Lifelog

I woke up today and chose violence. The [replies to @dvassallo's tweet](https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1634244815012646914) got me fired up to call out bullshit. There were lots of comments that due to @tdinh_me's 76k audience, he could launch anything—even a to-do app—and it'll fly off the shelves.

That's such a cop-out. A defeatist attitude. And missing important nuance.

A [simple answer](https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1634242744016314368) to counter all that bullshit about audience size:

He launched another AI product called askcommand when he had 50k audience and it flopped. Nobody cared. If his audience size was so all-powerful, tell me, where were they when he launched askcommand? Did they suddenly miss his tweets about it?

Fuck no. They ignored it.

Because it wasn't interesting or compelling. Because it didn't solve a problem or painpoint. Because it didn't have a market. Could be one or a combination of the reasons stated.

Audience isn't some silver bullet to solve all your product problems.

Audience is an accelerant. But if the product isn't even moving at all, there's nothing to accelerate.

Audience helps speed up success if you got a compelling product to start with. If you don't have a compelling product, no amount of audience will save you. It's not a silver bullet. In fact, having a huge audience go dark on it is actually an even more reliable indicator that it didn't work and you should drop it. And even if you have zero audience, building a compelling product in public will in parallel build an audience, sooner or later. It’s tempting to brush off successes like this to someone’s audience size. That’s a defeatist cop-out. You’re missing the real lesson here:

Do interesting shit, get interested attention.

So get your fucking priorities right, people.

All this building an audience bullshit is getting into all our heads. Hindering more than it helps.

Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.

Do the right thing > do the wrong things right
Build the right thing > build an audience

Prove me wrong. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

Bring it mf.

It finally happened to me. I always knew there's platform risk on Carrd. I mean, any platform has risk. When you build a house on someone else's land, there's always a chance they can rug pull you in unexpected ways.

For me, building plugins on Carrd had these risks:

- The platform might have a change of mind and no longer allow plugins
- They decide that my plugins infringe on their trademark
- Site gets deleted or lost somehow (like Heroku)
- They build new features that effectively make my plugin(s) obsolete

The fourth risk is the most real and probable. And it just happened. One of my best selling plugins—the mobile navbar plugin—became obsolete because recent new features on Carrd meant people can now make their own mobile responsive navbar using available Carrd components. No custom code required no more. It doesn't do it perfectly, but good enough. Good enough that my plugin no longer makes sense. The real kicker is realising that if I was the customer, I wouldn't buy my own navbar plugin.

Sigh...

I always expected it would happen, sooner if not later. But encountering it in real life just hits different, over pondering a theoretical possibility. I mean, it's not like I'm upset with the platform or founders in any way. I'm still grateful that they're open minded and cool about my plugins. I guess this is just grieving over that eventuality that now became reality.

That's why I was in a conundrum about my [new free Carrd template](https://mobilenavbar.carrd.co/) and [tutorial](https://mobilenavbar.carrd.co/#tutorial) about the new way to create a responsive navbar in Carrd. It felt like by launching it, I'm also killing my older plugin. But do I really have a choice?

Stay with the times, or be left behind, they say.

The tough choices of an entrepreneur. Kill your baby to give birth to a new one. Who can do that without hesitation?

Whats worse than a product that totally and clearly flopped?

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

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

True story.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Little wins, for the win. 😊

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Building in public is overrated.**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love that answer. 🙌

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

I hope so. I pray so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all that matters.

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

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

I know this to be true, from experience:

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

I can go on.

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

Hard truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stress truly is the sleep killer.

Stress biohacking = sleep biohacking.

I wanted to [build build build in February](https://golifelog.com/posts/february-goals-1675215463951), and I did it.

*Now what?*

March on, riding the momentum to keep building.

