progress in 3 years to be incremental and linear is unhelpful, because often nothing happens and then something happens.
- *"I am calling it The Reverse Tuition Fee - think of it as being paid to learn how to be an indie builder."* Reverse tuition fee is a great way to put it. I do feel like a lot of why it felt slow for the past years were due to learning and unlearning, and only recently started to feel like I'm getting more of the hang of it.
- Eli lays out the journey in an insightful way here. I think I'm still somewhere in between #2 and #3:
> Here are four stages of progress:
>
> 1. You're doing nothing and just dreaming
> 2. You're doing but not enough
> 3. You're doing enough but the universe hasn't caught on yet
> 4. The universe has caught on
>
> What you're supposed to do at each stage is pretty obvious:
> 1. Do something
> 2. Do more / different
> 3. Wait for universe to catch up
> 4. Celebrate
### Possible answers
- *"Launch 10x more things, try 10x more markets, etc. (my strategy, not the only strategy)"* Despite the diversity in my portfolio, I feel I'm still not trying enough bets. There's something to Pieter's advice here that points to what that phrase I often hear: To get good ideas, you need to generate many, many ideas. I need to go for volume, to arrive at the good bets.
- Likely barriers for past years, and therefore what to remove or get better at:
- Didn't know how to do marketing/reach my customers when started
- Unlearning unhelpful narratives/ideas about startups
- Lots of false starts and time wasted in the past years
- Market for my products are niche/narrow
- Not enough time because got a kid, but kid is also my motivation to go indie
- Spend more time on revenue-generating activities and less time on non revenue-generating activities, like spending too much time on Twitter
- *"Sometimes half the battle is stopping this belief that you have to earn your way up to your goal. You gotta ask for your goal right away. find someone who will pay $5k/mo for something you can build, and then go build it. Rather than earning your way up, you get immediate feedback on what people will or won't pay for, and just having to get 1-2 customers is 1000x easier than tens or hundreds of customers. And then if you want to double your revenue, you just add one more customer."* B2B is definitely something worth considering. But the main point is in breaking down the belief of small, incremental steps. It can be big steps because my target revenue is a finite, achieveable number!
- *"It's also about solving problems that are just big enough to go with your goal."* My products' had been pretty niche. Perhaps the market's pretty small, and so the revenue might have a natural cap. I do feel I need to continue building new ones to find that problem big enough for my goal.
Day 839 - Personal brand outlasts your products - https://golifelog.com/posts/personal-brand-outlasts-your-products-1681870148714
Most days I'm not sure why the amount of time I spend on Twitter is justified.
I average 2h a day on it, some days 3h or more when it's interesting. That's a substantial chunk of time. Yet the ROI isn't always clear.
My customers are mostly not on Twitter. My most important engagement for Plugins are in the Carrd groups and communities on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram. I do have a Plugins Twitter account but it's not adding much. Twitter also isn't a great customer acquisition channel for Lifelog, on both my personal and Lifelog account (in fact, I've not found any sustainble channel for Lifelog).
There might be some word of mouth effect from other indie hackers and creators, as I often build in public and share about my indie journey on Twitter, using examples from my projects. If someone needs help with Carrd, they might redirect to me perhaps, but based on experience I don't see that as a substantial pipeline. I don't think my 6k followers contribute much to my profit bottomline, to be honest...
So 2-3h a day, that's 14-21h a week. I'm spending almost 1 waking day out of 7 days a week on it. Without any noticeable returns on investment.
So ***why***?
*Why bother?*
Even if I do enjoy connecting to like-minds, get exposure to ideas, and gain some emotional/social support from Maker Twitter, does it really justify the amount of effort and time I'm spending on it?
And when you ask, sometimes the universe replies, unwittingly through others:
> "Your personal brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business. Usually, that means a time investment. How are you growing your personal brand? 🤔" – [@robertodigital_](https://twitter.com/robertodigital_/status/1647993330700107780)
So okay... I'm actually building personal brand on Twitter. I don't really like that term, but it points to something about it being an asset. Something that persists beyond and outside of my products and services. So that even if I close one or all my products, I don't lose everything that I invested in that products. I still get to keep something. An asset. Assets that originated as a side effect, a by-product of building something else, but outlasts the main product's lifespan.
And this asset can be helpful in my next project. Thinking about it from the lens of the ten forms of capital framework: If making products are about making assets that grow your intellectual, experiential or material capital, then building a personal brand is about growing your social capital. And these various forms of capital can be transformed from one form to another. Social capital can be transformed into financial capital.
In a way then, building an audience, having a personal brand, building trust and reputation, is a hedge against risks of rug pulls on my products. It's diversification of my various forms of capital. It's building resilience.
It's worth *something*. Even if measuring it is hard.
I average 2h a day on it, some days 3h or more when it's interesting. That's a substantial chunk of time. Yet the ROI isn't always clear.
My customers are mostly not on Twitter. My most important engagement for Plugins are in the Carrd groups and communities on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram. I do have a Plugins Twitter account but it's not adding much. Twitter also isn't a great customer acquisition channel for Lifelog, on both my personal and Lifelog account (in fact, I've not found any sustainble channel for Lifelog).
There might be some word of mouth effect from other indie hackers and creators, as I often build in public and share about my indie journey on Twitter, using examples from my projects. If someone needs help with Carrd, they might redirect to me perhaps, but based on experience I don't see that as a substantial pipeline. I don't think my 6k followers contribute much to my profit bottomline, to be honest...
So 2-3h a day, that's 14-21h a week. I'm spending almost 1 waking day out of 7 days a week on it. Without any noticeable returns on investment.
So ***why***?
*Why bother?*
Even if I do enjoy connecting to like-minds, get exposure to ideas, and gain some emotional/social support from Maker Twitter, does it really justify the amount of effort and time I'm spending on it?
And when you ask, sometimes the universe replies, unwittingly through others:
> "Your personal brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business. Usually, that means a time investment. How are you growing your personal brand? 🤔" – [@robertodigital_](https://twitter.com/robertodigital_/status/1647993330700107780)
So okay... I'm actually building personal brand on Twitter. I don't really like that term, but it points to something about it being an asset. Something that persists beyond and outside of my products and services. So that even if I close one or all my products, I don't lose everything that I invested in that products. I still get to keep something. An asset. Assets that originated as a side effect, a by-product of building something else, but outlasts the main product's lifespan.
And this asset can be helpful in my next project. Thinking about it from the lens of the ten forms of capital framework: If making products are about making assets that grow your intellectual, experiential or material capital, then building a personal brand is about growing your social capital. And these various forms of capital can be transformed from one form to another. Social capital can be transformed into financial capital.
In a way then, building an audience, having a personal brand, building trust and reputation, is a hedge against risks of rug pulls on my products. It's diversification of my various forms of capital. It's building resilience.
It's worth *something*. Even if measuring it is hard.
Day 838 - Hard truths from my 2022 indie revenue, cont'd - https://golifelog.com/posts/hard-truths-from-my-2022-indie-revenue-contd-1681803067758
I talked about how my [indie products made only $6.2k total last year](https://golifelog.com/posts/hard-truths-from-my-2022-indie-revenue-1681698643587). It ain't great progress. I know **something has to change**.
*What should I do?*
Broadly, I see three ways.
1. Increase revenue of existing projects
2. Find new sources of indie revenue
3. Cut costs
Specifically, some ideas:
- Double down on Plugins to increase revenue - launch more free and paid plugins, buy more ads, find more distribution channels, launch projects for it, get affiliates to distribute it for me. I'm already doing a lot here, so it's a matter of compounding further.
