Lifelog

We often think of burnout as overwork.

Working long hours.
Working 7 days a week.
Not getting enough rest/sleep.

And the antidote to burnout is removal from work. Rest. Do nothing. Passive.

That works for physical burnout. But there’s many types of burnout. Some might need you to do more stuff instead to recover.

“You often feel tired not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.” – Alexander den Heijer

That quote just about sums up what this other type of burnout is.

I call it creative burnout.

Not from working too long or too hard, but from not working on things that give you joy. Too little play, too much serious.

In such cases, sure I can benefit from the usual approach of walking away and taking some downtime. But the best way to recover from creative burnout is to do more.

Active rest, not passive rest.

The close parallel is when you’ve been working all day sitting down in front of a computer, and instead of resting by sitting on a couch watching Netflix, you go for a walk outdoors. Get some blood running. You feel more revitalized afterwards.

But huge caveat: Not do more of the previous work that is causing the creative burnout. Do less of that, yes. But do more play and fun. This isn’t some weird self-deception move to trick yourself to working more. Do stuff that makes you come alive. Stuff that you do even if no one is watching. Even if you don’t get impressions, likes, and retweets. Stuff for it’s own sake, just because.

So that’s what I’ll do.

“Nearly impossible to worry about anything if you’ve already decided you’ll stick to it for a decade.” – @OneJKMolina

It’s amazing what a non-negotiable commitment to a crazy long time can do to your motivation.

I’ve been recently feeling somewhat demoralised by my poor product launch for Sheet2Bio. But a friend on Twitter asked me this:

"It’s a figure of speech, I’m not saying it will necessarily take 10 years. But those who succeed often don’t mind investing 10 years into it. Because it really means that much to them. Besides. what else are you going to do in the next 10 years? Give up and work a 9-5?"

That made me laugh, at myself. Sooo true. Loved it. Felt so much better. Went away asking… “What was the problem again?”

I’m not going anywhere else. So what else is there? Just be ok with the disappointment, sit with it for a few days. Then just get back to work. There’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

This isn’t the first time I heard a creator say that. The OG of indie hackers @levelsio also said something similar about his own journey, how he’s committing to indie hacking for ten years, because he observed how many of his peers in electronic music (something he used to do in the past) found success after crossing the ten year mark.

Commit a decade to it.

And all the lows (and highs) that come during this ten years will be but a blimp in calendar. A decade commitment puts real big picture perspective to your tiny every day experiences.

You know that iconic conversation near the end of Lord Of The Rings when Sam and Frodo were near the volcano:

Sam: "Do you remember the Shire, Mr Frodo? It’ll be spring soon and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket and they’ll be sowing the summer barley on the lower fields and eating the first strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
Frodo: “No Sam I can’t recall the taste of food nor the sound of water or the touch of grass.”

I feel like Frodo now when it comes to feeling hopeful for the future. The past 2 years of the pandemic had felt like his arduous journey into Mordor. I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to something. I can’t recall the taste of anticipation nor the sound of optimism or the touch of hope.

I recall how, before the pandemic, I used to create these beautiful countdown landing pages for my trips and life events. Search on Unsplash for a gorgeous image of the country I’m heading to. Create a Carrd countdown landing page. Publish and share. Refer to it constantly. Being able to see the days and hours counting down, inching ever closer to the D-Day filled me with a sense of anticipation. The days were bright, not just because the present is beautiful but there’s a beautiful future to look forward to.

I wish to daydream again. To feel future-hopeful again. To drink from that wellspring of optimism again.

Perhaps it’s time to try making these pages again. And in turn, to make the plans for such pages to exist. Countdown pages as a mechanism for engineering hope.

Anything to taste that anticipation again…

Paranoia is the belief that everything and everyone is out to get you. The opposite of paranoia is pronoia, the belief that everything in the universe is conspiring to help you.

This is like my latest favourite word.

It’s like the scarcity vs abundance mindset. You can see everything as scarce and zero sum game, or you can see everything as inherently abundant and positive sum.