I'm not done yet. I feel a new season of aliveness. [The mental health pivot](https://golifelog.com/posts/here-comes-the-sun-1676784259686) I wrote about once in February was more important than it looks. Probably the most important thing that happened to me last month. Like a huge burden's been lifted off my shoulders. So much so that even on poor sleep days, I get through it fine. Not that I want to get into the bad habit of sleeping late again. But it just goes to show just how much deadweight I was previously carrying. All the background inner processing that goes on when chronic stress and anxiety is there. Since the inner pivot, health haven’t been the same. It’s gotten way better! No more chronic ailments. It really was psycho-somatic.

I've been trying to run a marathon while pulling along an elephant.

**No more.**

F**k the elephant and every deadweight before that. Screw the self-imposed rules and limiting beliefs. The finger to other people's opinions and influences.

Now, I am *the* f**king elephant and I'm gonna charge you down.

March on!

The shortest month of the year has passed.

I had wanted to [build build build](https://golifelog.com/posts/february-goals-1675215463951):

> I just want to build build build. And then share cool stories in this digital campfire called Twitter with other builders and hackers. Not to win social status or get more followers but just to make cool things and tell a story!

And I think I achieved it. 5 new Carrd plugins. A productive long list of improvements to my Plugins project. A banger month on Twitter. Starting on a new long-term consulting/coaching project with a non-profit client.

It was such a short month...it didn't feel enough! I want to continue this building momentum for the months to come.

Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
- One-off revenue: $755 (↓$61)
- Total revenue: $864 (↓$61)
- Total costs = $385
- Total profit: $479 (↓$230) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 55%

Just passed 100 subscribers on my [Substack newsletter](https://jasonleow.substack.com)!

I started on Substack ~3 months ago on [19 Nov 2022](https://golifelog.com/posts/started-a-substack-1668822280392), but the true origin of the newsletter was back on 1 Jun 2022 on the now-defunct Revue.

[](https://jasonleow.substack.com)

It all started as a hedge against Twitter platform risk. In fact, it wasn't even a newsletter at all when I started. I started a Revuew newsletter then to collect emails in case of being deplatformed. Not the most compelling sign up call-to-action, I must say.

But over time I experimented. Iterated from a email collection point to a monthly Revue newsletter where I post my monthly wrap-ups. It was an easy transition because I've been writing these monthly reviews for years now. It's just copy-pasting over and publish – there I'm done! Then the next iteration was moving to weekly publishing and onto Substack, where I again repurposed posts from my daily writing habit here on Lifelog. I also gave it a proper [project status on Makerlog](https://getmakerlog.com/products/jasons-indie-solopreneur-journey) – now that means something. Now it's a place to share longer form stories about my indie journey, stuff I almost never share on Twitter. A kind of sneak peek behind the scenes in long form.

And guess what I love most about this project? The fact that I still have no clue what I'm doing or want out of it. 😅 The zero expectations part of it is an experiment in itself. Can I grow a project without wanting it to *be* something, without desiring to achieve *anything at all*? I've known for a while that for me, expectations hinder more than help. This is a project to see if what an expectationless project looks like.

I guess the next phase of 100 → 1000 is to see it unfold!

---

Weekly peek behind the scenes of my indie solopreneur journey here:

👉 jasonleow.substack.com

I've written a lot about [tiny Twitter hacks I learned](https://golifelog.com/posts/tiny-twitter-hacks-i-learned-and-love-part-6-1674712438527) over the past 2 years being serious on Twitter.

But recently I've thrown the whole playbook out the window, and going back to what got me started on Twitter—and indie hacking—in the first place.

Building in public.

Like, for real building. Actual products. Real sh*t. Doing what I love. Making stuff. Just simply sharing the joy of creating, and connecting with other makers who enjoy doing and reading about the same.

Not tweeting for the sake of "consistency". Not tweeting to get attention for your personal brand. Not talking about "mental models" or "cognitive biases", or "10 ways to use ChatGPT to get rich". Not building an audience. None of that Twitter guru creator BS. I gotta admit, for the past 2 years I experimented a lot in those areas. And I'm sick of it. It's just noise, in the end. I'm equally guilty of adding to that noise, in an already crazily noisy world.

I'm done.

