Over the past couple days, I've been deep working with rich text editor frameworks, like Slate.
More specifically, I'm re-doing the text editor for Pigeon, because my first attempt at it was really shitty.
Why was it shitty?
Because I tried to take shortcuts and copy-pasted a done-for-you rich text editor from some Codepen.
This was epic at first because it only took me an hour to implement a rich text editor, but it totally screwed me down the line.
I didn't know the fundamentals of the framework
Making changes and updates to the editor took a really long time
Overall it was buggy
This led to stress and even feelings of anguish looming in the back of my mind:
Pat, you need to make XYZ changes to the text editor. How are you going to do that?
Back to the drawing board
So, this time, I'm reimplementing it, and I'm doing it right. I'm reading the docs, doing it from scratch.
This is taking me a while and it sucks how long it's taking, but I know down the line it's going to be a killer feature and I will be able to add new things and fix bugs more quickly, leading to a happier life and happier customers.
Having that confidence in your code and product is so huge.
Today I slept in until about 9:30. I'm trying to live most days without an alarm clock, it's a new thing I'm trying.
I've also had massively productive days since starting this experiment, and maybe it's due to getting really solid sleep?
Today, I added a submit/share page to Starter Story, something I've been meaning to do forever. I also added more tags to the platform. I'd like to start tracking more and more data. The more data I have, the more leverage I have. I can turn that data into paid features, or enrich pages on the site.
That data also may lead to new features, or even new products altogether. I can use the data to programatically generate content, and can do so much cool stuff, I really love this kind of stuff.
Also, getting data that is user-submitted is pretty epic. That, with a combination of scraping, and other tools, can build very valuable businesses. But our data is on such a small scale. But, it's still really cool to think about.
I also switched memberships on the site and removed the free trial. Also added a lifetime membership. I'll give that a test over the next couple months and through the new year.
I created a mini roadmap for Pigeon. Sounds like a non-important feature, but I think building this out and making each item as part of the docs will help me to share more of these features and build structure around the documentation and things like that. I need some process around that, because for me it super sucks right now :(
Feeling extremely energized this past week - need to take full advantage of this.
Since I went through the YC interview process a couple of weeks ago, I was definitely exposed more to investors, or at least "investor-think" - through talking to people, blog posts, etc.
Although investors probably have good advice, it is often hard to understand or apply that advice when you are deep in the trenches as an operator or business builder. And sometimes, I think their advice is just bad for you if you're building a business.
The same goes for podcasts, business books, and general startup content as well.
Because most advice is in 20/20 hindsight. You hear classic startup advice like "you need to identify your target market" but I have a feeling that many successful businesses didn't find it right away and pivoted multiple times to get there. It's not that simple.
Advice like that is great but I don't find it very helpful, at least for me. The only way I learn is by doing, and learning the "hard way". Maybe that's what makes me "slower" in terms of growth/success/riches...
I wish more investors or VCs would say things like "just keep working every day" or "building a great business takes 20 years" or "just get started", but often it's more sophisticated junk where they try to sound smart.
I'd like to write every day, and I plan to make that a commitment going forward. It doesn't matter how long it is - I want to treat this more like a diary.
I can literally type two sentences, or I can write 3000 words, or I can record a YouTube video, or even a tweet. Maybe, it will often just be updates on what I worked on that day, really boring stuff :)
And I want to hold myself accountable. So, if I miss a day, I have to donate $20 to some organization of my choice or support another creator buy buying their products/merch. If I miss a day, I have to write a blog post for that day (backdated) with proof of my donation.
That's the rules for now - things might change. I'm excited. Time to set a daily reminder in my calendar.
See you tomorrow!
(update: I have not been writing every day for some time... but maybe I'll be back!)
My business/product isn't good enough for YC, so should I keep working on it? Should I use their decision as a data point? Is all of this work futile?
Everything feels bigger now. All the things I need to build.. Things are getting more complicated with every line of code. Am I building something too complex, or something that is fundamentally too big for one person to be able to handle.
I've been thinking of other products that I could pivot to. So stupid... I could spend my whole life looking for the next shiniest thing, and never really finishing what I started.
Well, it's been almost two weeks since my last post. As the year comes closer to a close I will figure out how to do this every day.
But the last two weeks, I was preparing and anticipating for a YC interview.
It's over now, and I was rejected, but I just wanted to get my initial thoughts on paper. It helps to just write it down and get it out. I want to put something together over the next few days as I get all my thoughts together, but here is how I'm feeling now:
This time, I don't feel the sting of rejection as much as last time. This time I got further in the process, too.
This time, I won't kill my startup because I was rejected. Technically, I don't need YC because I have really low costs and I can grow it organically.
Part of me applied because it's the 'cool kids'. If only I could get in and get that validation I want. I wanted to prove to YC, and my family, friends, etc that "I am legit" and I'm working on something smart.
But I know better than that. I never got into any Ivy league colleges, and I never got hired by any epic companies like Google or Facebook. I'm not smart like that. I don't hang out with Princeton elites and discuss growth strategy, politics, and modern art. Sometimes, I have fallen trap to wanting those things, and when I try to get them, and can't get them, I somehow wonder why.
I never deeply wanted them in the first place, or I wanted them on a very superficial level. And if I ever got them, I realized very quickly it's not for me, and leave.
I'm not saying YC is like that, but it's also a 'cool name' that you can impress people with. In 5 years, I want to be able to say "I built a great company" instead of "I did YC".
But, if you have YC on your LinkedIn, or in your email signature, people will take you more seriously.
To me, that is one of the most cringiest things I've ever read about YC.
How about being taken seriously for things you actually did? The people that I personally look up to built things from nothing, like Elon Musk, Pewdiepie, Kanye West, Joe Rogan, etc. They are often college dropouts, and worked harder than anyone else, taking years to be even recognized.
I definitely see the value in YC but I need to write this kind of stuff to remember my principles. Because it's not my life goal to get into YC, it's to build a great life.
This is just the beginning of my thoughts. I hope to write more tomorrow.
I don't think YC is bad (it's actually awesome), and the interview experience was amazing. More on that next time.
But for now, I'm back to work on my business the day after I was rejected. That's certainly better than last time I was rejected.
