I run an online marketplace selling digital study notes and taking a commission. It's provided most of my income for the past 10 years, often exceeding a developer's salary. I've got a YouTube video where I talk about the MVP and growing it in the early days: https://youtu.be/aKXlZz-wbmg
My personal strategies are
- investing in group hobbies that remain doable later in life (e.g. My granny in her 80s can't play piano anymore due to arthritis, but still sings in 3 choirs)
- making it a yearly goal to make a new friend every year, so as to fight off attrition
I'm a programmer/marketer with a YouTube channel teaching the SEO, copywriting, and marketing techniques I used to earn a cumulative 7 figures with my Rails app (2—sided marketplace for college notes).
I give each of these big ideas a folder on my computer and then fill that folder with markdown documents and think aloud via writing. The core idea is that I don't want to lose the momentum of my thoughts. Maybe that might be helpful for your use-case.
You specifically mentioned marketing/growth hacks etc.
I'm a programmer who bootstrapped a site 10 years ago and it's supported me since as an indie hacker. In order to learn about marketing, I held a monthly closed-doors growth hacking meet-up with other bootstrappers and founders to share our experiences about what works, so I've seen a fair amount of the territory.
Anyway I've got a YouTube channel where I share a lot of what I know, especially with respect to getting those first 1000 users. The focus is on marketing techniques that appeal to engineering types like me (e.g. scalable SEO generated from data; paid ads that you can leave running long-term etc.)
My context is scrappy (the biz only had between 1 and 4 employees), but what I know should be of interest to people in the early stages (less so for funded startups, where scale changes the game somewhat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzT-LQI6x0&list=PLpkoC9yJXD...
I was so disappointed when Gary stopped filming these videos that I started making my own screencasts in that style (non-beginner concepts, fast-paced, language agnostic, and terminal-first).
I'm not Gary, so the focus is shifted towards areas I have special interests in — namely: the day-to-day of running a software product business as an indie hacker/solopreneur.
For those reading this thread whose products or ambitions are more along the "indie hacker"/bootstrapper lines, I've got a bunch of screencasts talking about my experiences over a 10 year period building and living completely from the income of a (Rails/JS) web app (Oxbridge Notes) I built as a one man show.
The screencast topics include everything from getting an MVP out, to a tour of my web app and its admin area, to SEO/Google Analytics/online marketing strategies, to some system design stuff to make maintaining the code easier.
It might be worthwhile to figure out what brings you joy by randomly asking yourself how you are feeling from 1 to 10 throughout the day. You might be surprised, in that your joy rating in the moment may deviate heavily from what you predict. With this data you can start prioritizing activities and trying to change your situation.
I just have a git repo and bunch of markdown files put into folders that correspond to tags. A few people have asked me about it so I already started recording a video about it for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ
I know this question is probably intended as a technical one, but from a pragmatic/empirical perspective, the number one use-case of the blockchain is to raise money in a way that side-steps traditional causes of friction (e.g. financial regulations).
(I make no judgement on whether these sources of friction are worthwhile or not.)
As someone who is now over a decade into their programming career, today I find more value in doing analytical breakdowns of my various success and mistakes. What were my oversights on a project? How could I have communicated better? What made one particular library a success, etc.?
Therefore, after years of Anki, I've stopped adding new cards and doing repetition; instead I now focus on keeping a code diary. I've published the first couple of hundred entries here so you can see what this entails:
I see the relationship between my days of ankifying tidbits of knowledge and my current diarying as one of tactics vs. strategy. The Anki-stage was necessary to drill the basics. But now, a decade later, the focus is on the bigger picture — and trying to capture this bigger picture onto a double-sided flashcard is about as fruitful as trying to contain an ocean in a bathtub.
I went rather deep into ankification of computer science - 5500 cards deep. I've written up my experiences as a series of articles here for anyone interested
For me (neck and upper back pain) the trick is not so much the model of the chair but the presence of neck and head support. One of the standard Ikea models (Markus I believe) offers that and gives me essentially pain-free computing where thousand dollar chairs without that feature cause agony at the end of a day.
1. A book holder. I noticed I got back pain from studying in recent years. This was entirely attributable to my neck position and buying a book holder stopped this. This, in turn, decreases the resistance to keeping a regular study routine.
2. A box of a 100 wax ear-plugs. Unwanted noise stresses me, and now I can reduce its intensity by 80%.
3. An electric moped. Allows me to zip between cars and avoid traffic, effectively cutting travel time by 1/3.
4. A collection of decent, second-hand suits. Most people underestimate the signaling value in dressing smartly. I've noticed that strangers are far more likely to strike up conversations with me when I dress like a gentleman - you seem much less threatening, more like a "civilian".
Web developer's love of programming is what wins them (potentially) fantastic salaries in regular work; it's also what cripples their attempts to diversify their income.
Time and time again, I see programmer friends investing 6+ months of their time getting an "MVP" out the door. Instead they should be applying their problem-solving skills to figuring out how to test their market hypothesis an order of magnitude more quickly. For my business, that meant a plain HTML website — no JS, no backend — and a PayPal button. (If you care to hear the full story, I have a video and transcript here: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/MVP-&-Origin-Story)
I've founded and been running an independent software product for 10+ years and have lately recorded about 25 screencasts on lessons learned. Watch them at Semicolon&Sons https://www.semicolonandsons.com/
Topics include:
— The consequences of your attitude towards dependencies 10 years down the line
— Systems to reduce errors (and alert you of them when they do happen)
— Lots of command line fu (+ vim)
— Monitoring production services
— Softer stuff related to the commercialization of software (my screencasts come from the point of view that software is a means to an end). Therefore there's stuff on MVPs, SEO, Analytics, etc.
— Continuous integration testing systems and optimization
I try as best I can to make the screencasts language agnostic.