Lifelog

"I started dividing my to-do list into 1) things I have to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do. Life changing! I often don’t get to 3 and I finally realized omg, is this what it means to have boundaries?! 🤯🤯🤯"
– @jdesmondharris

I love the 3rd to-do list – a to-do list of things that others want you to do.

Because so often we lump them together with our own to-dos, and our priorities go whack. What I love most however is how this is a concrete way of having boundaries.

Having this others’ to-do list feels like a more introvert, composed way of asserting boundaries. You want me to do something? Sure, let me put you on the to-do list and I’ll prioritize it accordingly. You’ll have to wait though…

Now out with the “to-do, doing, done” kanban board to-do list, and in with the “have to, want to and others’ want to” to-do list!

The real idea you spent months perfecting. Zero demand.

The joke idea you tweeted on a whim. Validated demand.

Oh, how Fate loves irony.

I tweeted something as a joke. As sort of a satirical shitpost about how everyone and their grandma is launching a cohort based course.

Apparently the joke was lost on everyone, but instead of moving on, they stopped at my tweet and did something surprising - they replied about wanting to sign up!

So now the joke’s on me. 🙃

I wasn’t even planning to create a course. I don’t even like coaching! But now I feel like I must because of everyone’s kind support.

So now I’m seriously considering starting a cohort based course, probably associated with Lifelog. It might look like this, broadly:

Low-to-medium touch on time and socializing. Something great for introverts!
Low bar for commitment. Engage in pockets, at the edges of your day.
As little content/curriculum as possible, delivered over email or messages. Just enough to take the first step, and maybe the next.
Asynchronous. Check in, check out. Anytime.
Self-paced, broadly structured.
Free(?!), or freemium, like small payment for maybe events(?).
Write in public, chat on Telegram/Discord.
To be honest, I have no idea how that can look like. What should it even try to achieve?

Writing better? Or just developing a daily writing habit?

I should speak to users more.

*What else should I be considering? What other aspects of a typical cohort based course do you hate?

I can earn $5k/m just from either one of these:

5 × $1000 websites
25 × Carrd plugin integration jobs
334 × Carrd plugin sales at $15 a pop
500 × Lifelog subscriptions at $10/m
1 × $30k consulting project over 6 months
1-2 courses at $2000-3000 per course
[New!] 25 × unlimited Carrd web design/support at $199/m subscription
[New!] 10 × unlimited Carrd design/support for unlimited sites at $499/m subscription

OK but it’s hard to expect to sell 334 Carrd plugins in 1 month when my current sales is like average 10 per month. So maybe I can do a mix:

2 × $1000 websites = $2000
34 × Carrd plugin sales = $510
1 × $30k consulting project per year = $2500

Or something even more realistic:

2 × $500 websites = $1000
1 × course at $1000 total sales
20 × Carrd plugin sales = $300
20 × Lifelog subscriptions at $10/m = $200
1 × $30k consulting project per year = $2500/m

Just breaking it down this way makes it feel so much more attainable! And assuring.

Anxiety levels going waaay down now.

When a joke tweet becomes serious... now the joke's on me to make a course! 🙃

https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1511010244582801413

How I structured my portfolio of small bets:

From selling time, to more leveraged/scalable income streams. It’s really a spectrum, where the endgame is to move the ratio of your time/effort spent from left to right:

Services → Productized services → Info products → Micro-SaaS → SaaS → Marketplaces

The goal is to go from selling time to disconnecting money from time. Of course, it doesn't mean I will only do SaaS in the future. I would still want to have a mix, a portfolio. But the ratio of time spent might evolve. I'm spending more time on the left side of the spectrum now, hoping to flip the ratio towards the right side in the future.

Taking a portfolio approach has it's benefits - it's more resilient and antifragile:

• Services (e.g. consulting): Immediate payoffs but more random, feast & famine cycles
• Info products: Higher payoffs in the beginning but fades away over time
• SaaS: Low revenue in beginning but builds up over time

They cover each other's shortcomings over their product journey:

In fact, now I'm thinking I could add more into the spectrum, and do some experiments in:

• Dropservices could go into the productized services stage.
• Courses could be a thing on its own, in between productized services and info products (since it's a mix of both)
• Where does ecommerce come in? After SaaS, before marketplace?

What else can I add?

Work under uncertainty:
- Hard work → Trial & error
- Focus → Many things at once
- Optimization → 80/20 rule
- Consistency → Intensity
- Avoid distractions → Embrace randomness
- Practice 10,000 hrs → 100 bets
- Goals → Stay in the game
- Efficiency → Slack in the system
– @davassallo
---

Working in chaotic situations calls for a completely different approach to working.

We’re used to working in predictable, stable environments. School, sports, office. There’s a rule book for working there, and it’s about following the rules.

Hard work, reducing distractions, increasing focus, making things more efficient and productive, 10k hours of practice makes perfect, set smart goals and KPIs.

That’s the rule book there. It’s familiar, it assuring. and it works.

In stable environments.

But throw yourself into entrepreneurship, social media, the jungle and any environment where things are more influenced by chance and chaos, and that rule book gets ripped to shreds.

