Lifelog

Rant incoming:

Don’t support indie hacker products.

Especially if you prefer stability.
Especially if you hate it when features break.
Especially if you want your tools to be dependable.

Being an indie hacker myself, my first reflex is to support my peers. Most of the time, it’s a good decision. You get up close to a product as an early adopter and it’s development journey, and you’re rooting for the underdog founder to succeed, which by extension, I’m also rooting for myself. It’s a mutually enabling relationship.

But as a consumer, f**k does it annoy me when:

- Maker launches with a big show, makes grand promises about how the product is his/her “life’s work” (when he’s just 20), and then disappears later due to burnout, personal problems, or lack of interest
- Maker gets acquired/sells out to a competitor. Shortly after, the acquirer announces that they will stop development for the product, and they can sign up for the other product instead. It ended up being an acquisition to kill competition, and leaves the community in the lurch.
- Maker keeps developing the product – a good sign initially, and over time makes the product increasingly worse. Product gets unstable, and even basic features stop working, while new features are non-starters and white elephants.
- Maker rebrands product multiple times and with each time it further alienates the community from original spirit that you had signed up for. Rebrands mostly achieves nothing but it’s next level to create larger and larger rifts between your community and the product.

These complaints isn’t just from one product or maker but based on many I had tried over the years. And it’s happening often enough for it to not be a fluke or outlier.

F**k this, I’m going for enterprise products the next time.

/rant

- Find a time slot to QT someone's tweet you love, or about someone's progress/work. It's about starting conversations on your feed as much as replying to other's tweets on their feed

- Ask a question in your tweet instead of factual penny wisdom 1-liners - that opens up more engagement and just more fun

Here’s an interesting hack when it comes to setting goals: Start a chat group.

I had started Telegram chat groups for a few new habits – keto diet, sleep and 5am wakes, and just recently, money habits.

What began unintentionally as just a way to socialize with others around a topic is becoming a habit hack—an intentional intervention—to ensure accountability, learn from others, and to grow collectively.

It's not really a newsletter but a mailing list. As a backup in case i get deplatformed, hacked or denied access for any random reason. Since I'm taking Twitter seriously, good to have a backup so that I can bring my audience elsewhere.

I’ve been in a slump since 2022 started. It seems like I always have either too much momentum, or too little. Seldom just enough.

It’s time to confront it here through writing. A few anxious questions that keeps replaying in my head:

• What will happen if my old consulting gigs dry up before my revenue is ready?
• Will I ever hit diaper-profitability for my products? What am I really missing?
• When will this global crisis be over? When will the world reopen?
• What can I do to pick myself up?
• How can we all heal?

I have no ready answers nor solutions.

But by naming my demons through writing them down, I drain them of their power. So that I might be better placed to solve them after.

I need to write more.

- Help people out in DMs. People had been approaching me for help, so I give it as freely as I can.

- Quote tweet if you want to take the whole tweet structure word for word but change the key words, like it's a meme - see https://twitter.com/Nicolascole77/status/1494601223672147968

What’s your freedom stack? Mine:

• Singapore citizenship, as native home base
• Bali, Indonesia for retreats, as a second home, with business visa
• Kyoto, Japan for inspiration, shorter tourist stays
• $10k monthly revenue from all my products
• Location independence on all my work
• A remote career for my wife
• Remote schooling for my son
• Ability to pay for airfare for grandparents’ visit anytime

- Even for a 2-tweet thread, add the 2nd tweet to auto-plug feature to send out after like 1h or 1 like, so that it's delayed. The delay will make the 2nd tweet be displayed after the 1st tweet on my profile feed, instead of being hidden under "Show thread" if it's sent out together

-

At this rate maybe I can write a Gumroad ebook on this!

- TweetSERP (https://tweetserp.com/@jasonleowsg) looks like a fun way to see my top twitter connections

- Someone shared his product with me (https://www.twentypages.org/). A reading club for building a reading habit, where they come together on Zoom to read 20 pages a day, for 40min. Yay or nay?

- Share more plain obvious or simple tips - "What did I learn that would be useful to someone a couple of steps behind me on the same journey?"

- for my replies to replies (to my own tweets especially) where I don't have much value to add to, instead of just saying "thanks" or something closed-ended or lame, ask a question instead. Ask why do you think so? Keeps the engagement rolling, and also helps us all learn more by sharing more.

My real endgame isn’t $5k MRR, $10k MRR or some arbitrary financial figure. My real endgame is freedom.

Financial, creative, location, and time freedom.

But not the freedom most think it is.

It’s not freedom from all money woes but freedom to choose to work on projects that doesn’t give a monetary return. Projects that are pro bono, altruistic and for common good.

It’s not freedom from all creative constraints but freedom to choose what to work on, with whom and how we do it.

It’s not freedom from location but freedom to work anywhere, even at home or at your local library.

It’s not freedom from meetings but freedom to choose what meetings I want to attend.

It’s not freedom from what’s hard, but having the optionality to choose your hard.

"My ultimate business plan to get me to $10k MRR:

👇"

https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1493132936002080768

- got Revue newsletter set up on my Twitter profile page to collect emails as backup (not intending to email regularly, if much at all)
- thinking of adding an extra timeslot at 11am as a safe slot for random experimental tweets (increase serendipity and experimentation to increase surface area for luck), eg today tweeted about web3. Can also use for RT/QT-ing other accounts.
- Followerwonk.com looks like an exciting new Twitter tool! Can see segments of followers by map, track follows and unfollows, give you a overview of who your followers are, who you are following

Finally bought jasonleow.eth!

🤔 Procrastinated over costly ETH gas fees
🤖 Watched gas fees using Telegram bot over 1 mth
⛽️ Held ~40 GWEI yesterday
💳 Paid ~USD80 / 0.025ETH for 5 years

So noob question: What do I do with it next?

...lately I’d been thinking there’s a case to be made for doing the opposite of building in public – building in silence.

When you build in silence, you curb your own ego.
When you build in silence, you don’t invite envy, jealousy.
When you build in silence, you don’t give unworthy people access.
When you build in silence, haters and trolls have nothing to bite on to attack.

There’s many successful entrepreneurs whom we’ve never heard of and are earning 9 figures. Many probably choose to stay under the radar for those reasons.

It’s a more humble choice.
It’s a better choice for your mental health.
It’s a choice that helps you focus on the work than the fame.

Build in silence.

*What do you think?*

- set an auto-plug tweet if original tweet goes viral (currently set to if post receives 150 likes)
- idea: find active followers of high follower accounts in my niche, and engage them in replies to their tweets, then in DMs

Here’s an interesting n=1 observation:

You think snoozing gets you a bit more sleep. But it actually backfires and ends up making you wake up feeling more tired. Not only did it not help, it actually made things worse.

Snoozing is a net negative.
Snoozing is wake procrastination.

One of the key money habits around consumption that I love is buying quality products over cheap ones. But I could never quite explain why it’s better, in a measurable way. Now I do:

It’s called “cost per use”.

Everyone on Twitter: "I just hit $10k MRR!"

Me: Wow this is so inspiring! 🤩

Also me: Darn why is everyone killing it but me! 😩

https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1492045764515741702

- Useful > viral - your audience don't need it to go viral, but they need it to be useful

- Not publishing the same day I write a tweet made a huge difference. I often draft a tweet, leave it there and come back to it the next day or many days after. I keep tweaking it from time to time until it feels right.