I already missed a day, and I'll be honest I completely forgot about this blog entirely 🙈!
Need a way to remind myself!
I might have also forgotten because I got invited to an interview in Mountain View with Y Combinator! Totally unexpected to get that, so that's been kind of a trip...
I am in Lisbon on "vacation", can't sleep. Needed to code up this idea (this blog right here) as I've been kicking at the idea like every day for the past couple weeks.
Been thinking a lot about how I want to get back into writing, and documenting all this stuff I'm doing.
I have a lot of "thoughts" but too scared to post them on Twitter and too busy/lazy to write a well thought-out blog post.
I want to build a daily habit. But I want to do this more for myself, and less for social media and for people to see. I want this to be more like a daily journal. It can be a YouTube video too, or some other piece of content, doesn't matter..
Who know what will come out of this. Don't want to make any promises, but I'd like to create some goal where I have to do this daily - doesn't matter about number of words, just that I wrote something.
And if I miss a day, will have to donate $X to charity...
Anyways, will iron more stuff out as 2019 comes to a close, but at least I got this one post up! Will keep playing around and trying to post more, with a more formal idea for what this will be in the next few weeks.
August 2019 is another record month, beating last month's record month in categories including revenue, traffic, content and pretty much everything else.
Although the number doesn't mean much, over 100,000 people visited Starter Story in the month of August. This is a first - I hoped that we might hit that number by the end of the year, but hit it 5 months early!
I have to attribute almost all of the success of the month to the process we've been building around the business and the team members we have brought on. This is especially true because I was traveling 3 weeks out of the month, and our team was able to hold down much of the operations without me, and ultimately ship 59 interviews/articles, which is another record!
On the flip side, my travel schedule significantly decreased my productivity and I didn't complete some of the features/initiatives I had planned. But the positive there is that it opened my eyes to even more holes in the process, more things I should outsource, and how I can improve things so that it could run without me and I can focus more on growth and the vision for the business.
We published 59 pieces of content. That is a 75% increase over the previous month (34 pieces of content).
In line with the above, my freelancers are now fully onboarded with all publishing and email tasks. Even though we shipped a massive amount of stories, it didn't feel that way as I am enabling my team to handle so much more.
Our Pinterest sharing automation is starting to take off. This month our pins got 10K impressions, which beats out last month's which was basically 0. This should keep growing! https://www.pinterest.com/starterstory/ I have implemented 9 daily templates and plan to get to 20. This is 100% automation and I LOVE this kind of stuff.
I had a big tweet about how I automate Reddit posts for Starter Story - which really goes into the details of how it works.
"Starter Features" are fully rolled out https://www.starterstory.com/michelle-miller - we published ~15 of these last month - as they allow us to share interviews with people that are not comfortable with sharing their monthly revenue, whom we would just lose them before.
In order to stay sane, I moved over most of the email stuff for Starter Story to pat@starterstory.comemail address. The team now works out of this email address, which will allow us to scale more and keep building the team.
We published a book on Amazon! This is 24 of our best interviews - I will announce this in the coming days and also offer it as an upsell on our premium membership.
August Opps for Improvement
I had a ton of stuff planned to implement last month, and barely got to any of it. Traveling was the main reason for this. I wasn't on vacation, but took most weekends off as I was going between SF -> LA -> SD in the span of 3 weeks. It felt like I was basically just keeping my head above water with the day to day stuff.
What I learned from this is that I need to build more process around the day to day so I can take some days off and still be able to focus on growth activities. I don't want to spend my Mondays and Tuesdays "catching up" on emails and transactional stuff from the weekend.
Notable content
Here are the 3 most successful interviews from last month, all hitting the front page of Hacker News (and 2 of them saying great things about Klaviyo):
How We Created A Planning Diary Making $160K In 6 Months - "We just recently switched from MailChimp to Klaviyo and it has allowed us to step up our email marketing game. The built-in flows and email automation possibilities are truly next level."
How I Started A $60K/Month Online Business From Malaysia - "When it comes to retention, email marketing works wonders for us! E-liquids are consumable so people would have to restock and repurchase after they’ve finished. We also set up a whole lot of automated email sequences that segments each user into providing as much value as we can along the journey. We recommend using Klaviyo when you can afford it, it pays for itself!"
Don’t feel like writing too much this month, but here’s my update for the results of the month of July 2019.
In this post, I’m mostly talking about Starter Story updates. I’m also working on Pigeon and learning a lot about how to build an app. Currently have 12 paying users on that one. More on that soon.
TLDR
July is another record month, the biggest in terms of traffic and email subscribers.
I've been working a lot on building process around the business and now onboarding some help to the team. This is allowing me to scale both content and features, which I'm really excited about. This is all sort of new for me, but I feel inspired to grow the business and make it bigger than just me.
Although most traffic comes from Google, I did see a big uptick in direct traffic this month and I think we are starting to feel some effects of word of mouth. I've started communicating more with users (by using Klaviyo) and they tell me often that they share the site with all their friends, which I love to hear.
High-level goals going forward is to keep increasing content output and variety, and keep moving the site to a more UGC model of AMAs, forum, Q&As, etc.
I've fully onboarded two freelancers to the team. One helping with all things email, publishing, etc. And the other helping outreach to more businesses for interviews. The goal is to release 60 interviews in the month of August and it will only be possible with their help, and with the help of my new side project Pigeon.
Launched new Starter Feature profile series - a new way for businesses to share their story without having to share their monthly revenue.
Implemented a new 5 email flow with Klaviyo (see screenshot) after signup. This has been awesome - especially the email where I ask them what they are working on - have made some great connections.
100% automated Reddit posts
We cracked <100K Alexa ranking. Although it doesn't mean much, it does give our site more "clout" for pitching businesses and improves our name/authority in the space.
Started new Pinterest campaign to drive more traffic to the site. Working on a 100% automated solution using asset generation tool Placid and the Pinterest API. It's pretty cool, you can see it already in action here.
Plans for next month:
Publish 60 new interviews (in the month of August). This will be a record high and the new norm going forward if things keep going the way they are - also, sometime next month we will likely hit 500 interviews since inception!!