- Continue building Lifelog - side project weekend is working, keep going.
- Launch/pivot the projects that's already half-completed anyway, to see if they bring in new revenue sources - Sheet2Bio, Career Conversation Cards, Inclusive Design SG.
- Launch something(s) completely new to create fresh income streams. Truth is, diversity in my portfolio is down. Launch info products, digital downloads, single feature micro SaaS (like fixmyspeakers.com earning $5k/m from ads).
- Cut costs. Cutting monetary costs will have minimal effect as I'm not spending much on servers, ads etc. But cutting effort/time (also a cost) will help. Where is my focus? If someone were to see where I spent the most time on per day, what conclusions would he draw? My days are generally split in Outsprint, Plugins, and building in public on Twitter. First 2 pays, the last one, not so sure other than being fun and social. I can cut down on time spent, but all the sunk costs on building up momentum there will be lost. Since I'm spending so much time there, perhaps it's time to build something based off my Twitter audience? Some Twitter tool, info product, community?
*What else do you think I can do?*
*What should I do?*
Broadly, I see three ways.
1. Increase revenue of existing projects
2. Find new sources of indie revenue
3. Cut costs
Specifically, some ideas:
- Double down on Plugins to increase revenue - launch more free and paid plugins, buy more ads, find more distribution channels, launch projects for it, get affiliates to distribute it for me. I'm already doing a lot here, so it's a matter of compounding further.
- Continue building Lifelog - side project weekend is working, keep going.
- Launch/pivot the projects that's already half-completed anyway, to see if they bring in new revenue sources - Sheet2Bio, Career Conversation Cards, Inclusive Design SG.
- Launch something(s) completely new to create fresh income streams. Truth is, diversity in my portfolio is down. Launch info products, digital downloads, single feature micro SaaS (like fixmyspeakers.com earning $5k/m from ads).
- Cut costs. Cutting monetary costs will have minimal effect as I'm not spending much on servers, ads etc. But cutting effort/time (also a cost) will help. Where is my focus? If someone were to see where I spent the most time on per day, what conclusions would he draw? My days are generally split in Outsprint, Plugins, and building in public on Twitter. First 2 pays, the last one, not so sure other than being fun and social. I can cut down on time spent, but all the sunk costs on building up momentum there will be lost. Since I'm spending so much time there, perhaps it's time to build something based off my Twitter audience? Some Twitter tool, info product, community?
*What else do you think I can do?*
Day 837 - Hard truths from my 2022 indie revenue - https://golifelog.com/posts/hard-truths-from-my-2022-indie-revenue-1681698643587
It's tax season. Was doing up the sums and came to this figure for my indie* revenue in 2022:
~$6200
* indie means revenue that's everything outside of consulting
That's total revenue for the entire year of 2022, at about $510 average monthly (non-recurring) revenue. I believe most of it came from sales of Carrd plugins, about $1.2k from Lifelog subscriptions, the rest of about $200 from Buy Me A Coffee donations.
I remember right around the same time last year I did the same calculations for indie revenue in 2021 and I actually did [around $11k!](https://golifelog.com/posts/seeing-my-portfolio-of-projects-through-a-different-lens-1653373054845):
- Lifelog = $1200
- Plugins For Carrd = $900
- Sweet Jam Sites = $500
- Keto List Singapore = $1100
- Social impact patronage = $1300
- Others (random freelancing) = $6000
Sweet Jam Sites and Keto List had stopped earning since, and donations in 2021 were high due to a viral project. I also still did occasional web design freelancing back then that contributed to the indie revenue, which I no longer do. All these were stopped in 2022. I'd trimmed my portfolio a lot. So that explains the dip from last year.
But if I compared just year-on-year growth of only Lifelog + Plugins, it's $2.1k vs $6.2k. Not too shabby, almost tripled. Which checks out with what I knew about the [3x growth of Plugins](https://golifelog.com/posts/i-tripled-my-revenue-for-plugins-1675388499473) while Lifelog was stagnant.
So it's **$6.2k spread across 2 projects, across 12 months, after 3 years of being indie**.
Not a great report card, if you ask me...
Frankly, $6.2k feels pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, especially for the things I need to pay for to feed the family. That's like maybe enough for 1 month... 1 year's revenue just enough for 1 month! 😅 It's not a great look if I'm seeking ramen profitability.
And I won't sugarcoat this or try to find a positive glass-is-half-full angle. It's nice to get $6.2k extra cash, and I still have my consulting as the main income stream to feed the fam, but realistically, objectively, $6.2k isn't not even close to what I aspire to be. And at this rate, I won't ever hit the bare minimum of my aspiration—to be able to survive on indie revenue, at least $5k/m—in a decade maybe.
Even if I do want to keep consulting in my portfolio, am I really okay to wait a decade to grow to ramen profitability? Not really. I'm not even sure I want to nor have the energy to keep going at consulting for another decade, well into my 50s.
There's only questions now, no answers.
But one thing I know for sure – whatever I'm doing now isn't enough.
**Something has to change.**
~$6200
* indie means revenue that's everything outside of consulting
That's total revenue for the entire year of 2022, at about $510 average monthly (non-recurring) revenue. I believe most of it came from sales of Carrd plugins, about $1.2k from Lifelog subscriptions, the rest of about $200 from Buy Me A Coffee donations.
I remember right around the same time last year I did the same calculations for indie revenue in 2021 and I actually did [around $11k!](https://golifelog.com/posts/seeing-my-portfolio-of-projects-through-a-different-lens-1653373054845):
- Lifelog = $1200
- Plugins For Carrd = $900
- Sweet Jam Sites = $500
- Keto List Singapore = $1100
- Social impact patronage = $1300
- Others (random freelancing) = $6000
Sweet Jam Sites and Keto List had stopped earning since, and donations in 2021 were high due to a viral project. I also still did occasional web design freelancing back then that contributed to the indie revenue, which I no longer do. All these were stopped in 2022. I'd trimmed my portfolio a lot. So that explains the dip from last year.
But if I compared just year-on-year growth of only Lifelog + Plugins, it's $2.1k vs $6.2k. Not too shabby, almost tripled. Which checks out with what I knew about the [3x growth of Plugins](https://golifelog.com/posts/i-tripled-my-revenue-for-plugins-1675388499473) while Lifelog was stagnant.
So it's **$6.2k spread across 2 projects, across 12 months, after 3 years of being indie**.
Not a great report card, if you ask me...
Frankly, $6.2k feels pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, especially for the things I need to pay for to feed the family. That's like maybe enough for 1 month... 1 year's revenue just enough for 1 month! 😅 It's not a great look if I'm seeking ramen profitability.
And I won't sugarcoat this or try to find a positive glass-is-half-full angle. It's nice to get $6.2k extra cash, and I still have my consulting as the main income stream to feed the fam, but realistically, objectively, $6.2k isn't not even close to what I aspire to be. And at this rate, I won't ever hit the bare minimum of my aspiration—to be able to survive on indie revenue, at least $5k/m—in a decade maybe.
Even if I do want to keep consulting in my portfolio, am I really okay to wait a decade to grow to ramen profitability? Not really. I'm not even sure I want to nor have the energy to keep going at consulting for another decade, well into my 50s.
There's only questions now, no answers.
But one thing I know for sure – whatever I'm doing now isn't enough.