Working in chance-based environments like entrepreneurship requires a total 180 flip on how I’m used to working. This is a totally different approach to work and working.

Not rule book but playbook.

I’m going to need to transform my identity from diligent, conscientious student to devil-may-care, ‘lazy’, “let me copy your homework” opportunistic trickster.

Less Thor, more Loki.

Ok this is gonna require more rewiring than I thought.

I think I went too much the other way when it comes to embracing failure.

Yes failing is a sign that I’m taking risks, putting myself out there. With each failure, if I learn from it, iterate and improve my approach from it, then it’s not counted as a failure. It’s actually growth.

By associating failure as necessary to success, the only way to pave my way to success was through failure.

I was so wrong.

Failures—especially grand failures—are costly, inefficient, demotivating.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But to muster up a response after a big failure, is hard. Not too smart too. It’s so demotivating. What if you don’t pick yourself up?

Why go through the extremes of high highs and low lows?

Small wins can pave the way to success better than learning through failure.

I’d put grand failures on a moral high horse, on a pedestal where there’s none. As if grand failures are better and more effective in getting to my goal than small wins.

Indeed, why do I need to feel like a martyr and have to crash the plane in order to say that I survived and got stronger?

What am I truly after? My endgame (financial freedom), or being able to show off my battle scars?

I was so wrong. So so wrong.

Small wins > grand failures

- Use "I" more often than "you". More authentic, tweets do better, and it pulls me back to sharing my own experience rather than being a sage on the stage

What are the things that I usually don’t feel like doing but seldom ever regret doing?
What are the things that my future self will thank me for?
What would a lazy-ass regret not doing enough of?

Here’s mine:

• Planning
• Workouts
• Taking walks
• Taking it slow
• Sleeping early
• Writing to-dos
• Swimming in the sea
• Buying hardcopy books
• Spending time in nature
• Reading hardcopy books
• Writing cards to my wife
• Getting up from my chair
• Having coffee with close friends
• Buying grassfed/organic/free range
• Doing something just for making money
• Being patient with someone or something
• Messaging a friend I’d not talked to for years
• Paying for a nice, wholesome, healthy but tasty meal
• Buying high quality but expensive shoes/glasses/clothes/bed

I could feel my curiosity and energy moving towards a few things naturally:

- creating more plugins for Carrd, peddling them more
- doing more build in public tweets
- making small bets again, e.g. Sheet2Bio, tweet remixer
- getting back to developing Lifelog features

For April will be keeping things semi-open and still follow my energy as an overall strategy, but keep doubling on those things which are pulling me in.

Will also work with an opportunist mindset rather than a hunker-down-in-hard-work mindset - "What opportunity can I leverage on today that will have the most impact for the least amount of work?"

So more opportunist-ing in April!

📈 Current MRR: $123
📊 1-off revenue: $250 (~150%🔺)
🐦 Twitter: Hitting 3k followers soon (261 new follows)
🔌 Sold 13 @Carrd plugins
🤒 Survived COVID

- To find tweets/accounts related to my writing tweet (so that I can engage these accounts/tweets), click on my tweet, scroll down to see "More Tweets"

I remember listening to a story by Sam Parr on the My First Million podcast about how Google kills projects even if they made a few hundred million in revenue per year.

Hundred million a year!

Hell that’s a whole lot of money! But it’s a pittance to the multi-billion dollar business that is Google, so comparatively, it’s nothing to them, and not worth the effort to pursue. These are good, functioning businesses, not just lame ones like Google+. Just killed because it’s deemed too small for a giant.

But imagine the potential of these products for us non-giants – solo entrepreneurs, indie hackers, bootstrapped founders. Even a fraction of that hundred million dollar business will be a life-changing amount of money.

It’ll be FU money. That kind of money that we can say we’re free. Totally, financially free.

I wonder if people had ever looked through the graveyard of Google projects and made an indie version of it.

Just look through the ideas here on killedbygoogle.com. There’s 264 of them currently. Just a quick scroll down shows some good potentials already

They might not all be million dollar revenue projects, but with some slight tweaks they can go on to be great indie products for niche audiences.

Makes me want to go make some now!

The recent hit on my MRR hit hard. Made me reflect a lot on my creator journey. I’ve also been thinking: I’ve been hustling on one product for some time now. Since Sept last year probably, and slightly over 2 years since launch. I think it’s time to pivot myself. I’ve given it a good go. Though I don’t think I’ll ever stop marketing Lifelog or developing it, my focus needs to change, it needs a change.

If anything, it’s for my sanity. For the creator spirit in me.

You can’t keep pushing without positive feedback. There’s only so much motivation and drive can do. After a while all the uphill struggles get to you.

Maybe finally moving to creating other products will help me with my revenue woes. Maybe taking some time away will benefit Lifelog. Maybe getting back to developing new features for Lifelog will help too - I’ve also neglected Lifelog’s development for some time now, since I went all in on marketing it last Sep. It’s been 7-8 months!

I don’t know for sure, but I do instinctively feel this is the right thing to do.