It now feels great to be back building in public, sharing thoughts and ideas about indie hacking, and all my throughputs and outputs. My tweets had been scheduled a month out based on the old approach, but increasingly I'm writing a new tweet for the day, on the day itself, because I have things to share about what I'm building! I'm consistent but not as a end in itself but as a consequence of building. All the past and upcoming scheduled tweets are beginning to feel out of alignment, less authentic, too abstract, too forced. And all the creator accounts I used to follow – boring and bland. I'm kicking many of these accounts out of my engagement list and adding builders back in.

Which I should have always done to start with.

Thinking back, this was exactly how I started on Twitter in the first place, and got me past 1k followers. I just starting to build indie products under a 12 startups in 12 months challenge I set out to do, called [#1mvp1month](https://twitter.com/search?q=%231mvp1month&src=typed_query). Then I got tempted and influenced by the gurus, went off track.

Now I've come full circle. Back to my roots. Back to my why. Back to who I am.

Makers gotta make.

2 years ago, it didn't even exist. Today, my very first Carrd plugin—the animated accordion FAQs—went past 1000 downloads.

If you're reading this and you've ever downloaded the plugin, thank you for your support. ❤️


It's wild to see this is even possible!

The plugin's origin story was completely happenstance. I was learning Vue.js two years ago and made these tiny little apps as learning projects. Felt it was a waste to let these apps collect dust, so I decided to embed it into Carrd to showcase my learning progress, and also to extend Carrd's features. A brain fart got me thinking of sharing it as a free clone site to others, and like they say, the rest is history. Those were the good old days, when I had to manually clone each site and transfer to requester. And I say it with reminiscent fondness. 😌

Months later, the Seller program on Carrd came into existence and sharing these plugins as templates are now so much easier to do - requester just logs into Carrd and downloads it directly. No manual cloning and transferring required. The upside is sometimes I get a referral fee if they don't have a Pro plan, but it's a bit of hit and miss as not everyone who downloads the template needs a pro plan. Sometimes, people would leave a tip (as it's set at $0 pay what you what). It's less about the money and more about the gesture – that someone found enough value in it to want to open their wallets in appreciation.

To be truly honest, I'm not even sure how this plugin (or any other plugin for that matter) gets around, lest say get to 1k downloads. I do share the link but only on rare occasions, yet the numbers signal it has a life of its own!

And I'm super grateful for it. 🙏

I just sent out a [Safe Distancing SG](https://safedistancing.sg) site closure post and [gratitude email](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jasonleowsg/safe-distancing-sg-site-closure ) to all my Buy Me A Coffee supporters, and to give notice that I'll be terminating the subscription payments from my monthly/yearly subscription supporters.

I mean, the site will still be live. I won't take it down yet. It's great to archive and for remembrance. All my other projects are still up. I can still continue receiving coffees anytime. It's just that I wanted to give my supporters a polite way to step down from the financial support. I'm also iffy about continuing to receive money when I no longer update the site and have no new social impact projects in the pipeline. Costs for domain etc continue though... so I will just have to absorb them.

So the #socialimpactpatronage project comes to the end of a season. A pit stop for indefinite period. At least until I can find another meaty social impact project to work on.

It's a bit of a bittersweet finale. That's the kind of territory from building these social impact projects. You don't aim for product longevity if you can help it. The ideal outcome is that the social issue is solved for good, the vulnerable group you're serving no longer exists, or had moved out of their challenging situation. In this case, it wasn't through my effort alone that we no longer needed Safe Distancing SG. The whole country had moved on, and the use case simply faded away.

Ending a product is a good outcome, in such circumstances.

And I'm grateful for it. For having the opportunity and privilege to build it, and to end it.

Thank you for everyone who lent a hand. Till next time, comrades.

Onwards!

They say mindset is everything. Sometimes it's easy to shrug this off as some new age BS, but I recently discovered this about sleep.

Yes, the mindset for sleep biohacking.