**Something has to change.**
Day 836 - Indie what? - https://golifelog.com/posts/indie-what-1681621146105
Indie hacker, indie maker, indie solopreneur, indie creator – what's the difference? We throw these labels around but honestly I've never really delineated their differences.
So just for fun, arising from a random conversation on Twitter, I made this sketch:
We know what indie means, i.e. "independent", free agent, self-employed, or bootstrapped. [Eli said](https://twitter.com/finereli/status/1647256362429325318) is about the focus, about what you're focusing on and they're not always talking about the same thing.
Indie hackers are focused on whether there's coding involved. Usually for folks who are developers coding their SaaS product. Indie makers are those who are making products but not necessarily coding it themselves. It's usually via nocode tools, or info products. Solopreneurs as a label is to highlight that the person is running a business solo or mostly alone, doesn't hire a team, but might work with freelancers or contractors. Indie creators, seems to be a catch-all for everyone who's indie and creating something, anything, even content. They don't necessarily have a product.
OK now that I've drawn lines, time to tweet this and start a semantic war. 🤣
So just for fun, arising from a random conversation on Twitter, I made this sketch:
We know what indie means, i.e. "independent", free agent, self-employed, or bootstrapped. [Eli said](https://twitter.com/finereli/status/1647256362429325318) is about the focus, about what you're focusing on and they're not always talking about the same thing.
Indie hackers are focused on whether there's coding involved. Usually for folks who are developers coding their SaaS product. Indie makers are those who are making products but not necessarily coding it themselves. It's usually via nocode tools, or info products. Solopreneurs as a label is to highlight that the person is running a business solo or mostly alone, doesn't hire a team, but might work with freelancers or contractors. Indie creators, seems to be a catch-all for everyone who's indie and creating something, anything, even content. They don't necessarily have a product.
OK now that I've drawn lines, time to tweet this and start a semantic war. 🤣
Day 835 - Side project weekend: Week 3 updates - https://golifelog.com/posts/side-project-weekend-week-3-updates-1681531659297
Updates on side project weekend: Pretty happy with the progress so far. So much so that I'm surprised why I didn't do it sooner.
I decided to start setting aside my time on [weekend mornings for side projects in end March](https://golifelog.com/posts/start-of-side-project-weekends-1680396240910). Felt great [starting it the following week](https://golifelog.com/posts/side-project-weekends-1679711565154), getting re-acquainted with VS Code and Nuxt.js all over again.
And since then, I've shipped 2 big text editing features for Lifelog. Getting those feature requests off the roadmap always feels great. The best part - not letting Lifeloggers down.
Personally, feeling progress on all these side projects after so long of ignoring them is a great relief. Easing some of that cognitive pressure of the projects nagging away at me felt cathartic.
Thinking back, it's silly why I didn't think of starting this sooner. I know the power of 1% compounding, and compounding a little bit even if every week not every day is still compounding. Shipping 1 feature a week means I would have shipped 52 features in 1 year! That's not unsubstantial.
What I didn't expect: Jumping out of bed on weekends, more so than weekdays! How weird. And surprising.
I guess I have a hobby now?
I decided to start setting aside my time on [weekend mornings for side projects in end March](https://golifelog.com/posts/start-of-side-project-weekends-1680396240910). Felt great [starting it the following week](https://golifelog.com/posts/side-project-weekends-1679711565154), getting re-acquainted with VS Code and Nuxt.js all over again.
And since then, I've shipped 2 big text editing features for Lifelog. Getting those feature requests off the roadmap always feels great. The best part - not letting Lifeloggers down.
Personally, feeling progress on all these side projects after so long of ignoring them is a great relief. Easing some of that cognitive pressure of the projects nagging away at me felt cathartic.
Thinking back, it's silly why I didn't think of starting this sooner. I know the power of 1% compounding, and compounding a little bit even if every week not every day is still compounding. Shipping 1 feature a week means I would have shipped 52 features in 1 year! That's not unsubstantial.
What I didn't expect: Jumping out of bed on weekends, more so than weekdays! How weird. And surprising.
I guess I have a hobby now?
Side project weekend: Deployed new feature on Lifelog - 🖊 Markdown formatting snackbar. Now you can add Markdown syntax using the editor panel to format the text. Great if user is unfamiliar with Markdown.
Day 834 - Winning the indie game without an audience - https://golifelog.com/posts/winning-the-indie-game-without-an-audience-1681456410187
In a move to call BS on the oft-stated reason "You're only successful because you have a large following.", Danny Postma posted a great, [informative thread](https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1646368426246680579) about how he grew a product to $1.2k/m using SEO, without ever mentioning it on Twitter.
What struck me about his thread was how simple SEO could be. Yes it *can be* complicated and look like black magic, but it can also be simple. He did it the simple way. The other realisation was that I probably stumbled into this same approach with my Carrd plugins project! It was SEO right from the beginning, that's how it pulled itself forward even though I didn't market it much. So it is possible! And thing about audience, as he said, it helps with "faster link building", giving you an edge of a few months over competitors. I mentioned before that an audience is an accelerant, if the product isn't moving there's no speed or momentum upon which to accelerate. So it's true.
So here's how Danny did it, paraphrased and referenced with my Carrd plugins project:
1. **Find your main keyword** using [Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator](https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator). Mine is "carrd plugins". I chose "plugins" over "widgets", "components", "scripts", because Wordpress calls it "plugins" so i assumed that would be most familiar and commonplace.
2. **Research keywords** to find something with:
- **Keyword difficulty (KD) < 20** - requires less than 10 backlinks to rank on 1st page of Google. Interestingly, the KD was N/A for "carrd plugins". So very niche but require even less to rank?!
- **Volume > 500** - average monthly no. of searches for the keyword over last 12 months for 1 country. For worldwide search, triple the volume. Estimated 15 sales/month at 1% conversion of 1500 searches. My volume for "carrd plugins" was 30 for US, 90 for global. Not high. Average sales for my plugins were about 10-20 per month, so conversion is about 11-22%!? Which kinda makes sense because it's so niche, but also explains why the sales volume isn't high.
- **Many child keywords.** High ranking for main keyword means high ranking for long-tail keywords too. Volume for "carrd widgets" is 10. No available data for other child keywords.
3. **Spend a lot of time researching the ideal keyword,** as this is the baseline. Start off the wrong one, you will struggle later.
4. **Build product around the keyword.**
- **Give users what they want** from searching. Answer their search intent, be it information or assets. Provide free downloads with low barrier. I do that with my Carrd plugins. There's more free plugins than paid.
- **Optimize website copy for the main keyword.** Repeat it everywhere but not too much. Yes I did this for my plugins site too. My hero tagline is a SEO grab basically lol - "Plugins, widgets, scripts to power up your Carrd sites".
- **Build subpages to rank for specific long-tail keywords.** The subpages for me are not subdirectory pages because I use Carrd's subdomain – plugins.carrd.co. But I link all the plugins subpages on the main home page.
- **Offer both free and paid options.** Free users keep users on site, boosts Google's ranking, and also earns trust by providing value first before asking for payment. Totally what I'm doing with plugins. My approach is "Giving till it hurts".
5. **Backlinks.** All my plugin subpages have links back to home page. When I launch my plugins as separate tools on various channels, they bring traffic back to the mothership. Danny suggested launching on Product Hunt, because **Product Hunt gives you a link with a strong domain authority (DR) of 90/100** even if you do not win first place. The higher the DR the higher the SEO effect. Other websites reposting via PH will give you even more backlinks., enough to rank on the 1st page with KD < 20. I've so far not launched plugins on PH yet because it feels rigged. But must consider now since getting a place on the leaderboard doesn't really matter!
