Reactor

Mark's streak app isn't done, but his attempt to build longer streaks of consecutive livestreaming days is paying off. He's published 5 videos within a week and its effect on his YouTube traffic has been remarkable. The rolling 28-day numbers are as follows: views +77%, watch time +75% and reach +109%. It hasn't translated into more money (yet), but that's not surprising given that YouTube views are high up in the Alchemist Camp sales funnel.

Justin's still making gradual progress on refactoring his Roblox game, Slider. He's added more instrumentation, gotten some expert advice and planned out some changes to the

We also talked about the equal pay for remote work topic that's been trending, the scalability of membership sites, Mark's Black Friday, and the psychology of pricing.

Video version here

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-11-18

The results of Mark's livestreaming are in! It's taken some focus and effort, but it's greatly increased his production per hour of work. The quality of the screencasts is slightly worse, but his YouTube views are up by 50%, watch time is up 83% and he's picked up 11 Twitter followers.

Justin has continued working with Chris, the Roblox dev he mentioned meeting last episode, and it's been productive. He's changed the way Justin approaches the entire game. He's now taking a much more analytics-driven approach to increase player retention at every subsection of the game. A key part of this is looking at each player's success to failure ratio at each portion of race tracks.

We finished the talk with an extended discussion about livestreaming, working in public generally, why it's hard not to be self-conscious and how there can still be a big upside.

Video version here

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-11-04

Justin has met another interesting character in the Roblox dev space. He's released about 100 games, has interned at Roblox itself and has over a million monthly players on his own games. He's been checking out Slider and giving Justin some advice—primarily to make the game less linear.

Mark has also been inspired by a game dev on YouTube gotten some useful takeaways from him. His name is "The Cherno" and uses livestreams as a way to create graphics engine development screencasts for his audience. He records very long livestreams, gets what he wants to screencast figured out and then does them live in just a couple or usually in a single take! The quality of his screencasts dropped when he started doing this, but the recent ones are very good.

Justin also went on Startups for the Rest of Us for an interview, Starlink has some very eyebrow-raising clauses in its TOS and the NTD is getting strong.

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Justin was up until after 2am working on his Roblox game and implemented area locking so that players need various keys to access tracks. He's also been meeting some other developer dads.

Mark got bogged down in planning out videos and coming up with ideas for drawings to support them. As a result, he's got a lot of plans but no videos :/

Friend of the show, Matteo had a successful product hunt launch for Heyhi!

In other news, Apple has just announced a new iPhone with lots of cameras. Also, Sidecar has started requiring 2nd factor authentication on both the Mac and iPad sides before it works (even when the two are joined by a USB cable.

Finally, US time zones are really, really strange. Do not handle them yourself unless handling them is "what you do".

Video version at https://youtu.be/YYunEPknwgg

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/34

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-10-14

Justin's been following the election news closely, and the president's covid case in particular.

In contrast, the issue dominating Mark's social circle and former co-workers has been H1-B visa changes. In his opinion the effects of the new regulations raising the minimum salary will be fairly nuanced and minor. The minimum salary requirements are going up, but not to nearly the level they initially were (adjusted for inflation). The number of applications in the lottery will probably decrease total number won't change. Most importantly, and unfortunately, H1-B holder's residence permission will still be tied to their employer.

tldr; small win for skilled applicants and the largest tech companies, and a huge loss for low-end outsourcers who were flooding the system.

Using WASM feels like living in the future to Mark, but Roblox development feels nostalgic to Justin... because it's rapidly developing and booming. Having been around computers and the web as they've exploded over the past few decades, rapid change itself is nostalgic!

Speaking of Roblox dev, Justin's never done this kind of of dev work before but has gone from zero to a playable and mostly "finished" graphical game. Of course with this kind of thing there's a lot of work to polish a game until it's profitable, but it's looking really good for such a new project. Justin says this is a counter-intuitive market where it's better for a bootstrapper to build the actual thing instead of selling picks and shovels.

Sometimes the best language updates don't add much in terms of syntax or functionality. They just make things faster and improve the tooling.

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-10-07

The weather has been fantastic in Taiwan as it always is around Halloween, but Mark's been really feeling the pressure to meet the requirements to renew his entrepreneur visa. He suspects that the easiest route will be to earn enough to hire three employees, or possibly to to set up a local company and spend a required amount. . Justin thinks the best bet to hit that goal is to work hard on his starter kit—Phoenix Igniter.

Nugget's star pupil, Mateo, made his first sale on his project Heyhi! This is great news for Justin since he's been looking for the right case study. It could start with how he heard about Nugget, how he went through the lessons, started building experiments and finally profitable apps. Justin has basically boiled down the lessons from Nugget into a single sentence: "Hyper iterate on the product, talk to people and make what they need".

Alex Hillman and Daniel Vassallo had an interesting debate on Indie Hackers about the value of an email audience vs a Twitter audience. We thought they both made a strong case, but leaned towards email for long-term safety if nothing else.

Justin explained quite a bit more about how strange and interesting the Roblox dev environment is. Multiple devs and builders can all work on a game simultaneously and see the effects of each other's efforts in real time. It also wraps up client-server communication in a way that reminds Mark of 2013-era Meteor.js with Mini-mongo available in the browser's dev tools. The competition in Roblox dev is intense and it's fairly alien for a web dev, but Justin's got some big goals.