Of course, it’s not always 100%. It’s not always homogeneous. This isn’t a statement of fact about reality, but more a personal stance one takes when encountering reality.

The classic half empty half full situation. Optimism vs pessimism.

This word caught my attention because it’s exactly what I think I need now. I’ve not been feeling very optimistic or hopeful lately. I did a quick list in my head of all the major changes in my life in the past 2 years:

• Becoming a father
• Surviving through a generational crisis (aka pandemic)
• Switching careers for real (from consultant to indie maker)
• Switching chronotypes (from night owl to early bird)
• Switching diet to meat based
• From working only outside in cafes to working from home exclusively

Each one would have been more than enough to handle singly, but all at once? No wonder I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water. It’s easy to start feeling paranoid, like everything’s working against me. While I have mostly no control over what happens externally, I do have control over some aspects, and especially inwardly. I need pronoia instead.

So yes, pronoia. Let’s go get pronoid now.

Ok so I said I will build my way out of burnout.

What will I build then?

It has to have these criteria:

- One-off and micro in scope
- Timebox the effort to just a few days
- No need for monetization
- Can be for jokes and laughs
- Be given to others for free
- For play, for fun
- Goalless
I have some ideas, some more serious ones, some fun ones:

1. Writing prompts Notion template - I have over 70 writing prompts saved in Lifelog. Always wanted to convert them into a free Notion template on Gumroad
2. Writing email course - another free product for Lifelog. Just a 7-day email course on writing. Leveraging stuff I’ve already written on the Lifeblog
3. Sleep biohacking guide/directory - all the pins and resources saved in the 5am creators Telegram chat group, categorised and tagged, searchable.
4. Twitter 101 guide - I’ve already wrote this out in this series of posts here, so might as well create it as another free guide
5. Life goals/bucketlist countdown - I used to use a free countdown micro-SaaS to countdown to upcoming trips and events that I’m looking forward to. I loved it - it gave me so much hope and anticipation to life. I’ve been wanting to recreate that for myself ever since.
6. AI-generated art card deck (using DALL•E or midjourney) - a text-to-image side hobby that’s been so much fun. It started with using conjure.art (which now closed down), and now I have access to DALL•E and midjourney.
7. Indie hackers ikigai calculator - It started from this popular tweet about how I decide if a product is worth making. I thought why not make a matrix calculator to help indie hackers like myself decide?
8. Canned replies site (spin off from notyourcustomer.carrd.co) - people loved it. That made me wonder: canned replies directory for all the canned replies we often have to send to people over email, text messages
9. Revive something from Google’s graveyard and build something fun
10. Build something fun with GPT-3. Use it to generate colourful, funny insults?

What else can I build?

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42, then what about 43?

The supercomputer in the book points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was, and itself was unable to produce the question.

Jokes aside, I think perhaps turning age 43 is about finding the question. Not that I knew the answer when I was 42. Far from it. And if I knew any answers last year, they are probably as meaningless as the answer “42”, because everything changed.

So yes, I’m turning 43 today.

I have no pithy wisdom to share.
No 43 things about turning 43.
No lessons I wished someone told me about turning 43.
… thankfully.

43 is a number.
It’s meaningful but also arbitrary.
It matters, it also doesn’t matter.

And birthday wish?
All I want is more sleep.
That’s how it is for sleep deprived parents.

And intentions for the new birth year ahead?
I’m just gonna be that dumb idiot who doesn’t have a plan but is happy, than (try to be) the smart-ass genius who has the best plan but is unhappy.

Onwards!

I read this recent CNBC article, bemused:

“The biggest retirement challenge that no one talks about, in my experience, is finding purpose.”

Really? Is retirement still a thing?

I’ve always felt retirement as a concept doesn’t make sense. If you hate what you do, then why keep doing it till 65? If you love what you do, why should you stop doing it at 65 just because of some arbitrarily set time called “retirement” age? I think at the base there’s this view that work is unsavoury, and had to be done with eventually.

Here’s my hot take:

“Retirement” is overrated. Work is misunderstood.

At least in the traditional definition of it where one retires by kick backing and doing nothing.