6. Next is to **wait**. An average of 3 months for traffic from Google, and another 6 months for larger boost. SEO is long game. Set and forget.
What a fun meta analysis of how my Carrd plugins worked itself out!
Now I know roughly why my plugins pages appear in [7 out of 10 on first page of Google for "carrd plugins"](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1643554075466936320)!
What struck me about his thread was how simple SEO could be. Yes it *can be* complicated and look like black magic, but it can also be simple. He did it the simple way. The other realisation was that I probably stumbled into this same approach with my Carrd plugins project! It was SEO right from the beginning, that's how it pulled itself forward even though I didn't market it much. So it is possible! And thing about audience, as he said, it helps with "faster link building", giving you an edge of a few months over competitors. I mentioned before that an audience is an accelerant, if the product isn't moving there's no speed or momentum upon which to accelerate. So it's true.
So here's how Danny did it, paraphrased and referenced with my Carrd plugins project:
1. **Find your main keyword** using [Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator](https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator). Mine is "carrd plugins". I chose "plugins" over "widgets", "components", "scripts", because Wordpress calls it "plugins" so i assumed that would be most familiar and commonplace.
2. **Research keywords** to find something with:
- **Keyword difficulty (KD) < 20** - requires less than 10 backlinks to rank on 1st page of Google. Interestingly, the KD was N/A for "carrd plugins". So very niche but require even less to rank?!
- **Volume > 500** - average monthly no. of searches for the keyword over last 12 months for 1 country. For worldwide search, triple the volume. Estimated 15 sales/month at 1% conversion of 1500 searches. My volume for "carrd plugins" was 30 for US, 90 for global. Not high. Average sales for my plugins were about 10-20 per month, so conversion is about 11-22%!? Which kinda makes sense because it's so niche, but also explains why the sales volume isn't high.
- **Many child keywords.** High ranking for main keyword means high ranking for long-tail keywords too. Volume for "carrd widgets" is 10. No available data for other child keywords.
3. **Spend a lot of time researching the ideal keyword,** as this is the baseline. Start off the wrong one, you will struggle later.
4. **Build product around the keyword.**
- **Give users what they want** from searching. Answer their search intent, be it information or assets. Provide free downloads with low barrier. I do that with my Carrd plugins. There's more free plugins than paid.
- **Optimize website copy for the main keyword.** Repeat it everywhere but not too much. Yes I did this for my plugins site too. My hero tagline is a SEO grab basically lol - "Plugins, widgets, scripts to power up your Carrd sites".
- **Build subpages to rank for specific long-tail keywords.** The subpages for me are not subdirectory pages because I use Carrd's subdomain – plugins.carrd.co. But I link all the plugins subpages on the main home page.
- **Offer both free and paid options.** Free users keep users on site, boosts Google's ranking, and also earns trust by providing value first before asking for payment. Totally what I'm doing with plugins. My approach is "Giving till it hurts".
5. **Backlinks.** All my plugin subpages have links back to home page. When I launch my plugins as separate tools on various channels, they bring traffic back to the mothership. Danny suggested launching on Product Hunt, because **Product Hunt gives you a link with a strong domain authority (DR) of 90/100** even if you do not win first place. The higher the DR the higher the SEO effect. Other websites reposting via PH will give you even more backlinks., enough to rank on the 1st page with KD < 20. I've so far not launched plugins on PH yet because it feels rigged. But must consider now since getting a place on the leaderboard doesn't really matter!
6. Next is to **wait**. An average of 3 months for traffic from Google, and another 6 months for larger boost. SEO is long game. Set and forget.
What a fun meta analysis of how my Carrd plugins worked itself out!
Now I know roughly why my plugins pages appear in [7 out of 10 on first page of Google for "carrd plugins"](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1643554075466936320)!
Day 833 - 100% sleep score II - https://golifelog.com/posts/100percent-sleep-score-ii-1681348558719
Hit 100% sleep score again! My second time ever. But I kinda brute forced into it by sleep in for 9.5h due to a bad bout of seasonal flu. I definitely needed the rest.
But getting 100 again just re-demonstraed to me again that despite all the sophisticated sleep biohacking techniques and tools I use, the fundamentals of great sleep can be super simple: Just sleep enough hours. Well at least one of the fundamentals.
Do that, and many of the other sleep hacks are just secondary and complementary, like these recent ones I learned:
- A 10-20min nap or non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) have both been shown to replenish physical energy and increase cognitive function. NSDR, however, also increases striatal dopamine and improves one's self-directed relaxation ability, which in turn improves sleep. Source: [Andrew Huberman](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=540927514852493&id=100068057464113&mibextid=qC1gEa). I always naps were better than NSDR, but looks like this NSDR thing could be worth practising more in.
- How the cultural practice of couples sleeping in the same bed is way overrated. We should normalise having sleep arrangements that work for individuals sleep profiles/patterns while not moral guilt-tripping couples into thinking that's bad for romance/relationship. Source: [r/sleep](https://www.reddit.com/r/sleep/comments/11vffo3/sleeping_in_the_same_bed_as_my_bf_is_agonizing).
- How a sleep-optimised day looks like:
- Regular waking time
- Get morning sun
- get morning exercise
- Caffeine shut off point around 2pm
- View evening sun
- Dark mode, limit screentime
- Keep bedroom cool
- Regular bedtime
- 8h of sleep
- Cognitive impairment from sleep deprivation is like drinking alcohol. “One night of low-quality sleep impairs your brain function as if you had a few drinks –– and if you go a full night without sleep, your mental performance drops as if you had a blood alcohol content of 0.10, which is well over the legal limit for driving.” Source: [Dave Asprey](https://daveasprey.com/how-stress-ruins-your-sleep/).
- Interesting new sleep supplement stack, which I only tried magneisum so far:
- Theanine for focus and sleep
- Inositol for relaxation and deep sleep
- Magnesium for sleep latency, reduces sleep awakening and increases melatonin
- Glycine for lower body temperature, sleep latency and better quality sleep
- My own sleep stack recently had evolved:
- 💤 5 sleep cycles nightly
- 🍽 Light/no dinner
- 🚰 Less water in evenings
- 💊 Magnesium L-Threonate
- 🏋️ Getting the body tired enough - exercise
- ☢️ Quantum sleep
- 😪 Less stress
- ⚓️ Stable routines
- Sleeping after midnight is bad. “Every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after midnight.” Source: [Time.com](https://time.com/3183183/best-time-to-sleep/)
But getting 100 again just re-demonstraed to me again that despite all the sophisticated sleep biohacking techniques and tools I use, the fundamentals of great sleep can be super simple: Just sleep enough hours. Well at least one of the fundamentals.
Do that, and many of the other sleep hacks are just secondary and complementary, like these recent ones I learned:
- A 10-20min nap or non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) have both been shown to replenish physical energy and increase cognitive function. NSDR, however, also increases striatal dopamine and improves one's self-directed relaxation ability, which in turn improves sleep. Source: [Andrew Huberman](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=540927514852493&id=100068057464113&mibextid=qC1gEa). I always naps were better than NSDR, but looks like this NSDR thing could be worth practising more in.