Ability to favorite stories and save them for later
Ability to follow users
Start new "story follow up" content offering -Reach out to old stories and have them provide and update on their business
Improve signup flow (get more data on user's businesses and incentize them to fill out their profiles)
Incentivize more engagement on the site such as commenting and posting
Add site-wide search to the homepage -> search "candle business"
Add tags to stories -> "bootstrapped", "side hustle", "instagram"
The story about how this piece of paper I wrote back in 2017 turned my life around.I created a YouTube video about this story as well.
--
First, I want to time travel back two years, in late 2017, when I was in a much different place.
I was on a six-hour flight from San Francisco to New York. It was a Sunday, and I was coming off of a long weekend trip with family and friends celebrating my sister’s 21st birthday.
That’s always a grueling flight, especially if you’re going east since you “lose” 3 hours. Couple that with the fact I had taken off a few days of work (just started a new job) and how much alcohol I drank over the weekend, I was feeling a bit guilty.
Why was I reading this book? Because I wanted to fix things in my life. And while reading, I couldn’t help but face my insecurities about my financial situation and career:
I had over $25k in credit card debt.
I had over $40k in student loan debt.
I had just moved to NYC and was living above my means.
I had just started a new full-time job and I wasn’t passionate about it.
(obligatory note that I am grateful to only have these issues - I realize that they are nothing compared to the hardships that most people in the world are going through)
I wasn’t beating myself up though - I was feeling a surge of motivation to change things.
A few pages in, I put the book down, pulled out my iPhone and wrote this note:
The note I created in October 2017 on that flight
You might be thinking “that’s is an oddly specific statement to write”.
But early in the book, Hill walks through his simple process on how to get rich (or for me, to get out of debt).
Napoleon Hill’s six-step process to get rich
He boils it all down to six steps, designed to help anyone get the financial results they desire:
1 - Fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say “I want plenty of money.” Be definite as to the amount.
2 - Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire. (There is no such reality as “something for nothing.”)
3 - Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.
4 - Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.
5 - Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.
6 - Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night, and once after arising in the morning. As you read, see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of the money.
I actually wrote it down this time.
After I got home from the flight, I wrote that same statement on a physical piece of paper, stuck a nail through the top and into the wall, and hung it right next to my bed.
Some of the wear and tear it went through, it got ripped off the wall a few times!
But how many times had I done stuff like this before? Made goals and didn’t stick to them? Too many to count…
My Rules
This time, I made sure to follow his instructions:
1 - $10,000 CASH was the exact amount of money I desired to have. Keep in mind that I was in $65k worth of debt, so this I needed to profit $75k to get there.
2 - What would I give in return for that money? As stated, I had to (1) keep making my full-time income (2) follow a serious budget and (3) make good money with a side project.
3 - I stated the date: Jan 1, 2019. At the time I wrote the note, that was 15 months away.
4 - Was it realistic? I needed a definite plan - so I created a spreadsheet that ran all of these numbers, and it was possible (although everything had to go perfectly).
5 - Following Hill’s instruction, I actually wrote it down on a physical piece of paper.
6 - I didn’t read it aloud twice a day, but by having it hung up by my bed, I was forced to look at it every morning and night.
I put my head down and started working
I’m not going to say that I became a different person and turned things around overnight.
I was still stuck, but this piece of paper remained constant as I slowly turned things around.
But also having this piece of paper hung up in my room was actually kind of weird for me at first…
When friends or family came into my room, I hid the sheet of paper out of embarrassment.
I was self-conscious about these goals. I thought people would think I was weird for this. I think I was afraid of failure and afraid of being myself.
But over time, people eventually found it and asked about it. It really was no big deal. Although I didn’t share this goal online, sharing this with friends helped it feel more real.
I took that sheet of paper really seriously.
Keep in mind that when I made these goals, Starter Story was not even monetized. I was making $0/month.
At the time, $3,000/month seemed incomprehensible to me, but I knew it was possible after all that I’d researched and read on the internet (thank you Indie Hackers, Pieter Levels, and so many more).
To reach my goal, I was assuming an average of $3k/month over the next 15 months. So if I couldn’t reach $3k in earlier months, I would have to make up for it in later months if the site grew.
It wasn’t very realistic, but you have to set big goals, and even reaching half of that I would have been happy.
I slowly chipped away at that goal:
The red line is the 15 months I had to get to $3k/month average revenue
What else could get me closer to $10k cash? Saving more money.
I’ve never been great with money, and I won’t go into that... but I needed to change that as well.
I created a spreadsheet forecast/budget and tracked my expenses in detail. I analyzed it every two weeks, digging deep into my spending, income, and understanding my financial picture better.
My old expenses tracking sheet. The column in red was how much I was putting towards my credit card principal every two weeks. Everything I saved went right into that. On another note, you can see how expensive NYC is!
(note - in this post I won’t cover a lot of the things that happened that year. But if you’re interested in more details about the business side, read this.)
To make a long story short, I just kept working towards that goal, getting small wins, paying off credit cards, and learned a lot about myself through starting my own business and changing my habits.
I wasn’t going to reach $10k
Fast forward a few months…
As the fateful day loomed closer, I realized that I wasn’t even close to reaching my $10,000 cash goal.
But I wasn’t sad about it. I had a lot to be proud of:
By August 2018, I had reached $1k monthly revenue.
By September 2018, I paid off all my credit card debt.
By October 2018, I quit my full-time job to put all my focus into Starter Story and the 24 Hour Startup.
All of these were massive, first-time accomplishments for me.
Although I was still far off from my $10k cash goal and still in the red, I’m certain that little piece of paper drove me much closer than if I hadn’t done it.
And then it happened (almost)
Then, in late November 2018, I got word from my newsletter sponsor that they wanted to exclusively sponsor the entire Starter Story website for the next year!
That was never in the “plans”, but one thing I learned at that point, is that I could no longer predict anything anymore.
The only thing that stayed constant was me putting in the work and trying to get closer to that goal.
Since the cash was paid upfront, it got me into “positive net worth” territory. It got me to $5,000 in cash, only $5k off from my goal!
I was so close, but at that point, I was no longer attached to reaching the $10k goal. I was surprised how I close I got, and grateful.