My own take:

Work should continue. But the reason you do it can change. If you have retirement savings and assets, then work becomes an opportunity for personal exploration, adventure and fun of something you never had chance to do when you needed to work to live.

“Fuck an early retirement. I want to die doing what I love.” – @SaasSavant

From work to live… to live to work.

(Of course, obvious caveats: This is a higher income bracket 1st world problem. Continuing to work well into your 70s-80s because you need to work to live is a different set of issues altogether…)

Work can be a way of life. Work can be a way of being. I can’t talk about it any better than my favourite author poet Kahlil Gibran, so here’s it in verbatim:

"On Work
in The Prophet

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine...."

Work is love made visible indeed. I couldn’t have said it any better.

If work is love made visible, why stop work to retire then? Does your love for yourself, others, life and the world stop at 65?

Nope.

Why stop then? Why stop at all?

Counterintuitive as it sounds, yeah I think I’m gonna do that.

Build my way out of burnout.

It might sound stupid and will backfire since it seems like I’ll just be working more.

But here’s where it’s different:

I feel most alive when creating something from scratch
I’ll make something one-off and micro in scope
I can timebox the effort to just a few days
No expectations for monetization
It can be for jokes and laughs
I’ll give to others for free
It’ll be play, for fun
Still goalless

I’ve always done this. Back in first year of the pandemic, I was locked down, stressed, sleepy, tired, going crazy. I went on to build over 10 products for social good.

It helped. A lot.

We often think of rest as doing nothing. But active rest works too, if not better in some case. Especially true where the root cause of burnout isn’t because of working too hard physically, but a burnout of the spirit. Stuff like working hard with little results or rewards (depletion of motivation), stressing out over money, and just accumulated ‘PTSD’ from the pandemic (worries over something out of my control).

All an inner game.

Hopefully, the life-giving joy of creating would top me back up.

I saw this the other day on my social feeds:

"some of us never found time to be happy because we were too busy trying to be strong." – @PoemHeaven

I felt that. I felt that a lot.

I think my past two years of the pandemic had been about being too busy trying to be strong.

Being strong as the sole breadwinner.
Being strong as a new dad for my firstborn.
Being strong as a husband for my post-partum wife.
Being strong as a son for my elderly parents (who lives with me).
Being strong as a Singaporean for Singapore, and everyone else within.

And being strong for my dreams of being an indie hacker, despite all my failures.

I’ve spent so much time trying to be strong that I’ve never really found much time to be happy the past two years.

No time for fun.
No time for rest.
No time for play.
No time for laughter.
No time for happiness.

It’s no wonder I can feel the flames of an approaching burnout singeing the edges of my spirit. I have to act soon. I have to act fast. Else it can downward spiral real fast.

Or maybe not act at all.

Maybe that’s why I went for a goalless month. Too much action, not enough non-action.

Pulse and pause.

How I know I’m not successful (yet):

I’m waaay too busy.

6 months ago I wrote that I’m not successful because I’m too busy.

6 months later, nothing’s changed…yet.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I do enjoy working.

Work is fun.
Work is satisfying.
Work gives me purpose.
Work feeds me and the family.
Work drives me to grow as a person.

But yet there’s always this conflict, this unhealthy loop:

I enjoy work. I work too much. I feel burned out. I want to be less busy. I work less. I feel rested. I get bored. I start work again. I enjoy work. I work too much…

Rinse and repeat. I’ve been looping through this for maybe the past 10 years perhaps? Ever since I went self-employed.

My relationship with work is not the healthiest, but it had worked for me so far. Maybe that’s the problem. It had worked in the past, and I assume it will work now and onwards into the future.

Is it time for revision? Now, as a husband and father?

Truth is, I’ve always struggled with rest, with being lazy. I felt it held me back from what I want to achieve, the future I’m striving so hard for. But now with my experiments in being opportunistic trickster, I realising the real benefits of flaneuring, having time to wander, having downtime. Being lazy actually helps me get to my goals faster. Now I can’t say no to that.

Hunt like a lion instead of grazing like a cow, @naval says. Hunt, eat, rest instead of grazegrazegraze endlessly through the months and years.