- How the cultural practice of couples sleeping in the same bed is way overrated. We should normalise having sleep arrangements that work for individuals sleep profiles/patterns while not moral guilt-tripping couples into thinking that's bad for romance/relationship. Source: [r/sleep](https://www.reddit.com/r/sleep/comments/11vffo3/sleeping_in_the_same_bed_as_my_bf_is_agonizing).
- How a sleep-optimised day looks like:
- Regular waking time
- Get morning sun
- get morning exercise
- Caffeine shut off point around 2pm
- View evening sun
- Dark mode, limit screentime
- Keep bedroom cool
- Regular bedtime
- 8h of sleep
- Cognitive impairment from sleep deprivation is like drinking alcohol. “One night of low-quality sleep impairs your brain function as if you had a few drinks –– and if you go a full night without sleep, your mental performance drops as if you had a blood alcohol content of 0.10, which is well over the legal limit for driving.” Source: [Dave Asprey](https://daveasprey.com/how-stress-ruins-your-sleep/).
- Interesting new sleep supplement stack, which I only tried magneisum so far:
- Theanine for focus and sleep
- Inositol for relaxation and deep sleep
- Magnesium for sleep latency, reduces sleep awakening and increases melatonin
- Glycine for lower body temperature, sleep latency and better quality sleep
- My own sleep stack recently had evolved:
- 💤 5 sleep cycles nightly
- 🍽 Light/no dinner
- 🚰 Less water in evenings
- 💊 Magnesium L-Threonate
- 🏋️ Getting the body tired enough - exercise
- ☢️ Quantum sleep
- 😪 Less stress
- ⚓️ Stable routines
- Sleeping after midnight is bad. “Every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after midnight.” Source: [Time.com](https://time.com/3183183/best-time-to-sleep/)
Jason Leow
Author
Yes I use this iOS app called Sleep Cycle. Set phone to airplane, start the app, and put beside pillow during sleep. Apple Watch and other wearables have sleep tracking apps too.
Day 832 - Rubberducking with ChatGPT - https://golifelog.com/posts/rubberducking-with-chatgpt-1681283275502
Today I solved a number of Javascript issues I face using ChatGPT. I must say I'm impressed. Previously I asked code questions for Vue.js, but perhaps the training data is limited or the way I asked, it kept giving me answers that were clearly wrong. This time it somehow shined through.
My lessons on how best to collaborate with ChatGPT on coding questions:
- Provide context, show parts of datasets, define variables and constants if needed, share what errors you faced.
- The more code and datasets you show the more relevant the answer.
- Ask in stages, not all in one go. Break it down so that it can also build up context.
- Tell ChatGPT it was wrong, what were the errors that came from the code it provided.
- Iterate on your questions, rephrase in a different way.
Given enough context, ChatGPT can provide code that customised to your code. That's a clear step up from asking questions on Stack Overflow, because I often have to adapt and re-jig the answers I find there. With ChatGPT, I get the right code, and it can also explain it line by line what the code does.
I've seen folks use ChatGPT for writing template code and all. But I was never impressed with that (you can download or copy paste template code easily). But this is different. I can imagine, especially for beginners, ChatGPT or equivalent, paired with good old Google search, might be really useful as a coding assistant and coach.
One of the use cases for AI that I'm enthusiastic about.
My lessons on how best to collaborate with ChatGPT on coding questions:
- Provide context, show parts of datasets, define variables and constants if needed, share what errors you faced.
- The more code and datasets you show the more relevant the answer.
- Ask in stages, not all in one go. Break it down so that it can also build up context.
- Tell ChatGPT it was wrong, what were the errors that came from the code it provided.
- Iterate on your questions, rephrase in a different way.
Given enough context, ChatGPT can provide code that customised to your code. That's a clear step up from asking questions on Stack Overflow, because I often have to adapt and re-jig the answers I find there. With ChatGPT, I get the right code, and it can also explain it line by line what the code does.
I've seen folks use ChatGPT for writing template code and all. But I was never impressed with that (you can download or copy paste template code easily). But this is different. I can imagine, especially for beginners, ChatGPT or equivalent, paired with good old Google search, might be really useful as a coding assistant and coach.
One of the use cases for AI that I'm enthusiastic about.
Day 831 - What if you had to start from zero all over again? - https://golifelog.com/posts/what-if-you-had-to-start-from-zero-all-over-again-1681183399692
Seeing how some indie hackers' MRR went from profitable to [ZERO](https://twitter.com/maximehugodupre/status/1645096979649769476) were heart-breaking to watch. These were the folks who built Twitter tools on top of the Twitter API, especially Twitter analytics tools. Almost overnight, their developer accounts were suspended, or they closed it themselves due to the ridiculous price hike.
Platform risk is so effing real.
Seeing this play out got me thinking: *What if this same thing happened to me?*
Even though I don't build Twitter tools, there's a thousand scenarios an existential rug pull can happen:
- Your cloud hosting platform deletes your servers for no reason (happened to someone recently on Heroku).
- The critical infrastructure that your business depends on could suddenly raise prices to the point that it makes your business untenable (Bubble, Twitter API are recent examples).
- You somehow got an unknown wave of chargebacks, and banks and credit card networks decide to blacklist you, and you can no longer use Stripe or any payment platform.
- Your domain name provider accidentally expires your domain (yes GoDaddy seems to do that) or decide to ban it and you lose all the page rank and SEO juice you built up.
- You get into an accident or contract some illness/health condition, and become unable to work for in medium term (risk of being solopreneur).
- The platforms you build on (Apple App Store, Android Play Store), could ban you for reasons that are unclear. Same with your distribution channels (ad accounts getting banned for no reason are commonplace, and an existential crisis if you heavily depend on it, e.g. ecommerce).
- A VC-funded competitor enters the market and poaches all your customers away.
- Macro economic issues like recession or some major crisis (e.g. pandemic) changes customer behaviour drastically (e.g. F&B all struggled to survive in the age of lockdowns).
Just a quick thought experiment: What if this happened and I have to start from zero all over again? What can I do to reduce chances of rug pulls happening, and if it does, what can I can to lessen the impact?
- **Diversify.** Sure, concentration builds wealth, but diversification builds resilience. Focus on 1, but no harm building up 1 or 2 more side projects. You can re-start a new business yes if the current one fails, but the incubation period might be long. Easier to not lost momentum by shifting to something already running.
- **Backups.** Keep multiple backups for your data, have ready alternatives for your critical infrastructure (set up secondary databases on Render on top of being on Heroku, be on more than one payment platform, like Stripe and Lemon Squeezy).
- **Test new ideas constantly.** Going all in on 1 business makes a hidden assumption – that the situation your business is in is stable and unlikely to change. Then when things go from stable to chaos, you're caught blindsided and not sure where to even re-start from. Constantly tinkering with new ideas, keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive, might help counter that blindside. You have ready ideas and motivation to hustle all over again, plus all the practice from starting from zero for new ideas.
- **Keep tabs on the pulse of your industry.** Prepare. Reading the experiences of those Twitter tools who survived the axe (like Hypefury), they started preparing way ahead, before things went sideways. They spoke to Twitter directly, got on whitelist for the new Enterprise plan, and paid immediately way before the deadline. I read that and I was impressed by their foresight. Only the paranoid survives.
- **Don't overthink it**, create undue anxiety. Being preapred is all good, but there's a million possible scenarios. Spending too much time and effort in remote possibilities is a huge time and emotional suck. It's a good reminder to myself that we need to prioritize because there's so much you can do to be prepared. Almost too much. Overthinking it is pointless too. This entrepreneurship game is something you can't be 100% prepared for.