And then it actually happened
Sure enough, luck struck again, and this time it was even bigger.
My old coworker texted me, saying that the startup we used to work for 5 years ago had just filed for IPO. When I left the company, I purchased some stock options.
This came to me as a surprise, as it had been a long time since I left the company, and I didn’t think it was ever going to happen.
And that was the moment I had not only reached my audacious goal of $10k, but blew so much further past it than I could ever imagine.
I dug through my bag and found the piece of paper, and it was one of the best feelings of accomplishment of my life.
Note: The stock options/IPO is almost 100% luck, so I hope it’s clear that I’m not bragging or attributing this to my own success. However, I do think this shows the power of hard work + luck. I worked my ass off to get to $5k, and then this was really the icing on the cake.
What did I learn?
Visualize. Visualize. Visualize.
What you visualize over time will naturally become your reality.
If you visualize yourself running and finishing a marathon, you will do it. If you visualize yourself getting that promotion, you will get it.
But it also goes the other way.
If you can’t visualize your side project making money, then it won’t magically monetize itself. If you visualize a relationship or date going poorly, then it will. I am guilty of negative visualization in many ways.
State your goals, and then multiply them by 3.
If you think it’s possible to make $1k month after 1 year, then scribble out the 1 and replace with a 3, or a 5, or even a 10.
Because if I set my original goal to be $1k/month, then I would never have hit $3k. And if I set my goal at $10k, I probably would have hit that too.
If you visualize the ceiling, then you will won’t break through it.
And the other thing I learned? If you work hard, consistently, and do honest work, then unexpected and amazing things will happen - it just takes time.
--
So that’s how one little piece of paper changed my life.
The funny thing is, after I wrote the note on that flight, I picked the book back up and only read a few more pages and got bored.
It didn’t matter what the rest said - that was all I needed! Thank you Napoleon Hill :)
So I recently just finished Rob Walling’s book, Start Small Stay Small (a great book btw!).
Although it’s a bit dated (written in 2010) there was one thing that really stuck with me, and I can’t stop thinking about it…
I’m making a lot less money than I should be.
Rob goes over some simple calculations to determine if you are underpaid - I pulled out my phone and did a rough calculation. I started feeling pretty shitty :(
I realized what I’m making is SIGNIFICANTLY less than what I should be making…
So what should my time be worth?
A good way to determine what your time is worth is your salary + benefits divided by 2000 hours.
Now, I don’t have a full-time job because I recently quit my job (more on that later) - but before I quit my job I was making $125k/year as a software engineer. Let’s add $25k of benefits to that (a conservative number).
$150,000 / 2000 hours = $75/hour
By those calcs, my time should be worth $75 per hour.
But what is my time actually worth?
Right now, I’m making around $4,500/month, or $54,000 per year.
$54,000 / 2000 hours = $27 per hour
Wait... but the 2,000 hours figure assumes a 40 hour work week, with weekends off. I actually work more than that now.
I probably work 60 hours a week (3,000 per year), so:
$54,000 / 3000 hours = $18 per hour
Eighteen fucking dollars per hour!!! You’ve gotta be kidding me.
Caveats
This $18/hour number kind of freaks me out a bit…
However, it’s not really that simple. There are a couple of things that make me feel a bit better...
My costs are lower
My living costs are much lower than they were in New York City. However, the income I have now would not sustain me in NYC.
This was a choice I made because I wanted to start my own business and knew that my revenue would be low while starting out.
So although my spend is less, I want to be able to live anywhere with my own business, including NYC (one day). Right now I can’t live there, so I don’t have true location independence.
Most of my income comes from minimal work
Most of my income comes from my website Starter Story. However, as of right now, I only work on it around 12 hours per week. (I’ve automated everything I could)
So, if I were to do a calculation on actual work:
$48,000 x 625 hours of work = $76.80 per hour.
OK that’s a little better!
Building assets for the future
Unlike a full-time job or consulting business, the work that I do today (for little to no direct compensation) may mean bigger payouts in the future.
For example, Starter Story may have a lot more traffic in one year, which would increase income with barely an increase in input.
About a year ago, I was putting in serious hours on Starter Story and making just a couple hundred bucks a month - now I put in less time with way more money.
I’m also spending ~75% of my time at the moment on a new product, which right now brings in just a small amount of money compared to the loads of work I’m putting in.
But that’s mostly because I’m just launching it and frontloading so much of time for the future. It’s also a recurring revenue product.
It’s not about the money
It’s important for me not to get too caught up in the numbers, and focus on building something great.
If I wanted to make an effective $100/hour I could go back to my old career of implementing enterprise software for Fortune 500 companies. If I never left that, I would have never learned how to code, become a software engineer, started my own business and overall I would have just been fucking miserable.
Or I could do freelance, or make a load of cash as a software engineer, but then I would be building someone else’s dream which also makes me miserable.
How I plan to change this
Although those were some good caveats, I’m still having a sinking feeling every time I think about that $18/hour number.
Going forward, I’m going to be taking a closer look at this number and how I can increase it.
My goal is to get that number higher than $75/hour.
Here’s how I plan to do it:
Start outsourcing work
Another really impactful thing I read from Rob’s book was the importance of outsourcing.
He argues that you would be crazy not to outsource anything that is cheaper than your target hourly rate. So if I’m doing a task that someone else can do for $6/hour, I am making a huge mistake, and effectively losing $69/hour.
If I can figure out how to outsource more Starter Story, I can not only save 10-15 hours per week of work, but I can scale that work to produce more content and grow at a faster rate.
I’ve tried outsourcing in the past and didn’t have a great experience… However, I’m going to give it a go another try and take a different approach. More on that to come.
Tracking my time better
I could work less which would bring up that hourly number, however, I don’t plan on working less right now.
I want to be more productive. I plan to do this by tracking my time better, using a new productivity technique called time blocking (which I’m loving) and making sure I’m working on only the most important things.
And again, using this analysis of my time to outsource more stuff.
Earn more revenue
This one is obviously the most important, but the hardest.
My goal this year has been to get to $12K monthly revenue by the end of the year, which would put me at $46 per hour at 3000 hours.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make more money and my plans to do that mostly reside on landing some big sponsors for Starter Story and some more B2B efforts.
