Reactor

Recorded on 2020-03-11

Justin has made a breakthrough! After years of effort, he's finally found a way to keep his blood sugar low with a diet he can sustain. Mark is cautiously optimistic but wants to see a few more weeks of data. (21:50)

Mark talks about consumer surplus and his thoughts about the patio11 / Ben Ornstein camp of "charge more" vs the Adam Wathan approach of selling $1000+ products for $150. Both strategies can be very successful, but which works better when? (41:55)

Justin created his own utility-based CSS framework with which to build his new app, Taskflow... because that's what he does. It's a little bit inspired by Tailwind. (52:45)


Goals discussion at 1:00:50

Mental Model

Justin's goals for next time

Mark's goals for next time

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/PYhB6a12rMg

Justin has a work-related trip to Denver coming up and Mark is getting tired of being under the CDC order to wear a mask. He estimates there's a 95% chance the virus will not be contained and 45+ states will have outbreaks.


Mark didn't get the analytics site launched, but he hit his other big goal of starting the email automation done and did some fasting. Justin didn't make it out swimming but made some good progreess and some decisions about Taskflow. (27:00)


Since he already has a sizeable audience, he doesn't really need to follow his own advice for entrepreneurs in the Nugget Academy. He can skip several of the steps and move a bit faster.

The details of Taskflow are a bit complex to work through. Productivity strategies are a big portion of the tool, and different strategies have different "ingredients". Power users can custimize quite a bit. For example, one user pursing a "quick wins" strategy might make small task size 5x more of a prioritzation factor than the financial impact of completing it. Another user might make it a 10x more important factor. (33:40)

Justin's reasoning about why it's valuable to get to a new "layer" of a large market (36:20)

One additional constraint is that this will be a freemium app used by many, many users if things go well and Justin wants to avoid external job queues as much as possible. It's probably going to have to be a SPA eventually, too.

This week's mental model is borrowed from Alan Kay's "The power of simplicity" talk, and we had a good discussion on the trade-offs of building your own widgets versus using other people's. (1:07:12)

Goals discussion at 1:11:02 and 1:22:01

Mental Model: Blue plane, red plane

Upon returning from Japan, Mark was ordered by the CDC to wear a mask when in public for the next 14 days, which completely derailed his running plans. He managed to get three screencasts recorded, surpassing the goal of two, though.



Justin got quite a few mockups for Taskflow finished, despite having a crushing week at work. The progress was a bit surprising and starting at 14 minutes into the episode Justin shares his mindmapping and planning tool and we do a long deep-dive on what he's building and go over the mockups.

About 95% of the discussion can be followed just through audio, but it's definitely worth seeing the video!

Mental model (starting at 56:19)

Justin's goals for next time

Mark's goals for next time

Mentioned

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/zbgHOwO1BIk

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/9Z3tJVUdo-k

Mark's made good progress on his goals and has mostly built the MVP for the site for this podcast and has made two tutorials for Alchemist Camp out of the work so far. Unfortunately, he didn't have any time to work on his analytics project and though he finished the whole Laravel series on git, it was a bit too basic.

Justin's attempts at lowering blood sugar haven't gone so well, but on the good side, he's making progress towards his project management tool and has a fairly novel idea of making task management strategies a top-level primitive in his app—choosing a different strategy would re-rank tasks based on the strategy the user currently wants to use. He's also settled on a working name of "Taskflow".

DHH has been talking about Lambda School quite a bit and Mark thinks it's interesting. On one hand, he's pretty bullish on bootcamps and education outside of universities and there are real disadvantages to putting most people through the same credentialed system. On the other hand DHH, had some points about how much of an indictment on the US system it was that economically disadvantaged people were interested in 30k loans for a 9 month online course to begin with.

Justin's been reading about the weirdness of colors and human perception, but he's never heard of "the dress" that broke the internet in 2015!

Mental model:

Justin's goals for next time:

Mark's goals for next time:

Mentioned:

Video version at: https://youtu.be/9Z3tJVUdo-k

This episode Justin and Mark start rough with shape for the show. Crystallization is happening!

Since Mark wants to know how Justin gets traffic to Speak, or any of his projects, that becomes the mastermind portion of the show. Mark talks about his old AS3 flash games he made when he was learning to program, Unity, and a mental model Mark borrowed from experience playing racing games as a child. Justin's thinking about how Mark's "Engines vs Power-ups" model could have helped Nugget's initial format and the power of blogging.

We discussed Tim Ferriss's blog post on the downsides of fame, Bill Murray's response and how the article relates to the idea of "Luck Surface Area". Finally, we talked about Mark's progress building the site (and making screencasts out of the process) and our goals for next week.

The original show plan:

Mentioned

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/AXYNSUvigpU

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/euTFeerH8us

This episode Mark goes over his basic signup flow for new customers. One goal is to give users an incentive to sign up and another is to get more information to segment new signups and suggest appropriate lessons for them. Aside from improving the signup flow, he's also looking at ways to get more people to the site to begin with and experiments that might help existing customers get more out of it.

Should he open source a ConvertKit API wrapper library? Would that move the needle at all?

Justin suggests creating a "seed group" of customers who are more involved in Alchemist Camp and creating a chat group for them, not integrated into the site, but something like Slack, Discord or even IRC.

On Justin's side, it was a busy week at the day job but he also took a look at the top of his customer discovery funnel and realized his blog is in need of a refresh.

In the process of trying to decide what to work on, a new idea emerged. Justin is seriously considering making a productivity app to solve his problem. It's tentative name is Task Flow. Mark was Gobsmacked that Justin is taking on a side-side-SIDE project (along with raising a kid and a CTO job), but Justin makes the case that all three products are synergistic.

Mental model:

Mind Mapping Software:

Also mentioned:

Glossary

This show is an experiment. It's part podcast and part mastermind video chat.

(Video version at: https://youtu.be/rrz3h7z1-rw)

Justin Vincent is a cohost of the Techzing podcast, runs the Nugget Academy for entrepreneurs and has bootstrapped many, many products. He's also working on a product called Speak and possibly another side-side project.

Mark runs Alchemist Camp, a site with tutorials and screencasts that teach the Elixir programming language. He's working on making a starter kit for Elixir web apps using Phoenix Framework and an analytics service.