*What else did I miss? What would you do if you had to start from zero again?*
Platform risk is so effing real.
Seeing this play out got me thinking: *What if this same thing happened to me?*
Even though I don't build Twitter tools, there's a thousand scenarios an existential rug pull can happen:
- Your cloud hosting platform deletes your servers for no reason (happened to someone recently on Heroku).
- The critical infrastructure that your business depends on could suddenly raise prices to the point that it makes your business untenable (Bubble, Twitter API are recent examples).
- You somehow got an unknown wave of chargebacks, and banks and credit card networks decide to blacklist you, and you can no longer use Stripe or any payment platform.
- Your domain name provider accidentally expires your domain (yes GoDaddy seems to do that) or decide to ban it and you lose all the page rank and SEO juice you built up.
- You get into an accident or contract some illness/health condition, and become unable to work for in medium term (risk of being solopreneur).
- The platforms you build on (Apple App Store, Android Play Store), could ban you for reasons that are unclear. Same with your distribution channels (ad accounts getting banned for no reason are commonplace, and an existential crisis if you heavily depend on it, e.g. ecommerce).
- A VC-funded competitor enters the market and poaches all your customers away.
- Macro economic issues like recession or some major crisis (e.g. pandemic) changes customer behaviour drastically (e.g. F&B all struggled to survive in the age of lockdowns).
Just a quick thought experiment: What if this happened and I have to start from zero all over again? What can I do to reduce chances of rug pulls happening, and if it does, what can I can to lessen the impact?
- **Diversify.** Sure, concentration builds wealth, but diversification builds resilience. Focus on 1, but no harm building up 1 or 2 more side projects. You can re-start a new business yes if the current one fails, but the incubation period might be long. Easier to not lost momentum by shifting to something already running.
- **Backups.** Keep multiple backups for your data, have ready alternatives for your critical infrastructure (set up secondary databases on Render on top of being on Heroku, be on more than one payment platform, like Stripe and Lemon Squeezy).
- **Test new ideas constantly.** Going all in on 1 business makes a hidden assumption – that the situation your business is in is stable and unlikely to change. Then when things go from stable to chaos, you're caught blindsided and not sure where to even re-start from. Constantly tinkering with new ideas, keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive, might help counter that blindside. You have ready ideas and motivation to hustle all over again, plus all the practice from starting from zero for new ideas.
- **Keep tabs on the pulse of your industry.** Prepare. Reading the experiences of those Twitter tools who survived the axe (like Hypefury), they started preparing way ahead, before things went sideways. They spoke to Twitter directly, got on whitelist for the new Enterprise plan, and paid immediately way before the deadline. I read that and I was impressed by their foresight. Only the paranoid survives.
- **Don't overthink it**, create undue anxiety. Being preapred is all good, but there's a million possible scenarios. Spending too much time and effort in remote possibilities is a huge time and emotional suck. It's a good reminder to myself that we need to prioritize because there's so much you can do to be prepared. Almost too much. Overthinking it is pointless too. This entrepreneurship game is something you can't be 100% prepared for.
*What else did I miss? What would you do if you had to start from zero again?*
Paid subscriber who never used my SaaS cancelled after 4 months
One of the more weird customer situations... Signs up in Nov, the $10 paid subscription activated in Dec, never wrote a post, doesn't reply when emailed to, then now 4 months later, abruptly cancels. 🤷♂️
I never added his 4 months payment to MRR from the beginning as suspected this will happen. Just didn't expect it will take this long... 😨
I never added his 4 months payment to MRR from the beginning as suspected this will happen. Just didn't expect it will take this long... 😨
Day 830 - Wise quitting - https://golifelog.com/posts/wise-quitting-1681110696126
"Don't give up." has got to be my favourite overall life achievement hack when growing up. Not surprisingly, it's always served me well in school and sports. It's like 100% hit rate. So learning that it's not true when my indie entrepreneurship journey was difficult.
But recently I realised it's not a total collapse of that notion. But more about adding nuance to it. I can give up a battle, but still not lose the war.
I can give up a project, but not lose staying indie.
Perspective perspective.
Closing a project when the data shows, isn't giving up. It's reprioritizing.
Stopping the project when my motivation for it runs dry, isn't giving up. It's re-directing.
Putting a project on hold when platform risk is too high isn't giving up. It's re-calculating.
By giving up a failed project, I can then redirect my energy and focus on something else, with a potentially higher chance to win the bigger war. Because of what practical lessons and experience from the failed project. Because now I'm smarter for it. Because I know what didn't work, I can avoid those factors and by reduction, I get closer to what works.
Now, that's **wise quitting**.
But recently I realised it's not a total collapse of that notion. But more about adding nuance to it. I can give up a battle, but still not lose the war.
I can give up a project, but not lose staying indie.
Perspective perspective.
Closing a project when the data shows, isn't giving up. It's reprioritizing.
Stopping the project when my motivation for it runs dry, isn't giving up. It's re-directing.
Putting a project on hold when platform risk is too high isn't giving up. It's re-calculating.
By giving up a failed project, I can then redirect my energy and focus on something else, with a potentially higher chance to win the bigger war. Because of what practical lessons and experience from the failed project. Because now I'm smarter for it. Because I know what didn't work, I can avoid those factors and by reduction, I get closer to what works.
Now, that's **wise quitting**.
Day 829 - Sunday mornings - https://golifelog.com/posts/sunday-mornings-1681004664747
It's been a while since I wrote about Sundays. It's still my favourite day for waking up early.
I wake. Wash up. Push buttons for my double espresso. And sit down and immerse into a sea of calmness. The quiet stillness is mind-stopping. I slow down. I see the first light coming through the horizon. The dark violets giving way to glacier blues and whisky orange. The flames of yellow breaks through clouds. So still, even the birds are still asleep.
I hit play on my [Soundcloud playlist](https://on.soundcloud.com/Gnedo). The ambient chillstep lends a deeper, immersive atmosphere. To savour and to soak in. It sharpens my mind, brings me to the present. Nothing like music that helps me come back to the moment.
I wish time would stop here. I could live in this moment forever. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I'm looking for in life. All I live for. Just fleeting moments when everything feels whole and complete. When I'm not needed nor expected to be anything. Where there's nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. When my entire universe is calm and collected.
A sacred hour.
A sacred space.
Sunday mornings.
I wake. Wash up. Push buttons for my double espresso. And sit down and immerse into a sea of calmness. The quiet stillness is mind-stopping. I slow down. I see the first light coming through the horizon. The dark violets giving way to glacier blues and whisky orange. The flames of yellow breaks through clouds. So still, even the birds are still asleep.
I hit play on my [Soundcloud playlist](https://on.soundcloud.com/Gnedo). The ambient chillstep lends a deeper, immersive atmosphere. To savour and to soak in. It sharpens my mind, brings me to the present. Nothing like music that helps me come back to the moment.
I wish time would stop here. I could live in this moment forever. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I'm looking for in life. All I live for. Just fleeting moments when everything feels whole and complete. When I'm not needed nor expected to be anything. Where there's nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. When my entire universe is calm and collected.
A sacred hour.
A sacred space.
Sunday mornings.
Code from scratch the first version of side snackbar Markdown editor on local
🚧 Work-in-progress for side project weekend:
Coding from scratch a side Markdown editor for my daily writing app golifelog.com
INB4: "Why reinvent, why not just install a package?"