Before, I was anxious about my sleep. The anxiety could be due to the general background anxiety during the pandemic (I started sleep biohacking then). It could be due to the growing pains of settling into fatherhood. Or it could even be due to financial anxiety. Or a combination of everything. I would obsessively track my sleep quantity and quality. Each night entailed a win or a fail. Did I get enough sleep? Did I sleep well? What can I do to keep up with the sleep debt?

Yet somehow, I never felt like I was on top of things. I was always flailing. Always one step behind this "infinite game" as I like to call it.

But something shifted recently. The anxiety is mostly gone. It could be due to being able to let go of the [experiences of the past few years](https://golifelog.com/posts/here-comes-the-sun-1676784259686). It could be that finances are doing better this year. It could be that my toddler is turning three soon and things are a lot more stable with him being older and more independent. For sure my sleep habits had not changed much. Yet I'm less fazed by poor sleep nights. I'll feel tired for sure. But I've got this "I got this" sense of equanimity to it. Tired? OK sure. Life goes on. I'll handle it. Got sh*t sleep like 50% sleep score? Oh well shrugs. Looks like I have to catch up on sleep debt tonight, and try to nap a bit or move around more. I still try to manage my sleep in all the ways I know, but the mindset's totally different. And it's psychosomatic. When I got this, I feel less burdened by the sleep lack. I just go about my day, function normally.

Life goes on.

Amazing what a mindset shift can bring.

Does activiating purchasing power parity really help with (revenue) growth?

Heard a lot about the upsides... But what might be some downsides for indie solopreneurs that few talk about?

I asked that [question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1626523347772407808) and got a great discussion out of it!

Here's a summary on the potential pros and cons:

**Upsides:**
- It's not about revenue but access. PPP allows your product to be more inclusive and equitable to everyone around the world.
- Good for brand and reputation, as it's seen as a kind gesture for folks from countries with weaker currencies.
- Brings in more sales and gross revenue you would otherwise not have, even if it's a smaller margin.
- PPP makes more business sense where the costs of replication is zero or very small, e.g. digital products. Services or physical goods might requires more analysis to make it worthwhile.


**Downsides:**
- Abuse by tech savvy customers who know how to use VPN to buy via countries with better exchange rates. The question is, would this be in the small minority? Or are your customers that tech savvy that there'll be widespread abuse? Re: Gumroad (which I use), thankfully, they require a credit card from the same country of the geolocation address, so that helps make it harder to abuse.
- Dilution of your brand and erode the perceived value of your product if it's cheaper. But it's relative to income levels of those who need PPP, so it's a toss up.
- You attract a different group of customers who might have different support needs/load, types of questions etc. It will have to be worthwhile for you to support that. Customers asking 100 questions before buying, requiring a call, etc, might not make it business sense.
- Sense of fairness. Would those paying full price feel that it's unfair, or that they are subsidizing people in other countries? How would that perception of fairness influence their decision to buy? They might not even be aware there's PPP to start with...
- Might not be financially worthwhile depending on your product and business model. If server costs increase with increased usage (e.g. generative AI apps), then PPP might cause a loss. Have to account for cost per user, even at the lowest PPP rate. If your business model is more service-related, like say, consulting/freelance, or customer/tech support that's manpower/time-intensive and constitutes a huge part of your delivery, then PPP might not make sense.
- Taxes and fees for certain foreign currencies. There might be additional tax and conversion/processing fees that payment platforms will charge you when customer buy from those countries. On top of that, you'll also have to handle tax compliance in more countries = more complexity. If sales volume is high, it might be worth it.

*What else did I miss?*

Doing the [review of all the products I've ever made](https://golifelog.com/posts/all-the-products-i-made-1676710309695) was fun. A few interesting themes emerged:

- I started my 1st business in 2011. That's more than a decade since!

- My 2nd biz (Outsprint Design) from 2015 still accounts for 90% of my revenue. It's wild to think anything you made on 2nd try would have this much longevity and endurance.

- 2018 was the year of public design products. It was also when I started indie hacking, bringing the indie approach to creating social impact products.