Perhaps it really is time to rethink this. And to act as a different person.

I probably said the same thing 6 months ago. Yet, 6 months later, I’m still here. This is one of those problems that feels like it’ll take my life’s work to disentangle.

One day, I will. One day…

They always say, don't watch your competitors. Just do your own thing, run your own race.

There's certainly wisdom in that.

It helps with focus. It doesn't distract you from your work. It won't lead to unnecessary comparison.

But there's also lots of underrated opportunities and advantages from watching your competitors in ways that doesn't affect your focus/motivation:

- Watch when they introduce new pricing, new redesigns - did it trigger a mass exodus of disgruntled customers? Can you capitalize on that and grab some of that market share?
- Watch their reviews on Google or other platforms. What are users complaining about? What features are missing? What existing features can be improved? Go build those missing features (of course, the ones that **also** align to your product vision), go market how your product doesn't have that problem.
- Watch Google Trends for searches for "X alternative", whether the trend is growing. @jakobgreenfeld(https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/1535260530830479360) talks about this well for popular SaaS tools like Ahrefs, Sendgrid and Miro and checked for each of them if people are hungry for alternatives.
- Watch news of your VC-funded competitors shutting down due to the economic downturn, and see if you can rush in to fill the market gap. What didn't work at VC-funded level can work for indie hacker bootstrapped level.
- Watch if they stumble, get bad PR, have downtimes. Can you capitalize on that? Make a funny meme or joke about it? Of course, always remember only to punch up (if your competitors are huge enterprises). Don't be mean if your competitors are other indies.

*What other opportunities are there from watching your competitors?*

When was the last time you said “I don’t care”?

Was it really because you didn’t care, or you couldn’t handle it well and not caring was an easy way out?

Thinking back, I think there’s way more occasions where it’s the latter than I want to admit.

This tweet truly prompted some deep reflection:

"It’s easier to say you don’t care about money than to admit you’re unskilled
It’s easier to say you don’t care about dating than to admit you’re awkward
It’s easier to say you don’t care about getting fit than to admit you’re lazy
Think of this next time you say “I don’t care”
– @WrongsToWrite"

Like when I said I don’t care about money, it’s about freedom. It’s true, ultimately freedom is my metric of success but money isn’t unimportant either. Both are necessary, but neither alone are sufficient. Especially pertinent lesson from the past 2 years when survival needs were always a concern. I do care about money, just to the point of enough. And when I said I don’t care, it’s more out of rebellion, out of not knowing how to make and deal with money. More out of exasperation with my relationship with money.

I often said I don’t care about socializing. I’ve always preferred to be alone, in peaceful solitude. I’d always said people tire me. But truth is, I do care. I do care about my wife, son, parents, family. I do care about some friends. I do care about socializing, but just in a way that energizes me instead of drains me. Fact is, I don’t know how to set up that to serve me. People always hold sway over me, pulling me away from what I feel I need the most, for myself. I don’t care because it’s easier to run away than to learn how to deal with it.

I always said I don’t care about approval and validation of others. But truth is, I do care, even if I don’t want to. Someone says my product sucks, and it still stings, even if I don’t know the guy. I show it to someone I look up to, and hope he or she likes it. We are after all human. Imperfect in keeping to our beliefs, and unavoidably social. Not caring is an aspiration, caring is inevitable. We can’t control others and their responses. So we say we “don’t care”.

"People claim apathy when they can’t handle failure. – @AlexHormozi"

How often is apathy just inability in disguise?

I don’t think I’ll ever look at “I don’t care” the same way again.

The next time I ever catch myself saying it, I know I need to probe deeper.

I've always loved the idea of a micro-SaaS and building tiny tools with code. SaaS has this impression of a huge wall to climb in order to launch it. So lowering the bar helps.

