I had another nonstandard and scattered week, though it wasn’t bad.
The big thing that happened (and took 40% of my time) was I took on my first freelancing gig.
I was helping a local startup development shop called Playlogix
build out a pretty simple landing page / website for a project because they were in a capacity crunch.
What was fun about the project was being able to crank the thing out in less than half the time
they had allocated for the project and generally the seeing people consistently surprised/impressed by how
fast and well I was able to put the thing together.
I may know next to nothing about launching a revenue generating product, but it’s nice to be reminded that I’m still
a pretty decent builder of things, and that’s a pretty high-value skill.
They immediately asked for more of my time, which I will likely turn down—but it was a fun way to see how local shops work
and get a bit of money in the bank!
I also open-sourced my wedding website (from my own wedding) and
posted it to /r/django just
to gauge interest.
It got to #1 pretty quickly and sat on the front page for over 24 hours so I’m going to keep pursuing that as a new project to play with—hopefully
as a way to use the wedding connection to get some SEO juice for placecard.me.
I also got a couple notes from people that want to use it for other weddings which is fun.
Goal Report Card
| # |
Goal |
Grade |
| 1 |
Ship something! |
A |
| 2 |
Run some more ads somewhere besides Google |
A |
| 3 |
One proper blog - wedding website |
C |
| 4 |
Continued efforts on traction |
C |
| 5 |
Spend one hour with tensorflow |
F |
Comments
- I’m counting the wedding website as shipping this week. Want to get back in the habit of having this goal every week.
- Ran ads for placecard.me on reddit. Was interesting and educational. Cost per click was low but value per click was also low.
Might write a bit more about this in the future.
- Wrote a ton about the wedding website but have not finished or shipped it. This is a big goal for this week.
- I apparently spent 6 hours on this but I’m not quite sure what I did.
- Random learning goal to dip my toe into the world of AI. Failed.
Time
Week 14 time breakdown
Changed up my time logging a bit to pull placecards out as it’s own top level entry so that it would be easier
to track work I spend on it in different buckets (traction versus product).
Otherwise you can see the big change here is two days of contract work that ate into my other buckets,
and starting to spin up work on the wedding website.
Notably absent is writing, which is something I want to get back into next week.
Life
Another week, another Lundy hike off the list.
I’m now pretty set on doing every hike in his awesome
“Best Walks in the Cape Peninsula” book,
and I’m well over halfway there.
So far he has yet to disappoint.
This time we took a stroll through Silvermine Nature Reserve with some amazing views over Hout Bay and
ventured up to Elephant’s Eye cave, a giant gaping hole in the side of the mountain that looks like the eye of an elephant from far away.
Caught this little fella admiring the view over hout bay.
—Cory