More on that to come soon. Hopefully some more saved/productive/outsourced time will allow me to focus on that towards the end of the year.
Oh yeah, I could also sell a course for $699 on Starter Story and make $1M/year. But I’m not a scumbag.
This is a post about my productivity hacks/techniques and how I work on a daily basis.
I’m not claiming that I am an extremely productive or efficient person. This is just how I work and what I have found works for me.
I am always trying to improve this as well, so any feedback you have please let me know what you think!
Goals before hacks
In order to be productive, I need to have clear goals.
I have to ask myself…
What, specifically, is it that I want to achieve? Can I break it down into smaller projects and tasks that I can work on today?
If I can’t answer these questions, then everything will fall apart and I will barely have the willpower to work more than a 3 hour day. I can always fake it for a bit, but it won’t last long.
I witnessed this a few months ago when I lost sight of my goals. At time, I didn’t know what I wanted, although I won’t go into it.
But during this time I wasn’t very productive and didn’t have much motivation to work hard.
But after that slump, my goals became more clear, and I slowly got back on track.
If you are having trouble focusing or getting meaningful work done, it might be worth it to think about your goals - and not just for 10 minutes - spend some time each day refining what specifically it is that you want.
Always be experimenting
It’s important to keep trying new productivity techniques and softwares, adding and subtracting new things often.
I’ve found that there is no single system or technique that works best. Our lives change and evolve, and so should our ways of getting work done.
I’ve learned Pomodoro, GTD, watched countless YouTube vidoes. I’ve used simple todo lists, Post-It notes, Trello, Notion, Google Calendar, and the list goes on.
By the time you’re reading this, my framework has probably changed.
But I think that’s part of the fun of it all.
Discovering and implementing a new productivity technique gives me a “boost” of productivity. So if I’m feeling like something has become stale or not working like it used to, I’ll go out searching for a new thing.
It’s exciting and motivating to try new things.
One thing to note - try to not get caught up in the productivity software stuff and switching to every new system. These softwares try to sell you on being more productive - but they won’t. Just pick one, they all do the same thing.
First I’ll talk about some key takeaways I’ve learned...
If you have trouble focusing or being productive (like I did), then it might be important to take a step back and figure out the fundamentals.
Go to the store, buy a stack of post it notes, write one task on each post it note (don’t pull them apart) and then place your post it stack next to your laptop.
Then, work on the item on the top of the stack until it’s complete. Once it’s done put it into the done stack. Then move to the next. If you realize you need to do something else, write that on the next blank post it note.
One cool side effect is that you can physically see that you’re getting work done.
I love this because it taught me two of the most important things:
What is deep work? An example would be going to a coffee shop early in the morning and working for 2 hours free of distractions. No email, no internet, no social media, no texting, etc.
If you can build a couple of hours a day of deep work into your life, you can achieve extraordinary things over time. A few hours a day can turns into thousands of hours a year of you working on the things you truly want to work on.
Building deep work into my days helped me grow Starter Story and was one of the main reasons I was able to quit my job after a year.
Here’s a video that sums up the messages from the Deep Work book.
How I work today
GTD
The main system I use today is a modified version of GTD, short for Getting Things Done.
GTD is a framework created by David Allen. It’s incredibly practical, and I love it.
For me, this is mainly for bigger picture stuff, so more products, features, code, and less day to day email stuff (that I’ve mostly systemized - which I’ll take about later in the post).
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.
This is Notion btw - but use Trello or index cards or post it notes. It doesn’t matter.
I’ll break down the different columns.
The In Tray
I use the In Tray as a sort of triaging station.
If I’m working on something and I’m like “Oh shit, I need to do X” I’ll immediately add it to my in tray so I can get it off my mind.
Every morning I go through my in tray and drag items to the to Today column, or delete them if I realize they are dumb. I’ll also check my calendar in case I have any recurring tasks or meetings (more on that later).
Today
Today is obvious, it’s all of the things I want to get done today.
I almost never finish it but I think it’s important to give yourself a bit more work than you think you can do. Keeps you working hard :)
Throughout the day, I tackle these as fast as I can while taking short breaks. Once I finish the task, it goes in the Done bin on the far right.
See the card on there that says Pomodoro x 4? That’s a task to work on email, which I’ll talk about a bit below.
Projects
These are the “bigger picture” projects that I’m working on. Tasks on the In Tray and Today columns usually correspond to these bigger projects.
Frequently, I’ll create new tasks based on these projects.
For example, I’m creating a YouTube video for this topic How I Work. It’s too big of a project to be just one task, so I will break it down into smaller tasks, like “How I Work” rough draft blog post.
Then next task might be “Revise Draft for How I Work”, then “Film YouTube video”.
Waiting For / Someday Maybe
If I’m waiting on something like buying an external hard drive next time I’m in an electronics store, I’ll leave that there so I can try to keep it top of mind.
If a task is something I want to do, but I don’t feel any obligation then I move it to Someday / Maybe but I rarely even look at that. If I don’t think it’s necessary then I should probably move it out of my sight.
Here’s an awesome video summary about the Getting Things Done book/framework.
Calendar
I use a calendar for recurring things that don’t fit into GTD.
For example, one weekly task I have is Finding and emailing 75 Starter Story leads… I need to do that every week so I can hit my targets, so I try to do that every Thursday.
On Thursday morning or when I get the alert, I will turn that into a Today task in GTD and try to get it done that day.
For me, this works surprisingly well for recurring things.
Same thing for my newsletter, publishing YouTube videos, monthly reviews, meetings etc.
Email
I do a lot of email. I’m probably tackling around 50 actionable emails per day - not including spam and newsletters and random crap. Most of this is Starter Story articles and all of the email correspondence that comes with that.
It is mindless but it is also very important to my business. My goal is to spend as little time in email as possible - so I can focus on creating.
I tackle all of my email with the Pomodoro technique, which I’ll talk about a bit in the next section.
I focus on Inbox Zero, which I really hard for me to hit but I try my best.
I archive/filter/unsubscribe to everything possible. I also I aggressively use Boomerang to stay on top of hundreds of in progress blog posts.