Here's one that I love, that I realised I'm already doing (for Carrd), but where the same principle can be applied elsewhere:

"💡 Simple side hustle / micro SaaS idea: Build useful @airtable scripts and post them on Gumroad. Research their community. Tons of folks asking questions… 😉 It’s a gold mine 🔥 Yet people are wasting their coding skills making notion templates or another twitter app 😅 Not only Airtable but there’s also @coda_hq @NotionHQ (formulas) , Sheets scripts (@Kamphey 😉) , etc…" – @CSMikeCardona (https://twitter.com/CSMikeCardona/status/1530959795498283010)

It's TRUE. I do the same for Carrd. But never quite saw the opportunity for it in other platforms. Pretty underrated opportunity!

- Folks using these platforms generally aren't technical folks. But since it's low-code, they might have encountered it, dabbled with it enough to be not averse to dealing with *some* code. Perfect situation for introducing code scripts for them to copy-paste.
- Power users often push low-code tools like Notion, Airtable to their limits, so being able to extend their Notion page to do more without learning to code could be something they might be open to
- I can imagine the code can be repurposed, say Carrd to Wix or Squarespace perhaps. So code once, sell twice!
- Low-code tools/platforms that can leverage this opportunity:
- Carrd
- Notion
- Airtable
- Google Sheets
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Coda
- Zapier
- Make

What other opportunities did I miss?

Here’s an interesting idea that’s counter to the mainstream:

"I’m always surprised when I see people seek accountability to force themselves to do something. I’ve been deliberately organizing my life to remove as much accountability from it as I can. I want to adapt and change my mind without feeling beholden to anyone." – @dvassallo

I think Daniel is talking about external accountability, like accountability groups. Like Lifelog perhaps.

That’s an interesting thought experiment to try: Indeed why seek external accountability at all? Why force yourself?

I’m familiar with the usual arguments - to develop a good habit. To get started. To achieve something wholesome/worthwhile (e.g. good health, diet etc).

But there’s something else to be said about being motivated only by external accountability.

It isn’t sustainable as a habit forming lever in the long term. Over time, we rebel against the gaze of the other. Or simply ignore. And thus back to old habits.

People in the accountability group can come and go. Some graduate, some drop off. Hence leaning on something which isn’t always there for you, isn’t always the same for you, will affect your motivation too. Factors outside of your control.

Ultimately, there’s a point about how only intrinsic motivation lasts.

If you don’t have a deep ‘why’, a deep satisfaction, a self-driving reason why you want to do it, you will never last as long as you want.

And even while intrinsic motivation is what sustains, what about the parallel concept called internal accountability? It’s easy to conflate the two.

Internal accountability is you setting a target and being accountable to yourself, where no one else is watching. It doesn’t always work out. Forcing yourself to do what you’re procrastinating on can end up being counterproductive. Procrastination is a signal, it’s data - we got to learn how to listen to it even though it’s often described as a distraction, an impediment to our goal. Sometimes procrastination tells us we don’t want to do it, or do it this way, and we need to either change the way to approach it or to re-examine our goal in the first place.

Intrinsic motivation ≠ internal accountability

So is accountability mostly useless then?

That makes me think. A lot.

Maybe it’s useful for short term. But long term, nope.

The issue is when a short term hack becomes a long term strategy.

I've been having horrid sleep. Hardly any deep sleep. Not feeling rested upon waking. And it's messing up everything downstream. Sleep really is the first mover.

When sleep is good, everything else just works, in virtuous loops.
When sleep is bad, nothing seems to work out, in vicious cycles.

The vicious cycles goes like this:

Sleep poorly
Energy goes down
Motivation tanks
Sleep even more poorly
x10 spiral downward to hell

I think I'm in a sleep slump.

Like writer's block, but for sleep.

And I'm out of ideas on what to do when sleep goes haywire.

What can one do when sleep goes awry without rhyme or reason?

A few things to do could be to run through a checklist of the usual suspects of poor sleep:

- Health - how's your health recently?
- Exercise - how you been exercising/moving enough?
- Diet - Been eating clean? Or junk?
- Stress - Anything that's stressing you out lately?
- Lifestyle - Any changes to lifestyle, routines, location, external environment?

So what can I do, right now? What's my go-to sleep hack(s) when sleep isn't going well?

