- Worked nights & weekends from 11/11/2017 to 02/09/2018 (3 months) building Nugget 3.0 from the ground up
- Pushed Nugget 3.0 live!
Dad, indie founder, podcaster, game builder, CTO x 2. Teaching indie founders how to get from 0-1. More @ http://nugget.one/jv


- Fixed a few bugs related to users who don't have active subscriptions.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Put an ad for Nugget 3.0 in the free daily nugget.

- Make it clear that momentum updates are public
- Make links in profile popup work
- Fix no search results message
- Make user profile popups work in slack view
- Add first name or "There" to password reset email
- Make momentum messages append to each other
- Fix skewed leaderboard images
- In momentum format a - like a checkmark
- Make formatting work in comments (from markdown)
- More understandable hints in momentum popup
- Submitted today's Nugget

- Make the cancel stripe hook work
- Don't say [1 new] if I am the one that aded it
- Highlight new messages on any comment page since last time you came in
- Fixed a bug where some customers were not being linked correctly with their stripe active subscription
- Send email when someone replies to your comment
- Only send reply notifications to users with active subscription
- Send reply notifications via a job queue to speed the user experience up

- Show last updated time, if new items were added to today's momentum
- Add edit & delete comment functionality
- Decode html entities when loading comment to edit
- Fix nugget blog, all the assets are missing!
- Do not touch updated_at when voting on a comment
- Show individual users momentum i.e /momentum/justin
- Post today's nugget
- Create a way for admin to make accounts for reviewers
- Create a way for admin to upgrade existing accounts for reviewers

- Made it possible to "like" a nugget from "inside" a nugget
- Added a "Nugget Read Me" section to every nugget
- Wrote blog: "How to Multiply the Potential of Every Startup Idea"
- Wrote blog: "Don't Validate One Idea, Validate Three"
- Posted today's nugget

- Made the stripe webhook actually "work"
- Added tool tips to the main nav icons at the top
- Fixed input bug on Momentum Tracker
- Worked with @laura to create a sensible tagline for Nugget
Nugget is an online incubator and community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.
- Fixed a bug where blank momentum check-in followed by momentum comment crashed the system
- Converted "Nugget Read Me" to "Get the Right Mindset for Success" and made it hidden with an expand option
- Put backward and forward day-to-day navs in momentum
- Posted today's nugget

- Posted today's nugget
I've done less than I would have liked to today, but at the end of the day you have to make some room for family and weekends!

- Researched a tool like intercom to add to the site
I tried to work on my first marketing post today (a post to founder cafe announcing Nugget 3.0) but I found I just didn't have the mental energy (on this Sunday) to get that done. So, instead, I decided to watch some good TV...

- Posted on founder cafe announcing Nugget 3.0
- Posted on Indi hackers announcing Nugget 3.0: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/just-launched-nugget-3-0-and-online-incubator-and-startup-community-8c99bbfb14
- Added drift live chat widget to the public website let's see what that does for us
- Posted today's nugget
- Wrote the main draft of a new blog post aimed at Hacker News "Thanks for the Advice Grandpa - Debunking Conventional Startup Wisdom"

After installing Drift as a live chat widget I I'm not sure I like it because it doesn't have an option to say "We're away right now" and also it ends up being something like $360 month if you want any of the interesting features.
So, next, going to try https://www.tidiochat.com and see how that works out (on a tip from @mskilton).
- Pushed blog post to hacker news and indihackers
- Testing $29/month price point with 14 day free trial
- Fixed various edge cases with the new 14 day free trial system

- Pushed some copy changes on the plans & pricing page
- Having lot's of discussions about Nugget plans & pricing. Trying to work out an optimal strategy.
- Did my taxes!
- Posted today's nugget
- Made the βMake the most of this Nugget!β section stand out a little more
- Fixed bug where checkmarks were displaying when it should have been bullets or numbers

- Updated the Startup Academy page to show May as the launch month
- Send notification if someone is mentioned with an @name
- Added detailed mixpanel events for logged in users

- Fix bug where new users were being given a username of 4, 5, 6, etc.
- Notify me and @laura of new free trial via email
- Added max streak to profile so that a user never looses their personal all time high
- Create welcome screens (on boarding) for new users
- Posted today's nugget

- Added some more events to mixpanel tracking to get a better idea of how people are using the starter plan vs the momentum plan
- Fixed bug where startup academy application was not sending email
- Fixed spelling mistake on home page
- Posted today's nugget.