My new product, Pigeon is going to solve a lot of my email headaches which I’m really excited about. For example, I will be able to send a series of emails (drip) to someone that needs to finish their interview, rather than Boomeranging the email thread 4-5 times over the course of a few weeks. It’s going to save me so much time and allow me to raise content output going forward.
My email inbox after waking up this morning
Automate emails
There are also a lot of small tasks that I need to complete, like sharing Starter Stories on reddit, or updating missing information, or notifying people that their Starter Story is live.
I automate everything possible using tools like Sendgrid. Again, this is another thing that Pigeon will solve.
Email tasks
But some things cannot be automated and they require human interaction, so I use what I call email tasks.
For example, sharing Starter Stories on reddit. For reasons I won’t get into I am not automating this task (although I do schedule posts and have a bunch of code that helps me do this in 2 minutes).
But anyways, I have an automated email when a story goes live that I send to myself:
This email is helpful because I can tackle that task very quickly, less than (~2 mins) while I’m going through and getting my Inbox to zero with the pomodoro technique (talk about below).
This also has the hidden benefit of consistency. I would likely forget to do this sometimes. But if it’s in my email inbox, I have no choice.
I think this will also help me systemize for when I hire people too, but we’ll see on that.
Pomodoro
Last, but definitely not least is the greatest productivity hack I’ve found, the pomodoro technique.
I use this “hack” to tackle work that I don’t want to do, like email and monotonous Starter Story work (reading, editing, and revising content).
It’s really simple. Set a timer for 25 minutes and then just go hard on a specific task. When the timer is up, take a 5 minute break, and then do it over. I usually do this 2-4 times and then I can get my inbox to zero.
It’s crazy how much work I can get done with this method, I highly recommend it. If I can do 2 Pomodoro sessions in the morning, that means got all my annoying shit done in one hour - and I can free up the rest of my day to work on the stuff I really want to work on.
I’m quitting social media for 30 days. I will reassess on June 1.
Fuck it, I’ve had enough. It’s one of my goals for this year, but I’ve been putting it off for the “right” month.
May 2019 is the right month!
This is gonna be a short post, but I just want to announce it to make it official and to get myself to commit…
Why?
After going on Twitter today, I could feel the negative emotions come over me - mainly issues from comparison of other people.
I can also feel myself tying my own identity to Twitter. Happy when I get likes and comments. Sad when I don’t, or sad when I see others having success...
Rules
I’m already pretty much off Instagram, although I do browse it here and there. On Facebook I use the News Feed Eradicator so that’s pretty much worthless as well.
So rules are… No Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter, no LinkedIn, no Tinder/dating apps. No matter what.
The only social media I will be able to use is YouTube, but I’m not allowed to look at the comments of others videos. I want to focus on creating and I don’t have much of a following there anyway.
Ok I’m excited as fuck to do this… I will report on my experience soon!
In this video, he calls out other creators for forcing positivity in their videos. He suggests that many YouTubers are leading viewers on to believe that they are happy all of the time.
But this blog post isn’t about the state of YouTube creators…
His personal struggle
I think what’s more interesting about this video is the story that Felix tells about his personal experience faking positivity in his old videos…
Felix used to mainly create content about video games. For years, he would just make videos about that. He was very successful doing this.
But over time, he grew tired of making that type of content.
He claims that, at one point, he would turn the camera on, be super happy and excited, and then once the camera was off, he would be irritable. I think we can all relate to that!
But even though he was getting tired of making that content, his fans were not - and his channel was growing to become the biggest YouTube channel of all time.
A dilemma
Effectively, he had two choices:
1. Change up his content, piss off his fans, risk his channel “falling off” and be happy.
2. Keep the same formats, cater to his fans, and be miserable.
Obviously, #1 is the right thing to do. But most people pick #2. The idea of falling off is too scary. You’ve worked too hard to fail like that.
Why #1 is always the right decision
In hindsight, Felix obviously made the right decision (he picked #1).
In the short term, he pissed off some of his subscribers, but in the long term he is happier and (luckily) he also saw even more success.
The reason why #1 is always right is because of passion. If you choose #2, you will lose your passion. Sure, you can still pump out videos for a year and continue to get those dopamine hits of success, marginally growing your channel, but eventually you will burn out.
Passion is the fire that keeps you showing up every day, for years. Passion is the thing that will make your work not suck.
And this is why Felix has been so big for so long. His content, style, etc has evolved based on his passions. He can still show up every day on YouTube and be generally happy.
This video shows why Felix is the biggest creator on the planet - he is honest, stays true to himself, and does not make decisions based on numbers or success.
You must “niche down”
But following your passions is actually contrary to other advice you may hear.
You hear this phrase all the time… if you want success, you must niche down, or you need to get really good at one thing.
Although that’s probably good advice if you want to be successful, it’s definitely not going to give you happiness over the long term (by long term I’m talking 20 years).
At least for me, doing the same thing over and over again eventually takes a toll. Although it may bring success in the short term, it will eventually lead to burnout and quitting.
Do you know who is really good at doing the same thing over and over again? Companies. That’s what they are designed to do. As people, we are not - we need to keep evolving to be happy.
How this relates to me
So how did this video change my life? This is something I’ve been feeling a lot over the last month.
For 2019, I set crazy goals to try and accomplish things that I know will bring me short term success. I’m just realizing now that to accomplish those goals, I will need to do things that don’t really make me happy - and like Felix - it’s hard to find the passion for them.
Mentally, it’s wearing me down… I’m not looking forward to sitting down and doing some of this work I’ve set out to do. I want things to feel like they did one year ago, where I was literally overjoyed to sit down for 8 hours on a Saturday and ship side projects.
Now, it feels like “work”. It feels like burnout. And that’s exactly what I want to avoid - I quit my job to avoid that shit.
Yesterday, I was feeling mad shitty. I was debating with myself… Why can’t I get more done? Why can’t I get motivated to ship this feature that is next on my to-do list?
And then I realized it! It’s because I don’t give a fuck about the thing that’s on the top of my to-do list.
It’s like when people ask me to create a podcast for Starter Story. In theory, yes, it is a great idea and it would make me money. But I don’t have any passion for it! I would be fucking miserable doing it.