Video version at https://youtu.be/TRNv3XsI0hs

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-09-30

California is burning, and Justin's got cousins were in the evacuation zone. So, they, their kids and their pets are all staying with him and it's a crowded house for a bit. That affected Justin's plan to use the trampoline daily but he's made good progress on Slider.

Mark got three premium screencasts and one free one published, did a bit of work on the Alchemist Camp site itself, and finally got some work done on Phoenix Igniter! He also survived a fairly persistent spammer attack. It's unclear what their goal was, but they created hundreds of accounts in a short periods of time. Many had odd usernames, such as URLs or a concatenation of obvious spam terms, but those names aren't visible to other users. Mark had to deal with it in real-time, harden the signup process enough to deter them and then do a bit of research to make sure the next bots have an even harder time.

Mark loves the new iPad & pencil! It's completely replaced his Wacom tablet and he's been doing some drawing drills and even putting a few sketches into his YT videos. He's also gotten back into using it to generate ideas about different topics daily (see link to "Altucher Idea Muscle"). One thing that's come out of this is a lot of offerings he could add to Alchemist Camp.

Nugget Bootcamp's stats have worked out to very round numbers. Out of 330 people who started, 30 finished. Of them, 3 bought. So it's about a 10% conversion from starting to finishing the mini-course and about 10% of those who finish buy the full course. The next step is to get feedback from successful students and add testimonials throughout the course.

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Recorded on 2020-09-23

Justin is energized with his conversation with the other Justin on Techzing earlier in the week. What it takes for an entrepreneur to succeed as an entrepreneur, even in a limited sense, is so situational and poly-causal. It's very difficult to make a consistent, timeless framework. Justin is looking for a way to boil it down to first principles, but Mark is skeptical about the return on effort for people learning from them.

Mark's new microphone is here and so far the results have been good! He managed to do a decent length run completely fasted this week and is going to try to keep the diet in check and continue intermittent fasting. He got some work done on an easter egg in Alchemist Camp, but still hasn't gotten back to Igniter. The mic is making it easier to record screencasts efficiently though, since it blocks out most background noises.

People are getting through the Nugget bootcamp, but very, very few are signing up for the paid course afterwards. It's difficult to tell if it's due to how they found and chose to sign up, but it's somewhat surprising that people finishing a free course would be less likely to sign up than those who were pitched straight from email.

Gitlab's second reduction of CI/CD minutes is starting to bother Mark. The first reduction wasn't onerous at all, but now he's a bit concerned, especially for any projects written in Rust that have longer compile times. For now, it's okay, but even needing to worry about whether or not to delay a deployment is enough that he's starting to look for other options.

We also discussed some of the historical hate JavaScript has gotten, its subsequent popularity and the limits of what makes sense for a someone working on a solo project.

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-09-09

Mark "went" to Microconf's first remote conference. There were a number of technical issues, but he was fantatically lucky in terms of who he met during the breaks. The very first person he talked to, Richard, lives in Pasadena and knows Justin! He also met someone running a large Elixir meetup and one of the founders of Elixir Drips, the OG screencast that started the niche Alchemist Camp currently occupies!

Justin extended the launch of his bootcamp to his entire email list and is already seeing over 100 people going through the 7-day course. He's offering the premium version of the entrepreneur academy to people who complete it but none have bitten so far. The next step will be to share it on HN to get more people in the funnel and make A/B testing possible.

In related news, Mark has realized that the median result of writing a blog post on Questing Log and submitting it to HN is hitting the front page and getting to #2. We talked a bit about post titles, submission times and user accounts.

There was an interesting discussion between Alex Hillman and Justin Jackson on Twitter about how important it is or isn't for an entrepreneur to build an audience. Mark mentioned it, and as a result Justin jumped onto Twitter after the show and ended up recording an impromptu TechZing interview with Justin Jackson!

We discussed podcasting mics in depth! Hat tip to Ben Orenstein and Pat Flynn for their suggestions and hopefully you'll be able to hear the difference soon! Probably not on Spotify though, at least not in a very listenable version...

Video version at https://youtu.be/q6cs2BCah_c

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-09-02

We've finally got intro music for our show! In classic Justin Vincent style, he chose one of the old songs from his Irish rock band days and added some new sounds to it. His son Jack, sang the high parts and his wife Georgie did the voice intro. The added sound effects came from Justin's game dev library.

The soft launch of the Nugget Bootcamp has gone fairly well. Just over 6% of everyone who tried, it went through all seven modules. This is better than expected, given how most of the traffic came from unqualified leads on a Facebook group.

Mark's done well on goals this past couple of weeks. He's (mostly) stuck to the diet and dropped another 2cm from the waist, and is at nearly $4k revenue for the month! Though Alchemist Camp's true MRR has grown, this month was particularly good due to a number of yearly signups and renewals.

An interesting blog post came up that looked at the top 50 YC startups (by valuation) and what back-end languages they used initially. It was shockingly dominated by Ruby. 70% of the YC startups had a single initial primary back-end language. Those who primarily used Ruby represented 52% of the total valuation, those primarily using Python contributed 17% and no other language passed 3%. Some of the companies near the top of the list are relatively young, too.

Justin is buying a trampoline.

Video version at https://youtu.be/CEwiqEX19_I

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On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-08-26