My first thought was always: Forget hacks, go back to **sleep fundamentals**.

- Pay back on sleep debt - take 1-2 naps, go to bed earlier
- Wind down properly in evenings
- Thermal comfort at night
- Last food 3h before bed, eat clean
- Drink enough water in the day
- Destress, be less busy

Will try this and report back.

There’s been a huge opportunity right under my nose for a while now, but because it’s doing okay on its own, I’ve often neglected it for other shiny objects, other projects in the portfolio.

That opportunity is my Plugins For Carrd project.

It’s been the one project bringing in revenue all on its own without me putting in much effort into marketing and distributing it. I dare say, it’s probably 100x less compared to the time and energy I put into marketing Lifelog. Yet, it brings in almost the same amount monthly. Some months, even more.

Another signal that it has potential: I actually love working on it. Every time someone emails or messages me a bug report or a plugin integration problem, I jump right into it. Even if I’m working on something else. And I love it. Being able to so tangibly help someone else, plus use my coding skills, was definitely more compelling than I had yet to admit to myself (now I do).

People email me ideas all the time, and ask me if this plugin can do this or that. I observe Carrd folks asking recurring questions on the Facebook group, prompting me with even more ideas on how I can solve it with plugins. There’s certainly a hunger for solutions beyond what the native Carrd settings can provide. Already I’m starting to see other indie makers trying out making Carrd plugins. I had a recent conversation with @mikecardano on Twitter - we talked about demand for micro-SaaS for low-code tools. Writing scripts and formulas for low-code tools like Airtable, Make, Carrd, Google Sheets to help other nocode users. There’s definitely a market.

Yet here I am, working on other things while my Plugins project is quietly screaming at me to listen.

I hear you now.

I can’t keep neglecting a project that’s been quieting generating revenue and say in good faith that I haven’t found a project that has potential to take-off. IT’S RIGHT THERE for the taking. Take it.

So I think I’m going to shift focus a bit.

Plugins should really be my main project not side hustle.

This creator journey often feels like a dance, like tango… 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

Sometimes I do get net 1 step forward, but it feels less frequent than net 1 step backward.

But I beginning to realise, that net 1 step back isn’t regression.

It actually goes like this:

✅ 2 steps forward
❌ 3 steps back
✅ 2 steps forward
❌ 3 steps back
✅ 2 steps forward
❌ 3 steps back
✅ 2 steps forward
❌ 3 steps back
✅✅✅ 10 steps forward

I was simply gathering momentum, like on a playground swing.

For that one massive swing forward.

Because that 1 massive 10-steps forward swing from the momentum built up from smaller 2-forward-3-back swings would mean over a long enough timeframe the chart still goes trends upwards.

What I’m realising is that even the net 1 step backward is part of overall progress! 😮

Because backward steps bring the lessons, experience and insights. The forward steps bring celebration, motivation and data. But taking a 10,000ft perspective from above, both backward and forward are compounding steps of progress nonetheless.

Another tiny epiphany: It’s simply this @visualizevalue chart turned 90degrees clockwise -
https://twitter.com/visualizevalue/status/1385067484554858497

So time to hold on tight, because the massive swing forward might be incoming… All the while, just plain having fun.

@viking_sec asked me about consulting work, about how to get your name out there -

"I’ve got an idea for a fairly good niche. How do you get your name out there in your niche in a way that gathers attention from the right audience?"

It’s a great question! And I realised I’ve never wrote much about my design consultancy Outsprint before, and certainly never wrote about how I sustained myself in consulting all along, so writing out the answer for him was cathartic in a way. Putting it down here for reference and archive:

Caveats
Let’s get the caveats out of the way first. Honestly, it really depends on your niche. I can’t say my approach will work for everyone, so your mileage may vary. Please be discerning and filter out what works what doesn’t for you.

What worked for me:

Social capital
I was lucky in this aspect. My consulting was based off my previous employment ~10 years ago when I was a designer in a government organisation. I had some networks then, so when I left to continue doing the same work but as a external consulting specialist for government/non-profits, there was word of mouth effect that helped. I’ve never done any ads, done any marketing for my consulting agency. It was solely word of mouth.