Because I love a challenge 🤣
Because it's a passion project I can do wtf I want 🙃
Coding from scratch a side Markdown editor for my daily writing app golifelog.com
INB4: "Why reinvent, why not just install a package?"
Because I love a challenge 🤣
Because it's a passion project I can do wtf I want 🙃
Day 828 - 1000 different & beautiful things in your 1 wild & precious life - https://golifelog.com/posts/1000-different-and-beautiful-things-in-your-1-wild-and-precious-life-1680960250621
"Twitter is saying 1 thing in 1000 ways."
Sorry, hard NO. That's boring af.
Instead, let's normalise saying the 1000 different and beautiful things happening in your 1 wild and precious life.
Do that, & I'd follow you in a heartbeat.
Because no one can compete with being you. And being you means embracing all the facets of who you are, what you do. You don't need to come up with original content. You = originality.
Because we're not one thing, even if the gurus all say it's good to be known for one thing. They say, people are lazy, they just want to pigeonhole you into one box. It's easier for them to recall you as the "____ guy". I call bullshit. If we just spend a few more seconds thinking deeper about anyone we know—friends or family—we will effortlessly realise they are so much more beyond the one thing we tend to label them by.
Because we contain multitudes. We are complex creatures. We're not uni-dimensional. Most of the time, we can be multi-dimensional if we get out of our own way and just let it reveal itself. There's 1000 different and beautiful things happening in our 1 wild and precious live. But we've tuned out of them, and got numb. So many creators say, I have nothing interesting to share! That's exactly it. We lost touch with our multitudes. We just need to look harder, and get accustomed to seeing them all over again, and it'll get easier. It's true, I was skeptical, but tried and now I can see interesting things happening where I used to not notice them.
Only machines try to say 1 thing in 1000 ways. In the age of AI, don't compete with machines by being a machine.
Compete by being utterly and imperfectly human. By being you.
Sorry, hard NO. That's boring af.
Instead, let's normalise saying the 1000 different and beautiful things happening in your 1 wild and precious life.
Do that, & I'd follow you in a heartbeat.
Because no one can compete with being you. And being you means embracing all the facets of who you are, what you do. You don't need to come up with original content. You = originality.
Because we're not one thing, even if the gurus all say it's good to be known for one thing. They say, people are lazy, they just want to pigeonhole you into one box. It's easier for them to recall you as the "____ guy". I call bullshit. If we just spend a few more seconds thinking deeper about anyone we know—friends or family—we will effortlessly realise they are so much more beyond the one thing we tend to label them by.
Because we contain multitudes. We are complex creatures. We're not uni-dimensional. Most of the time, we can be multi-dimensional if we get out of our own way and just let it reveal itself. There's 1000 different and beautiful things happening in our 1 wild and precious live. But we've tuned out of them, and got numb. So many creators say, I have nothing interesting to share! That's exactly it. We lost touch with our multitudes. We just need to look harder, and get accustomed to seeing them all over again, and it'll get easier. It's true, I was skeptical, but tried and now I can see interesting things happening where I used to not notice them.
Only machines try to say 1 thing in 1000 ways. In the age of AI, don't compete with machines by being a machine.
Compete by being utterly and imperfectly human. By being you.
Day 827 - Twitter algo tips - https://golifelog.com/posts/twitter-algo-tips-1680850572027
I've been reading threads about the Twitter algorithm which recently went open source. Just to gather up the tips and hacks:
*Caveat: The algo gets updated often, so this might only be a snapshot in time. And take the boosts and weights not as definite results but more as probabilities as the algo is multi-layered and complex. It behaves more like a symphony:*
- Follower:following ratio matters. Ideal is 0.6, where you follow less than 60% of the number of followers you have. But don't rush to unfollow a lot of people quickly, as that kind of behaviour resembles a bot and could get you shadowbanned.
- A tweet decays at a rate of 50% every 6 hours. (Side note: That's why I retweet it every 6h to bump it up and also to show it to folks in different timezones. It's inclusive as folks follow you to see your tweets, and timezones might make it less accessible to them. But might add noise if you RT too much, so do it with care.).
- The algorithm will show more of your tweets if you have a high TweepCred. If your TweepCred is less than 65, the algo will consider up to 3 of your tweets. If your TweepCred is more than 65, the 3-tweet limit is lifted. What TweepCred entails and how it's calculated is still not clear. This aligns with experience where tweeting anything more than 3 per day isn't as effective.
- Tweepcred is also based on the quality of users you interact with. Interact with low quality accounts with bad follower/following ratios and are marked as spam/nsfw/bots/toxic, you get penalized.
- Your account is clustered into a group with other similar profiles. This clustering helps extend your tweet reach beyond your followers to other similar people. Tweets won't do as well if you post “out of network” content, outside your cluster. That's why the advice Twitter is saying 1 thing 1000 ways. Repeating on your niche works (but boring).
- Using keywords in your tweets matter. Because Twitter uses the same algo as Google (PageRank).
- Multiplier boosts:
- Likes (30x)
- RTs (20x)
- Replies (1x) - getting likes + RTs boost more than getting replies
- Trusted circle (3x)
- Adding images/video (2x)
- Tweeting in English
- Follows
- Trending topics (1.1x) - trends, media, news
- Twitter Blue (2-4x)
- Ending tweets with a question mark
- Obvious but worth mentioning: Getting blocked, muted, abuse/spam reports, unfollows would lower your visibility score. Unfollows are only kept on server for past 90 days to prevent permanent shadowbanning.
- Negative feedback like "Show less often", block or mute (-74x)
- Report tweet clicked (-369x)
- The tweets someone sees in the For You feed is based on the probability that they will:
- like/RT the tweet
- click the tweet and reply
- stay for 2+ minutes
- check the account's profile
- Posting these in your tweets also lowers the reach of that tweet:
- only URLs
- no words
- misspelling, making up words, unknown language
- name only
- multiple hashtags
- tweet gets categorised as misinformation or blacklisted
- The myth is verified now: Links gets marked as spam if they are considered "non-news or non-media" links. But this doesn't mean your tweet won't go viral. If engagement on it is high because the link is relevant to the viral content, the tweet can still do well. It just starts off with a handicap.
- Blocking, muting others too much too often might also lower your algo ranking. Not too sure how true this is though. Still rumour level.
Sources:
1. https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status/1641953684564201472
2. https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status/1641945231636545536
3. https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1641888492627083264
4. https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1641922257470595072
5. https://twitter.com/NFT_GOD/status/1641914923826462721
6. https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1641892397440450560
7. https://twitter.com/NFT_GOD/status/1641925407468404739
8. https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1642004729390858241
9. https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976943141699584
10. https://twitter.com/contentkuba/status/1642128038866321408
11. https://steventey.com/blog/twitter-algorithm
*What other Twitter algo tips did you see?*
*Caveat: The algo gets updated often, so this might only be a snapshot in time. And take the boosts and weights not as definite results but more as probabilities as the algo is multi-layered and complex. It behaves more like a symphony:*
- Follower:following ratio matters. Ideal is 0.6, where you follow less than 60% of the number of followers you have. But don't rush to unfollow a lot of people quickly, as that kind of behaviour resembles a bot and could get you shadowbanned.
- A tweet decays at a rate of 50% every 6 hours. (Side note: That's why I retweet it every 6h to bump it up and also to show it to folks in different timezones. It's inclusive as folks follow you to see your tweets, and timezones might make it less accessible to them. But might add noise if you RT too much, so do it with care.).