- Out of the total 35 products, 33 started in the last 5 years, since 2018. When I was 38. I sure am a late bloomer! But when I do start, I go go go.

- I only learned to code my own products from 2019. But I already made 11 things by then (using Wordpress)! The point here is: Coding is not necessary for making.

- 2020 was the year of COVID products... understandably. It was my way of coping with the crisis, by making things that could make a difference. It's a way to reclaim some sense of control over the whole pandemic that's out of our control.

- Products made for a particular phase or season in life are susceptible to short lifespans. Like my COVID projects, or the keto one. That doesn't mean they're not worth doing. It just means I got to build it with an expiry date in mind, even if it's self-inflicted.

- The underlying thread weaving all the products together is that they were all in niches where I had direct experience in. It could come from my lifestyle (like keto, sleep), or work (like public design), or things I'm living through (like COVID). When I did try products were I never had any experience in (like Restobio for the F&B industry), it fizzled out fast. And the ones with staying power were in niches/topics that were persistent in my life – design (Outsprint), writing/reflection (Lifelog), coding/making (Plugins), social causes (COVID, social good projects). Projecting that ahead, it'll be safe to say, as long as I stick to projects where I have direct experience and are part of these few persistent themes, it'll have a better chance of success.

I don't think I'll ever stop making. I just can't help myself! 33 products in 5 years. I've theoretically got another 40 years left in me.

That means I might have 264 products ahead!

Onwards.

Just a few months ago, I was at a carnival with my wife and son. It felt like the whole Singapore was there. Everyone looked like they were having fun, being out.

Like the pandemic didn't happened.

I remarked to my wife that it felt surreal to see everyone like that. Like how could everyone have moved on from that so easily? I felt emotionally distanced from the fun, even though I was physically there. There, but not really there.

We talked about it, and concluded it could be some form of trauma still lingering in the back of my psyche.

Then just yesterday, we were out and chanced on a basker performing on the guitar. As we watched the performance, I had this mindful moment of self-awareness, a realisation that I no longer had that surreal feeling. I was enjoying the performance, just as everyone as in the audience. I *almost* had a tear in my eye.

The basker was playing *Here Comes The Sun* by the Beatles:

*Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's alright*

*Little darlin', it's been a long, cold, lonely winter
Little darlin', it feels like years since it's been here*

*Little darlin', the smile's returning to their faces
Little darlin', it seems like years since it's been here*

*Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's alright*

And I can't think of a more apt song to signal the start of this new season.

Onwards.

A list of everything I've ever made over the years – all 35 of them.

And only 3 are still making money currently:

- Outsprint
- Plugins For Carrd
- Lifelog

That's a hit rate of only 8.5% for making profitable products.

Ship MORE.

Saw this tweet and really enjoyed the contrarian perspective when starting on a new idea or product:

> Don't try to validate your next startup idea. Instead ask people why you SHOULDN'T start working on it. That way you'll reduce your own biais 🔥 – [@xavier_coiffard](https://twitter.com/xavier_coiffard/status/1625865771384463363)

Because we always consider more reasons we can add to the list of reasons for doing it, but seldom consider *removing* reasons, or reasons that disprove the idea.

It's Nassim Taleb's *via negativa* approach basically. Focus in what it isn't. A recipe for what to avoid, what not to do. Subtractive, not additive.

And when you're entralled by a shiny new object of an idea, everything in your brain is compelling you to make irrational judgements to persuade yourself and others that you are right. You might even co-opt "intuition/gut feel" as a reason even if you don't. There's so many things to watch out for:

- Personal bias - You're interested in the the topic and that blinds you to seeing the reality of the market conditions needed to judge if pursuing the idea is a good decision
- Lack of information - As with most products starting out, you don't even have enough data to make a good judgement call, but you make them anyway, filling in the gaps with your own subjective interpretations.
- Over-optimism - You drank the Kool-aid and believed in narratives like "patience for results", even if you're working on the wrong thing and you're actually stalling.
- Media hype - Everyone and their mother is talking about it (like NFTs, web3, now AI), so you got on the bandwagon too without deeply understanding the technology or how investors/companies hype up certain things because they are incentivized to do so.