I need to feel creative and alive again. And I need to make. Create stuff. Anything.

I need to do something about my worries about feeding the family, so I need to make more products that could have a bigger payoff.

I need to restart my maker engine and start small bets again. Aggressively timebox my effort and commitment for each small bet, and curb my ambitions.

I need to start experimenting and having fun again.

Like how, just yesterday, I started on a small project for myself, called Sheet2Bio. It’s like sheet2site.com but for link-in-bio like Linktree. All done via Google Sheets instead of having to create yet another account on a social platform. I needed a bio link but decided to make one myself, and potentially for other creators.

Already, once I started on that, the worries become less worrying. Some hope and optimism returns. I can feel movement, and movement brings more motivation. The creative flywheel starts humming.

Creating in itself is an act of optimism.
Creating clears the head.

I create, therefore I am.

- Used to use Lists but found the feed for Lists to have too much noise. I just want to engage the accounts on their own tweets, not their replies to other people's tweets. So changed my Twitter List into a Bookmark folder on Chrome browser - just right click and open all profile pages as tabs and engage from there - more efficient

Yes it’s sweet to support an indie hacker, out of no other intention than to support his work. It’s like being a patron for an artist.

But something about the patronage approach for indie hackers always bothered me.

It means that someone bought your product without necessarily seeing value in your product. They just wanted to support you, the person, the maker.

Though I appreciate it, I find that adds noise. The signal that I’m seeking from the market isn’t how many people support me, but how many people find my product useful and valuable in helping them solve a tiny problem in their lives.

Customers > patrons

So the best way to support me is by buying my product because it solves your problem. Buy because you need it, because you will actually use it, not (solely) because you want to support me.

If it doesn’t solve a problem you have, don’t buy it.

If you want to support me, you can always do so in other ways - retweet my tweet, talk about my work to your friends, buy me a coffee, DM me how you enjoy your content. All that is sincerely appreciated.

It might sound foolish turning away free money, no matter how fleeting, even if it’s out of patronage support than actual utility. But that’s just how I roll. I’m purist that way, a pragmatist that way.

I take a practical sort of pride in my craft, and there’s no better praise that affirms my craft than a paying customer who uses my product every day.

When your monthly revenue matches your monthly expenses, you hit infinite runway.

Some call this ramen profitability. I like ramen, but not that much. There’s a larger sense of possibility by calling it “infinite runway”. By not calling out the bare minimum but highlighting the theoretical maximum, it’s so much more inspiring.

Infinite runway is that ideal state where you can keep going, working on your product, at your own pace and time, yet still keep feeding your family. It’s where you can start to taste the freedom. The total freedom from not needing to think about going back to a 9-to-5. That sense of relief, that freeing feeling, is the best feeling in the world.

Taste that freedom long enough, and you start to acquire a liking—even addiction—to it. It becomes your default. You can’t do it any other way anymore.

You become unemployable.

Yes, infinite runway is where I want to end up on.

- Every day on Twitter, dont just read to engage. Read to spot opportunity. FIND ONE OPPORTUNITY EVERY DAY.

I’m clear! Tested positive for everyone’s favourite virus on 17 Mar, then turned negative on 25 Mar.

Nine days.

I’m just relieved the episode is over for the family.

After two years of bracing ourselves for this eventual showdown, I’d say we survived intact.

Now, back to some semblance of normalcy. We’re heading out for a family dinner to celebrate. Just as the government announcement easing of more social distancing measures.

Finally, something’s looking up this year.

A ray of sunshine and hope.

Hopefully, a sign of better things to come.

I want to run a calm company of one. Like the folks at Basecamp say, it doesn’t have to be crazy at work.

“It’s crazy at work.” has become so normalized that it’s crazy.

Even though I work for myself, it’s still easy to get sucked into the craziness. In fact, exactly because I work for myself that it’s easier to push myself even harder.

I’m not there yet, but I want to get there.

The real reason I’m building my own business is that I’m tired of helping someone else build their dream.

“Why not me?” I asked myself.

If I’m going to give so much of myself into my work—and it’s good work I do—then might as well let myself be the main beneficiary of that effort.

In fact, “Why not me?” should be a default way of being. I’m realising it’s a powerful way to prompt thinking and promote action.

“Why not me?” gets me out of my own comfort zone.
“Why not me?” makes me think I can achieve what others did too.
“Why not me?” shows me where I’m lacking in imagination.
“Why not me?” prevents me from talking myself out of trying.

“Why not me?” invites social comparison, yes. They say “Comparison is the thief of joy”. It’s true. If you just compare and don’t do nothing, envy and jealousy will embitter your heart. It’s also true if you compare on the big things in life (that you have no control over) than the small things (that you can actually act on).

But here’s the nuance – social comparison can be a force for change, if you know how to use it as bushmen use small bush fires to fight the larger forest fire.

Just compare the small things and actually go do it.

It’s friendly competition.
It’s mutually empowering rivalry.

It’s like Edison versus Tesla. It’s Einstein versus Hilbert. It’s Wright versus Langley.

I dare say, “Why not me?” fulfilled more dreams than “I can do it”.