Reactor

Justin has made some progress with his Nugget bootcamp but much more importantly he has become a Robux Millionaire. The secret is playing games with your five year-old and then setting up auto-clickers to harvest in-game resources.

The Reactor site is really close to ready to deploy. It's 99.9% there. Mark has completely failed on his diet goal. He only managed to stick to it four out of seven days instead of six of seven.

Justin talks about just how big of a deal traffic is. It's like a resource you can use to mould and shape a business from. His number 1 advice for someone starting out is to learn how to build an audience. That ability leads to all kinds of opportunities and speeds up learning. Don't worry who it is at first, just learn how to build an audience 

Mark can't disagree as the very most successful indiehacking friend he's ever known did it on the back of a very popular nutrition site monetized on the back of humble Google ads. One of the most useful tactics he's found so far is to notice when things are hard to Google and create content that answers the question better. Google often picks up the better content.

We also discussed a bit about top of the funnel strategies—producing more content, blog posts on broader topics, making YT clips of longer videos, and jumping into new tech that's still pre-1.0.

Mentioned

Justin's goals for next time

Mark's goals for next time

Joint goal

recorded on 2020-06-03

Video version at: https://youtu.be/FQjs-dXbltA

Mark had a great b-day party with his friends at a 熱少. Very unlike the situation where Justin lives in California, there were no masks, no social distancing and instead friendly old Taiwanese men at the restaurant joining in to offer happy birthday cheers.

It was hard not to think about the gulf of effectiveness between Taiwan's handling of the epidemic and the US's. We don't like to bore anyone with politics, but delved into it for 12 minutes following realization of how different our situations were. We talked about the epidemic, protests of police violence, health care, taxes and infrastructure.

Back to tech topics, we talked about the promise of web assembly, coding in WASM directly vs using Rust bindgen and how it could get adoption not just in browsers but also IoT.

Justin's still working on his bootcamp and working out a "level up" game for new founders—first get traffic, then find the right people and finally learn how to help them, make an appropriate product and sell it.

Which is easier to work on if you only have small chunks of time, code or written content? We disagree. But, our podcast traffic is growing... even though Mark still hasn't deployed to the site. He has started making some short clip videos from our discussions and sharing them on YT with some success.

Mentioned

Justin's goals for next time

Mark's goals for next time

Video version at: https://youtu.be/vDjYmbGou2k
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/16

recorded on 2020-06-03

Mark's week has been fantastic! Somehow, launching a 2nd product—Phoenix Igniter—seems to have had a great growth effect on his screencast business. He's also discovered a very much unexpected growth benefit to making Stripe revenue public on Indie Hackers.

In general IH hasn't been a great use of time for Mark, probably due to his niche tech stack and its relatively shallow focus on engineering. HN, on the other hand has been helping his business even when he's just commenting for fun. Justin's products are broad enough to do well on both.

Mark saw a Rust tutorial he really liked on HN. Justin's curious why Rust is so interesting to him, and what makes it useful in general. Mark's a big fan and sees it as an especially powerful tool for an Elixir dev to have in his or her toolkit.

Justin's week has been brutal. Between a bit too much to drink, a lack of sleep and getting even more into his son's game, it's been a poor week for hitting goals in the real world. Within the video game, though, he's done a substantial amount of engineering! He's been setting up a fully automated system for collecting, smelting and storing virtual ore.

Mentioned

Justin's goals for next time

Mark's goals for next time

Recorded on 2020-05-20


Video version at: https://youtu.be/vDjYmbGou2k

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/16

Justin's been agonizing over the writing of the new Nugget Bootcamp material, but Mark's week has been great! Well, aside from a concerning injury related to a previous muscle tear he suffered pushing a stuck SUV in the mountains of central Taiwan...

On the good side, Mark's Phoenix Igniter is launched! Justin is impressed with the sales so far, but Mark is a bit more reserved about it.

Justin's diet is on point, and he's been doing hill sprints!!! No wonder the blood sugar readings have been great! Unlike the temporarily incapacitated Mark, Justin is getting after it.

Due to his son Jack, Justin has become more and more drawn into the world of gaming and in particular Roblox. Just as one would expect in the internet, he quickly encountered some "killer" player types as soon as he logged into a server, but he's beginning to level up. (20m)

Mark goes into a bit of a rant about his struggles with his old startup, video chat and being reliant on a platform at 30m.

Mentioned

Recorded on 2020-05-13

Video version at: https://youtu.be/xQnQNJ0kvVc

Justin has been going deep on his bootcamp for new founders and pouring over two decades of notes from his own startups and those he's mentored. The most common failure mode that he's identified is founders biting off more than they can manage for their first projects. Mark was no exception with his businesses or even software projects. Devs tend to do the same, often attempting an ambitious game as one of their first projects!

Mark shows the site to host this podcast running locally and shows off the coolest revenue graph—going from zero to one sale for Phoenix Igniter! He's also finished setting up a Gitlab integration for it and a nice VuePress site for its docs. He's been getting a lot of new YouTube subscribers but not much revenue recently.

Justin has also been playing a LOT of video games with his five year-old son. This has lead to thoughts about founders as video game players who gradually level up, gain skills and become capable of taking on larger challenges.

Mark's goal for next time (54:33)

Justin's goal for next time

Mentioned

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

Mark is now only about a week away from having both residency and a health card! On the biz side, revenue from Alchemist Camp is flat, basically where it was two months ago, but YouTube views and subscribers are way up. He's given his paying subscribers access to Phoenix Igniter as a bonus perk and has been getting some great feedback so far.