- The algorithm will show more of your tweets if you have a high TweepCred. If your TweepCred is less than 65, the algo will consider up to 3 of your tweets. If your TweepCred is more than 65, the 3-tweet limit is lifted. What TweepCred entails and how it's calculated is still not clear. This aligns with experience where tweeting anything more than 3 per day isn't as effective.
- Tweepcred is also based on the quality of users you interact with. Interact with low quality accounts with bad follower/following ratios and are marked as spam/nsfw/bots/toxic, you get penalized.
- Your account is clustered into a group with other similar profiles. This clustering helps extend your tweet reach beyond your followers to other similar people. Tweets won't do as well if you post “out of network” content, outside your cluster. That's why the advice Twitter is saying 1 thing 1000 ways. Repeating on your niche works (but boring).
- Using keywords in your tweets matter. Because Twitter uses the same algo as Google (PageRank).
- Multiplier boosts:
- Likes (30x)
- RTs (20x)
- Replies (1x) - getting likes + RTs boost more than getting replies
- Trusted circle (3x)
- Adding images/video (2x)
- Tweeting in English
- Follows
- Trending topics (1.1x) - trends, media, news
- Twitter Blue (2-4x)
- Ending tweets with a question mark
- Obvious but worth mentioning: Getting blocked, muted, abuse/spam reports, unfollows would lower your visibility score. Unfollows are only kept on server for past 90 days to prevent permanent shadowbanning.
- Negative feedback like "Show less often", block or mute (-74x)
- Report tweet clicked (-369x)
- The tweets someone sees in the For You feed is based on the probability that they will:
- like/RT the tweet
- click the tweet and reply
- stay for 2+ minutes
- check the account's profile
- Posting these in your tweets also lowers the reach of that tweet:
- only URLs
- no words
- misspelling, making up words, unknown language
- name only
- multiple hashtags
- tweet gets categorised as misinformation or blacklisted
- The myth is verified now: Links gets marked as spam if they are considered "non-news or non-media" links. But this doesn't mean your tweet won't go viral. If engagement on it is high because the link is relevant to the viral content, the tweet can still do well. It just starts off with a handicap.
- Blocking, muting others too much too often might also lower your algo ranking. Not too sure how true this is though. Still rumour level.
Sources:
1. https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status/1641953684564201472
2. https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status/1641945231636545536
3. https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1641888492627083264
4. https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1641922257470595072
5. https://twitter.com/NFT_GOD/status/1641914923826462721
6. https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1641892397440450560
7. https://twitter.com/NFT_GOD/status/1641925407468404739
8. https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1642004729390858241
9. https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976943141699584
10. https://twitter.com/contentkuba/status/1642128038866321408
11. https://steventey.com/blog/twitter-algorithm
*What other Twitter algo tips did you see?*
Day 826 - Blue tick is here! - https://golifelog.com/posts/blue-tick-is-here-1680767721605
Got my blue tick on Twitter today. Applied on Apr 1st, got it on Apr 6th.
They say there's a 4x boost if in same network, 2x boost if not in same network. (Not sure what "in network" means though...)
Quite looking forward to seeing how it goes!
Some Twitter folks might not share my excitement. I've seen tweets where they claim they don't care, that it's about the people, these hacks are stupid, etc.
Just to be real here: I started on Twitter for the marketing, but stayed for the people. I'm on Twitter for the people and ideas. Chatting and learning from fellow indies had been the best part and most enjoyable. But I won't deny that getting some follower growth is also pretty motivating.
I mean like, come on, we all recognise having an audience is a great asset to any indie hacker, especially if you're trying to monetize. Let's not feign moral higher ground and say it doesn't matter. It does matter. Trying to say it doesn't frankly comes across as disingenous, being contrarian for its own sake. A rebel without a cause. Maybe "It doesn't matter" is sometimes a reflex against *how* people grow an audience, especially those using shady tactics. But if we can engage authentically and also use what we learned about the algo ethically and mindfully, why not both right?
It's not mutually exclusive.
Blue tick—or Twitter itself—is just a tool. It's *how* you use the tool that matters.
I'm all for responsible use and happy growth.
They say there's a 4x boost if in same network, 2x boost if not in same network. (Not sure what "in network" means though...)
Quite looking forward to seeing how it goes!
Some Twitter folks might not share my excitement. I've seen tweets where they claim they don't care, that it's about the people, these hacks are stupid, etc.
Just to be real here: I started on Twitter for the marketing, but stayed for the people. I'm on Twitter for the people and ideas. Chatting and learning from fellow indies had been the best part and most enjoyable. But I won't deny that getting some follower growth is also pretty motivating.
I mean like, come on, we all recognise having an audience is a great asset to any indie hacker, especially if you're trying to monetize. Let's not feign moral higher ground and say it doesn't matter. It does matter. Trying to say it doesn't frankly comes across as disingenous, being contrarian for its own sake. A rebel without a cause. Maybe "It doesn't matter" is sometimes a reflex against *how* people grow an audience, especially those using shady tactics. But if we can engage authentically and also use what we learned about the algo ethically and mindfully, why not both right?
It's not mutually exclusive.
Blue tick—or Twitter itself—is just a tool. It's *how* you use the tool that matters.
I'm all for responsible use and happy growth.
Day 825 - You only have freedom if you use it - https://golifelog.com/posts/you-only-have-freedom-if-you-use-it-1680658639922
For me, being an indie solopreneur was about the freedom to decide today is an off day and I'm going cycling at the beach with my wife and kiddo.
But I rarely ever exercise that freedom.
Glad I finally did yesterday.
The grind is sometimes so all-consuming. There's always something to do. Something to fire-fight. Something to improve on. The work is never truly done done. I mean... I love it. I enjoy the work. It feeds me, mind, body and spirit. But I always like to say, any virture brought to extremes turns into vice.
If I had a freedom but I never exercised it, never used it to my benefit nor enjoyed it, then do I truly have that freedom? If I'm always holding myself back from taking that freedom, for whatever good or bad reasons, is that freedom truly mine?
> If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I think no. It's just an impression of freedom. A mirage. But we're shackled by other chains that holds us back from drinking from it.
I only have real freedom of or from something if I actually exercise it.
When I live it out.
Like yesterday.
But I rarely ever exercise that freedom.
Glad I finally did yesterday.
The grind is sometimes so all-consuming. There's always something to do. Something to fire-fight. Something to improve on. The work is never truly done done. I mean... I love it. I enjoy the work. It feeds me, mind, body and spirit. But I always like to say, any virture brought to extremes turns into vice.
If I had a freedom but I never exercised it, never used it to my benefit nor enjoyed it, then do I truly have that freedom? If I'm always holding myself back from taking that freedom, for whatever good or bad reasons, is that freedom truly mine?
> If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I think no. It's just an impression of freedom. A mirage. But we're shackled by other chains that holds us back from drinking from it.
I only have real freedom of or from something if I actually exercise it.
When I live it out.
Like yesterday.
Day 823 - Twitter tool idea - https://golifelog.com/posts/twitter-tool-idea-1680494349323
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?!
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?!
🧪Experiment: Tweeted out my first longform tweet, repurposed from today's Lifelog post - https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1642350092706545664
Deployed bug fixes and added new keyboard shortcut feature (hit Esc key to preview markdown)
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.
✅ 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.