Day 343: November Review
These monthly reviews are useful for two purposes:
- Reflecting on the past month
- Planning the upcoming month
They become less useful for those purposes the longer I wait to do them since the new month gets mixed up with the previous month (harder to reflect) and there’s less time to make changes (harder to plan), so I’m going to try to actually do these on time from now on instead of doing them like half a month in.
What went well?
🛠 Fixed up my house
I decided to stop simply whining about things that are broken back at home and unlearned some helplessness by fixing things around the house: House Tasks Spreadsheet
My favorite part of this was putting together a window frame with my grandpa. It was special because there aren’t many opportunities for spending quality time with him, and it was a reminder of how much I respect his handiness and “can-do” attitude.
🎯 Launched Focus Mode on Intention
Decided to ship a feature I started working on about half a year ago. While it’s been super helpful for me personally, there hasn’t much usage from Intention users because it does require developing a new habit where you block off time before you start working. Still, I’m happy to have put some time into Intention and fixed some bugs as well.
🇹🇼 Moved to Taiwan
It happened! This started off as an inkling of an idea way back in May when Jen Yip mentioned the Gold Card in Show & Tell, and I thought about how neat it would be to go back to Asia for a while, especially since Taiwan has been incredible in its coronavirus response.
I wrote a guide for moving to Taiwan which got pretty popular in the r/taiwan subreddit and it even ended up being covered in Taiwan News. Getting all that attention on Road to Ramen felt a bit strange because I think of this as my personal journal and not as something that’s designed for public consumption. I need to do a better job of figuring out the “Road to Ramen is for journaling and dkthehuman.com is for posts meant to be shared” setup because so far I’ve just been publishing everything here.
What didn’t go well?
😅 Didn’t follow through on my reality check
In the beginning in November, I had a great conversation with Shiva where he helped me realize that I should focus on working toward the “making a living” part of my goal to “make a living building things I love”.
Actually, this is where these monthly reviews are incredibly helpful. Yesterday, during my weekly planning, I wrote down a bunch of tasks related to building cloud functionality for Browserflow, but reflecting on it now, that doesn’t make much sense. I know that if I start investing time into building the cloud functionality, I’ll go into another intense hermit coding frenzy where I don’t do anything but code for months. (That is, exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 7 months.)
Given that Browserflow works locally and isn’t dependent on the cloud functionality, it doesn’t make sense to prioritize building out the cloud stuff if my intention is to try to make this into a business.
Basically, I need to overcome my resistance to charging money for the stuff I make. The private beta seems like the most straightforward way to go about this so that’s what I’ll do.
Metrics
Users & Revenue
Even though Firefox’s Promoted Add-Ons pilot is over, they’ve continued displaying Intention on the front page of addons.mozilla.org which is why there’s significant growth in Intention users on Firefox.
Revenue is the same as it’s always been because I’m still not charging for Intention or Browserflow, heh. 😅
Time
Spent a lot more time writing Road to Ramen posts (hello, Taiwan posts) and significantly less time on Browserflow.
Overall reflections
The downside of financial security in the context of being an indie maker is that there isn’t much of a sense of urgency for actually turning projects into businesses. I’m fortunate to be in a position where even if I were not to make any money during 2021, I’d be completely fine.
But that won’t be the case forever, so I want to make sure I’m actually making progress towards making this into a financially sustainable lifestyle rather than me just sinking a lot of time into side projects. Gotta be a squirrel that stows nuts away in preparation for winter rather than one that’s just straight chilling and eating through his nut reservoir.
I’m finding it quite difficult to switch into this mindset though because I’m not very motivated by money. I mean, it’s important to have it in order to provide for your needs and I want enough to not have to worry about it, but I’m basically already there?
Geez, I’m comically bad at this.