Be known for a unique niche
Occupying a unique niche helped. Most design consultancies don’t specialise. They take work from wherever whatever. I only do “design for public good” - design-driven innovation in government and non-profit, so it’s easy for anyone to remember that “gov design guy”.

Location matters
My design consultancy was targeting local work only. Which makes sense because of the nature of government. But this helped me niche down further, instead of competing globally. Geographical advantage helps - it gave cultural context, networks and focus.

Overdeliver
I always felt that the best form of marketing was to do damn good work. Overdeliver on value, impress by going the extra mile. The lovely second, third order effects of that is word of mouth marketing, good deliverables that showcase itself, and ex-clients willing to recommend you to others.

Unique business model
Because I worked in government before, I knew how my now-turned-clients think, their painpoints and needs. I was in their position previously! I intentionally created a productized service package with clear deliverables and price (instead of buying man hours or per project quotations). That helped them understand what they will get at what cost, compared to more vague terms they might get with proposals from other design agencies.

I also made the price fall within the budget approval limits so that they can get approval through a less onerous approval process (we call it invitation to quote) rather than a lengthy more troublesome process (calling for tender), which most consultancies often fall into.

With the lower price also meant I needed to deliver a shorter project, hence I went with a design sprint model, everything done in 1 week. That also lowered barriers to trying me out, compared to other agencies where they have to project-manage for 3-6 months.

Build an audience
COVID dried up the consultancy gigs from government because they were focused on managing the crisis. But with the pandemic mostly over, restrictions lifted, public organisations are slowly getting back to thinking about service improvement. I thought I could start building an audience on LinkedIn now (since my LinkedIn networks are mostly local design folks), to raise awareness of my presence and offering again, and do some business development. It’s the first time I’m doing any form of marketing.

I’ve been enjoying coding the Sheet2Bio landing page in just plain HTML, CSS and Javascript. (The bio pages are in HTML, CSS and Vue.js)

It’s such a joy to code using just a Github-Netlify tech stack.

So simple.
So uncomplicated.

Just like writing here on Lifelog, I write code on Github on the web app, and click publish. Netlify does the rest, automatically.

No hosting.
No libraries.
No terminal.
No backends.
No databases.
No frameworks.
No npm or yarn.
No code editors.
No components.
No versions to update.
No environment variables.
No endless node modules.
No tooling to install and set up.
No configs for eslint and prettier.

Sometimes I wonder if we had veered way off course when it comes to simplicity of tooling for web development.

OK sure one doesn’t need to learn everything on that list to deploy his first app. But still numerous enough. That was my experience too. Just getting set up with the tooling is a huge pain and barrier to entry already, before he can even deploy a simple “Hello, World!”.

I love that my time-to-helloworld is mere minutes using the Github-Netlify tech stack.

I wish every web app I create can be this simple and uncomplicated.

Question:

What’s the best way to get started with journaling? Do we need any templates or frameworks?

Answer:

The thing holding back most aspiring writers: Thinking it has to be elaborate and complicated.

Scrappy is better. Scrappy gets you started.

Just set aside 10min. Not 3h. Anyone has 10min in a day. It can be any time. No need to get up at 5am. Or stay up after the kids are in bed. 10min while on your commute home. 10min during lunchtime. 10min on the toilet.

Think about one question, concern or worry you might have for the day. It doesn’t have to be a huge life problem. It can be something tiny, mundane, small, like “I’m feeling anxious for my work presentation later” small.

And just write it down. Brain dump everything into whatever medium you have. It doesn’t have to be a fancy, beautiful notebook. You don’t need a space age pen. It doesn’t have to be on a $3000 Macbook, with a serious note-taking app with bi-directional linking and networked thought. Your phone, a text message to yourself, a napkin, or even a scrap of receipt paper will do. Just start.

And one last thing… do you need templates or frameworks? I think you would be able to guess it by now. No. Just start. 10min. Whenever. On whatever. Simple.

Start scrappy. Elaborate, complicate later, if ever.