Justin has also made some big progress. He's kept his glucose levels in range and has started doing hill sprints! On the biz side, Taskflow is now somewhat usable for project management, hooked up to a DB and has some new screens built out. He's also "accidentally" made a sale for his Nugget academy and is now working on a streamlined bootcamp version of the course.

Mental Model: Gresham's Law (26:58)

Mark's goals for next time (31:19)

Justin's goals for next time (33:38)

Make the Taskflow data editable from the condensed view screen

Get the Nugget bootcamp ready to share with experts and get their feedback

Keep blood sugar 70% in range

Mentioned

Alchemist Camp

Nugget Academy

Taskflow (coming soon!)

Phoenix Igniter

Video version at: https://youtu.be/Av3hH7607yI

Mark cleared the final hurdle in his path to once again gain residency in Taiwan! The last month has been full of unusual challenges and he feels a renewed energy now that they're cleared.

Alchemist Camp has simultaneously had its best growth ever in terms of email subscriptions, YouTube watch time and site usage and a slight revenue decrease. Justin suspects this could be due to the pandemic, but on the other hand it could be due to the fact that the recent tutorials have all been free.

Mark also took a page from Justin's book and used the power of structured procrastination to launch a starter kit product while procrastinating on the analytics product. It's called Phoenix Igniter and Justin loves the branding.

Speaking of structured procrastination, Justin has been working on Taskflow but hit a particularly annoying screen to design. As a result, he designed a new "bootcamp" version of Nugget! After that, the next step in launching it to his main list, drove him back to finishing the screen on Taskflow. He got the original task done AND a new product design done for a different product.

Justin has reached some clarity about the ways in which his business pursuits are altruistic and in which ways they're profit-driven. He's also realized something interesting about his earlier customers versus the more recent ones. At first people were primarily looking to Nugget for community and interaction with him. More recent customers have been much more transactional and utility-driven.

Goals discussion is at 30:10.

Mental Model: Comparative Advantage

Mark's goals for next time

Create 8 Tailwind CSS components for Phoenix Igniter

Record at least 1 video for Alchemist Camp

Get to the government office to submit all his paperwork

Justin's goals for next time

Do the 7 minute workout with the family

Finish the mind map

Get 5 people into a new Nugget batch

Mentioned

Alchemist Camp

Nugget Academy

Taskflow (coming soon!)

StatWatch

Phoenix Igniter

Video version at: https://youtu.be/A6cmboBvf1c

Everything is terrible for Justin, except that he's got a nice fireplace and enough logs to get through the snowy mountain weather. Mark's made great progress on dealing with all the immigration / banking hassles and the struggle is nearly over.

Mark's surpassed his goals, publishing four videos, building out more of the podcast site, gaining YT followers more quickly than normal and even getting in 5 workouts during the week. On the down side, only free usage of Alchemist Camp is growing. Paid usage has basically stayed flat and some new subscribers have been buying a single month's subscription, downloading everything they can and then cancelling. See the Reactor site at 6m.

Talk on Stripe's new subscription scheduling features and subscription vs one-off lifetime memberships at 17m.

Justin hasn't been feeling working on Taskflow, so the power of structured procrastination lead him to creating a new landing module and new offer for Nugget!

Justin shares a business analysis framework he's been using in consulting. This part is better on YouTube! (25:35)

Nathan Barry's rules (53:26)

Mark's goals for next time (1:03:27)

Justin's goals for next time (1:03:27)

Mentioned

Video version at: https://youtu.be/PEpelGW96HE

recorded on 2020-4-01

The mad scramble isn't over. Mark's bank closed his account, due to no action of his own. That sucks since he's halfway across the world during a pandemic. It was a rough couple of weeks, but ultimately he prevailed. The bank opened him a new account, reopened the debit card he had with him and connected the two.

Justin's blood sugar has been in range and he's finished the "now" screen for Taskflow as well as the "next task" UI. Between that, the day job he's just generally been crushing it for the past couple of weeks, from the comfort of his mountain home. Diet part is at 19m and Taskflow demo at 23m.

Justin's also considering launching a new Nugget batch. He's thinking that it might make sense to drop the prices due to the pandemic. There's also a question of how to make a "low-res" intro to help new students get a quicker overview before digging into the details of any part of the course. Pricing discussion starts at 40m.

Mark's thinking about branching out a bit further from Elixir and making videos about other topics that would also serve the same audience and Justin was very bullish about the idea. It probably wasn't optimal to make videos about Tailwind that assumed Elixir + Phoenix knowledge of its viewers. A few videos higher in the funnel that can bring new people to the channel is probably a good idea.

Goals discussion starts at 51m

Mark's goals for next time

Justin's goals for next time

Video version at: https://youtu.be/QxCra7EaPQc

Due to a sudden change in local immigration rules, Mark has to scramble to either get a resident visa or find a new place to live. He's made surprisingly good progress in the past couple of days.

Justin's "chop diet" has pushed his blood sugar even more into range and it's looking clear that this is the best diabetes controlling diet he's found in years of searching.

Progress is going well with Task Flow as well.

Justin has a few interesting links from HN. One involves an interesting use of 3D printing to help with the current crisis, but Mark is looking forward to the day when teenagers are "pirating" burritos by downloading and then printing them. (38m)

Discussion an other podcasts, media and contrarians at 44m.

Mental Model

Goals (49m)

Mark's goals for next time

Justin's goals for next time

Video version at: https://youtu.be/QI51QFSo_7A