So I went through my to-do lists and did some deleting :)
Stop calling yourself a “maker”. Stop calling yourself an “entrepreneur”. Stop calling yourself a “Democrat”. Stop calling yourself anything.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about why we feel the need to use words like these to identify ourselves.
Have you ever seen someone’s social media bio that says something along the lines of “Entrepreneur, Writer, Speaker, Founder, Husband, Brother, Burrito Connoisseur...”?
Imagine meeting someone in real life and they introduce themselves like that… That person is a douchebag!!
Calling myself a maker
In my Twitter bio, I used to say I was a “maker”. At the time, it seemed like a nice word that generalized the things I was working on.
But for some reason, the word “maker” started picking up steam. Products and communities were getting created that supported makers. All of a sudden there were debates about being a maker, what it means to be a maker, the definition of a startup, etc.
This created a dichotomy - there was “pro-makers” and “anti-makers” battling it out on social media.
It was so cringey. It felt like a political debate.
Stopping calling myself a maker
So then I took the word “maker” out of my Twitter profile and I stopped using it altogether.
But taking the word out of my profile doesn’t matter. The fact that I had it there in the first place (and spent time to craft up a “cool bio”) makes me cringe a lot.
Maybe it’s human nature, but I think many people feel the need to identify with an idea, a group, or a movement.
There’s nothing wrong with being part of a group, but I think it’s important to understand why we identify.
Do you call yourself an entrepreneur so you can put “Forbes 30 Under 30” in your Instagram bio, or is building businesses something you truly love it and could see yourself doing it for 30 years with little success and never talking about it with anyone?
I am 100% guilty of this myself. I’ve made questionable decisions or identified myself with things for the wrong reasons, or just did things because everyone else was doing it - like going to college or exploring careers that I really had no true interest in.
I think it’s important to make a conscious effort to try and avoid these motivations.
Stay out of your comfort zone
Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time in Telegram groups, online communities, and Twitter.
While these can be massively beneficial, I think they are also very limiting because they are filled with people who all have very similar opinions!
And I think this feels nice because it’s comfortable. It’s easy to get validation for the things you do.
But it’s important to keep exploring - discovering new people, groups, identities, topic etc..
I need to more actively follow people that have nothing to do with startups. I need to read unrelated books, and meet people that have no idea what a “maker” is.
Don’t tell, listen
I shouldn’t need to use words or phrases to support my identity.
I should let the work I do speak for itself. Instead of telling people what I am, I should listen more. I should inquire, dig deeper, and be more curious.
And when I listen to people, I shouldn’t try to connect the dots to my own narrative or ideas of how the world works.
This is why I’ve left a lot of Telegram groups, limited Twitter use, and stopped browsing many online communities. I get frustrated with the groupthink - no one is going to remember what a “maker” means in 10 years.
Over the last year, I’ve done a bunch of work automating stuff for Starter Story. One of the bigger automations I shipped was social media.
Today, my Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts are 100% self sufficient, posting daily content without any work from me :)
As a solo founder, I believe it’s important to automate as much as you can. Freeing up your time is crucial to getting more done. Also, as a programmer - automating things is fun and it’s a pretty cool feeling to have code working for you while you sleep!
I’ve had a few people ask me about this on Twitter, so I figured I’d write a quick blog post about why and how I did this.
Note - this post is about automating my business social media accounts. I think automating stuff on your personal accounts or using bots is bad.
Why I automated social media
As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages of having an automated system. First I'll talk about the advantages:
Save time!
I publish new articles on Starter Story every day, so reposting those stories on three different social media platforms is time consuming!
Let’s say that it takes 5 minutes to publish each post on social media… With 7 articles a week on 3 platforms, that’s a couple hours of work per week saved.
No longer think about it
You know when you’re working on something important (and unrelated) and you then you realize you need to do something else that is time sensitive (like post on social media)?
For me, that is extremely disruptive to productivity. Little things like that can derail my focus and lead to getting way less things done.
Now, I no longer think about social media. I turn notifications off for those accounts and I rarely check them. It’s one less thing I have to think about.
Computers are loyal
Humans are forgetful and lazy.
For me, it’s hard to do simple repeatable tasks over long periods of time unless I can turn them into habits.
If you don’t have clear systems for tasks, I will probably forget about them or be too lazy to take action.
But... computers are not forgetful or lazy!
A computer doesn't make mistakes - it always shows up on time, and it never complains :)
There are some downsides to automating
Let’s be honest - the main downside to automating social media is less audience engagement (likes, comments, etc).
Because it's automated, you have less room to be creative and spontaneous in your posts - and your post likely won’t go viral or something like that.
Your followers will also likely catch on that your content is automated in some way. If they perceive this, they may be less likely to like, comment, or engage with it.
So, I think you need to weigh the pros and cons.
Is social media your main marketing channel?
If it came down to a question of automating or not - I think this is the question that can help answer it…
Is social media your main marketing or acquisition channel?
If not, then I think you should just automate it and forget about it. If it is, then you should probably not automate and put a lot of work into your posts.
For Starter Story, my main acquisition channels are Reddit and search engines. I get, maybe, 10% of my traffic from social media, so for me it makes sense to just automate it.
Automation is an iterative process
Here's something that I don't hear people talking about enough…
Automation is a slow, iterative process (at least for me).
I didn't have my social media automated in one night. In fact it probably took me months to have the thing full automated.
Start with a manual process - then slowly work towards automation
My process always starts manually.
I want to see what works and get a feel for the work involved. Then, I work (slowly) towards automation.
For example - how do hashtags work on Instagram? I had some trial and error there, and learned some things by manually testing it out.
Seeing what works and what doesn't is important and can later inform you on what to automate.
Building automated systems is complicated
A truly automated system is not built overnight (at least for me).
There are many moving parts and I often can't code it up in a couple hours session. So I'll usually start by automating the most time consuming thing.
For example, the first thing I automated was the image assets, this is what they look like today:
Before I had these automated, I was manually creating these assets in Canva! This was a process that took at least 10 minutes, but I felt it was important, especially for social media link previews.
So, this was the first thing I automated - it would save me the most time and it was clear what I needed to do.