This is a sum-up of everything I learned and relearned today about failure, from the comments in just one single tweet -https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1532724727948537856

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Failure is but just research.

Failure is but another data point, in a long series of data points of wins and fails in the lifetime of your product, in the life journey as an entrepreneur.

Failure doesn’t mean you failed.

The launch didn’t fail.
The product didn’t fail.
I didn’t fail.
The experiment failed.
Now just move on to the next experiment.

Launches don’t have to mean anything.
It’s just an arbitrary event I created in the calendar.
Besides, it’s just been one week. Give it a year, and maybe you can call it a failure (if ever).
A failed launch is as meaningful and informative as a successful launch.
Use it, don’t be swayed by it.

Another perspective:
It’s random. It’s chance-driven. It’s luck.
There’s countless moving parts that led to the outcome today, most of which might not even be in my control.
Do the exact same launch tomorrow, and it might win.
Such is the game in an unpredictable, stochastic world of entrepreneurship and Twitter.
Luck drives outcomes a lot more than we like to accord it.
Just focus on what I can control - the process, my outputs, my effort, my intentions.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Downside is down to us, upside is up to God.

Failure is just a starting point, not the end point.
Avoiding failure means you’ll also avoid success.
No attempts means zero results.
Shots on goal means you’ll miss some.
But it also means you hit some.

See it this way:
Zero sign-ups isn’t a new low, it’s rock bottom.
Literally, deepest part of the ocean, Mariana trench bottom. You can’t get negative number of sign-ups.
Zero is as low I can go.
Everything else is UP after.

Truth is, 90% of launches fail on the get-go.
All the wins you see on Twitter and the news?
All survivorship bias.
All just a minority report.
If everyone fails then no one does.
Also, fact that I launched, is already way more than 99% of everyone.

In fact, there is no such thing as failures where there’s learning involved.
You either win, or you learned something.
You can’t ever fail that way.
Like Edison said, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Think about it this way:
Say you truly failed failed. What would you do then? Give up, quit, go back to 9-to-5?

Going back to a job is a non-negotiable for me. I’m too unemployable now, too deep in and enmeshed with my products and entrepreneurship to go back to working for someone else. That freedom is addictive. It’s transformative.

I can’t ever go back anyway. So what if I fail? I’m going to get back up the next day, and try again. And again. And again.

Till it works. I have no choice.

It’s been 1 week since I launched Sheet2Bio.

ZERO sign-ups so far.

It’s fair to conclude that the launch failed. Or something failed, at least.

Sigh. This is a new low.

I knew Sheet2Bio is still a scrappy MVP. I know I’m still experimenting with it. And I know I’m signalling these two points by building in public, so it does affect the product’s reputation in a way.

So I had low expectations going into the launch, but not that low. I expected something non-zero, for sure.

Not gonna lie…this was hard to stomach.

OK so back to the drawing board…

I set out to test this hypothesis through the launch:

“Are people even willing to pay for this tool to begin with?”

Not “Of the 100%, how many % are willing to pay?” because this latter hypothesis assumes some will pay, just how many % out of my target population of customers. Nope, I made no such assumptions. Because it’s still a leap from having a product that no one will pay for versus a product that some might pay (and you just have to find them). And also because most alternative link-in-bio platforms offer a freemium model - so anchoring bias might exist (where people expect it to be free than paid, a bit like how people expect apps on the app store to be 99 cents because the first apps were all 99 cents).

It’s about product-pricing fit, not channel-offer fit.

Hence from a single pricing plan of $10/month, I’m now experimenting with a two-tiered pricing model:

- One-off plan where you pay $50 once and use forever, but no future feature/updates
- Monthly subscription plan where you pay $10/month and get access to all future features/updates

But leading in front of both plans is the 14-day, no-questions-asked free trial.

Hope this reduces the barrier to payment!

Also tweaking the landing page design, adding more style and overall making it look more credible and legit, while maintaining the brutalist vibe.

I want to see what happens if I just do my own path despite going against prevailing best practices and how-tos…

Will I regret it? Or will it lead to contrast and standing out?