The way I see it, there's a lot more skewing forces to convince you that your idea is a good one and you should pursue it. Less forces balancing out the other way (other than cynical family members/friends).

It just makes more sense then to ask people why you should drop it, to address those blindspots directly. You usually have enough knowledge of the pros anyways...

Ask why you shouldn't do it, not why you should.

I've been brewing this idea for a SaaS for a while that combines a bit of my wide-ranging interests: web accessibility, design for disability, social impact work, SaaS, indie hacking, and GPT-3 AI.

Idea:
Consumer/Enterprise GPT-3 AI app for image captioning, and generating alt text for images on the internet.

Problem:
- Inclusive design and web accessibility (aka "a11y") is important work but often deprioritised because it's deemed as "expensive" or "time-consuming" or "not relevant to our target customers". But companies might take it up if it's dead easy to implement, like just *npm install a11y*.
- One important a11y feature is having alt text for images in your website. Without alt text describing the images, folks who have visual impairment/blindness using screen readers will be deprived of social participation and understanding the context of the content through the image. Like say memes for example - all the context is in the image, and people don't often caption or describe it in the post or in alt text.

Opportunity:
- Platforms are now giving more algorithm weight to images with alt text. So it's good for business/marketing. Personally I add alt text to all my images on Twitter, not just for the higher algo juice but also for inclusion.
- AI like GPT-3 aren't just good for text-to-image generation. They can also read images and describe them. There's already [2 MVPs](https://gpt3demo.com/category/image-captioning) doing that. I tested out one of the [apps called CLIP](https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/CLIP_prefix_captioning) using a Spiderman meme, and the result "A group of cartoon characters standing on top of a blue skateboard" isn't not the most accurate description tbh. Lots of room for improvement and maybe that's where the opportunity is?


Features & business model:
- Imagine if alt text is automated and hassle-free. All it takes is to install a package and the software adds all the required alt text for you into the code. Or you're uploading a picture to Twitter and the app auto-generates a description in 1 second. Most basic MVP version would be like CLIP – a drag and drop for an image to get a text description.
- B2C: Chrome extension to write alt text for you when triggered on a site. Or a mobile app that adds an alternative AI keyboard option to your normal keyboard that you can trigger on any text field using a command like `/gen`.
- B2B: Premium npm package or plugin that reads all images in your site, adds alt text descriptions to HTML automatically. Payment can be a mix of recurring and non-recurring: one-time generation vs monthly ongoing generation. Great for ecommerce sites with lots of images uploaded every month.

*What do you think?*

Being rich is being often portrayed as having mansions, supercars, yachts and expensive divorce settlements. That's what being rich for the top 0.1% is like. But for the us mere mortals, we don't want to be that kind of rich. Our rich looks a lot simpler.

What "I wanna to be rich" really means for me:

- Waking up without an alarm clock, and going back to sleep after waking up because I can. This includes no 3am downtimes, no urgent support cases.
- Waking up in a new city or country every week or month if I so choose to. Or being able to choose to stay in a foreign place for long term. Travel anytime, anywhere, first class.
- Not buying fast cars but being able to afford one if I so choose to, while not actually exercising that option... because it's lame.
- Buying all the healthy food I want and need for me and my family, and not having to second guess if I can afford it this month.
- Donating generously to a social cause, or helping a friend out without expecting any return, or just having time/money to help others more.
- Retire one's parents. My parents are already retired but it'll be great to give them a quality of life that's more than comfortable.
- Being able to have leisurely and quality time with family and people I love. Key word is "leisurely", not in a hurry to get back to work.
- Having lots of time to do what I truly enjoy working on. A steady stream of interesting creative projects done in a calm and joyful manner, with no concern for making it profitable.
- Being healthy, free from chronic ailments, having time for personal fitness and feeling a sense of wellbeing.

*Does this resonate?*