Step 1: I designed that image with HTML/CSS and then just started manually taking screenshots of it which saved 10 minutes per post.
Step 2: I set up a screenshot service to automatically do the screenshotting.
Step 3: I wrote the code generates the copy for the social media post, etc etc.
And I did this over a longer period of time. Breaking it up into smaller tasks allowed me to save time with each task, but also not get overwhelmed with the project.
How I did it
Now that I explained some of the why and my high level thoughts, I'll go over the specific implementation.
The creative
It's easy to just automate posting text to social media, but generating dynamic image assets was quite a challenge for me!
The way I do it today is I have a special page that has HTML/CSS that looks like the image.
It's just a regular page on my website, you can see a live version in action here:
Notice the last two paths in that URL? That controls the width and height of the assets.
For instagram I use a "square" image, where Facebook/Twitter I use a more rectangular shape.
Taking screenshots
Now, I have to convert that page into an image.
This part was actually sort of challenging! I couldn't find a good (and free) solution at all.
PhantomJS usually works pretty well, but the issue I ran into was that it doesn't support Flexbox and other CSS stuff that I needed. The screenshots came out all wonky.
I ended up finding a puppeteer based solution - which supports Flexbox - here. You can also specify the width and the height of the screenshot browser window - it was perfect.
Once I take a screenshot of the image I upload it to S3. I also use that image as the og:image for the article page.
I will spare you my code on this because it is absolutely horrendous.
I have some logic set up in my app that anytime a story is updated, a job will run to take a new screenshot. So if the title is updated, I get a new screenshot automatically.
Posting to social media
Now that I have my images (the hardest part IMO) I have to actually post them to social media.
I run a sidekiq job once every morning that looks at every published post the day before and runs the code to post those to Buffer.
Logistically, this allows me to make last minute changes to posts or still post something later in the day, knowing that the social media worker will run the day after publish.
Social media API
I post to social media using the Buffer API - their API is fucking amazing and the best part is that it supports Instagram - which at the time of writing is a very new API.
What's nice about using Buffer is their queue system. When I add a post to Buffer, it doesn't immediately post right away, it gets queued up to be posted based on a schedule I set - which is customizable by the platform.
Here’s my Instagram schedule:
This is nice because my worker runs early in the morning and sometimes I have multiple posts getting published in one day but I'd like the social media posts to be spread apart.
Here is the basic code I wrote to post to the Buffer API. Super easy!
Generating copy
This is another possibly overlooked, but easy thing to make your posts look a bit less automated.
Different platforms have different standards or expectations of the "copy" or text that goes into the post.
For example:
Twitter only allows 280 characters.
Instagram doesn't allow links.
You can put a ton of text inside Instagram caption.
I won't go into too much detail here but will show a few screenshots of what my copy looks like:
For Instagram, I have a set of 1-200 hashtags and I randomly select 30 to include in the bottom of the description.
Tagging people
Another easy thing to do that will help with engagement - tag people in your posts!
When people get tagged, they get notified! Which may mean more retweets, shares, followers, etc.
In my interview form, I try to get people’s Instagram, facebook, etc handles and I save them in my database.
When I go to write the copy for the post, I check to see if they exist in my database and include it in the copy if it is.
Other social media posts I've automated
Other than just new posts whenever I have a new story, I also have automation set up for a couple other things.
Twitter Quotes
I run a daily worker that picks an article at random, finds blockquotes inside the article, and then posts them to Twitter.
Only took me like an hour to write that code and it's a nice way to switch it up.
Tools posts
Because I have every interviewer record the tools that they work with, I have another Twitter post that tags all of these companies.
A couple weeks after a story is shared, I will create another post that lists out these tools and tags the companies.
It's a nice way to engage the community!
That's it!
Hopefully this post didn't bore you too much!
Although this stuff may seem pretty obvious or whatever, I really did enjoy building these automations and it's a pretty cool feeling to never have to do anything, and having robots working for you while you sleep!
Thanks for reading and please reach out if you have any questions on any of this.
I flew out to Bangkok and traveled with my mom and sister for two weeks.
Although I enjoyed traveling, it is hard to not work for that long... towards the end I started getting antsy - squeezing in a few hours of work every couple days…
I got to Chiang Mai mid month (where I am now) and still struggled a bit to adjust. Wasn't sure what to expect... What's the life of a digital nomad like?
Turns out they just work a lot 😂
Was also lucky to find a few @wip'ers in CM - so that's been nice to have some friends.
But it also feels like another world for me.
It's weird. My routine is all over the place. I've lost track of the day of the week. Sometimes I work until 2AM and doesn't feel like I'm doing something wrong...
But the freedom is also reallyyyy nice.
Ok back to the business stuff -- traffic was down this month.
Was getting a bit worried but I think it's attributed to it just being the holidays. I think maybe people are less interested in starting a business at this time. In the new year I'm seeing it spike really nice.
And google traffic is continuing to spike! In the past few days, I've been seeing 700+ uniques/day from google search - that's an all time high!
Since "business" was a bit dead this month, I spent a ton of time on features and clean up - which has been really nice.
I quietly shipped a Starter Story Premium Membership!
This will be my first attempt at true MRR, and it is very much a work in progress - I'm excited to add more features over 2019 and really understand how to create an MRR business.
And this month was big for backend stuff.
As I'm scaling up everything - I need to be utilizing all of the code I can to grow the website while staying a 1 man team. Some stuff I'm working on…
Most notably, I'm working on a "true" CRM.
I want to eventually be able to manage hundreds of in-progress interviews and content - and not do it through email.
What I'm building will save me 10 hrs/week + I think it could productized for other multi author blogs!
Another big thing - my end of the year blog post!
I almost didn't write it... got nervous it would come off too corny.
Very glad I did tho - had so many ppl msg saying it inspired them / it was a nice to give people (not on Twitter) an update!
I also got back into running and I signed up for a half marathon in Bali.
Feels really nice to get back into it and it's helping me focus and I'm feeling a bit healthier.
Lastly, I spent a lot of December thinking about my goals for 2019 - I don't think I ever spent that much time on goals before - constantly revising them and thinking about them often.
Here they are...
I'm so amped up for 2019, and over the past couple weeks I've been feeling really focused and happy.