- Well, it's my birthday. Age is momentum that just can't be stopped ;)
- Wrote a script to fix premium nugget ordering and insist each nugget has an id that is the same as its premium #number
- Now forcing nuggets to open in a new tab on the nugget search screen. This fixes the the problem where if you use infinite scroll, then click into a nugget, then click back, you loose your place on the infinite scroll.
- Enforced that a momentum submission must have a comment. After watching the momentum tracker for a few weeks, I can't find any good value in allowing empty momentum cards to be punched. Unfortunately, it adds a way for folks to be able to maintain a streak on the leader board, without really participating with the community, that's why I have removed it.
This looks like a quick and interesting way to add web push notifications to nugget...
https://github.com/laravel-notification-channels/webpush
And this also looks pretty cool...

- Some paired mockuping with @chrisfranklin ;)
- Greatly improved individual momentum pages with ability to show comments and dates and re-order too. Click someone's profile and momentum to see changes.
- Add edit icon to dynamically inserted comment when replying to a comment

- Synchronized stage and live servers to make it easier for @laura to test new functionality on stage
- Added auto deploy system for stage and live (sick of logging in and running git pull!)
- Auto sending a follow up email to users who cancel, even though I wish that no one ever would cancel ;)
- Refined some of our mixpanel events to get a clearer idea of what's going on
- Added a "smart template" to the "view contact" for any nugget. Here is an example - https://nugget.one/nugget/531/contact - note how it auto fills your info and creates the perfect cold outreach email.
- Defaulting [x] remember me to checked on the login page
- Added a ui hint to make it easier to understand where a chat thread starts and ends. This helps when there are posts from lot's of people on the momentum page.

- Created admin interface to edit nuggets
- Added refinements to admin nugget editing features
- Added ability for admin to bump a nugget to top of feed
- Now showing larger snippets of the nugget in the main listing
- Added new popout icon in nugget listings, to give the user a choice of opening the nugget in a new tab, or not
- Fixed a bug where the contact template was not opening in a new tab with the help of @michelle @chrisfranklin & @nautical
- Added a script that computes people's momentum and cur streak once per day. This ensures that people's momentum is kept up to date even if they don't login to the server for a day or two.
- Updated welcome emails for new subscribers added some context and instructions
- Now showing momentum/slack nav. even if there is no momentum/slack for today
- Posted today's nugget using the new editing system
- Now sending an email to admin when a user changes plans
- Make @name email notifications work when punching a card or commenting on a nugget
- Added real link for @usernames in notification email
- Fixed bullets that are added without a space as uncovered by @michelle
- Stopped system from sending notification @replies to myself
- Enabling users to use π π π π€£ in comments
- Fixed the bug that kills comment if you enter a < and then it strips out anything after that
- Ok I think I'll call it a day! π

- Made image urls auto create clickable thumbnails
- Made pdf urls auto create clickable thumbnails
- Made backticks work in comment popup
for code
- Added formatting hints to bottom of comment popup
- Posted today's nugget
- Refactored all comment popups to use same base template
- Added a way to upload and attach images or pdfs to any comment. Here's an image of Grandpa and a pdf of Uncle Chocky's
- Made emoji short codes work for realz, so that chat imported from slack now has the actual emojis, rather than the short code like
smile
here is an example

- Posted today's nugget
- Auto posting new premium nuggets to Slack #general when they are created
- Created an admin report of nugget users

- Composed an email to invite existing nugget members to help test out this momentum tracker
- Posted today's nugget
- Slim pickin's for today's momentum log! Are we going to see @chrisfranklin or @nautical zero out their current streak?! It's a nail-biter

- Posted today's nugget
- Fixed weird permissions bug that was stopping users from logging in

- Had meeting with @laura to review next strategic steps for Nugget
- Created better test harness with regard to database for dev and stage environments
- Fix weird cookie bug on stage
- Separated stage and live back into their own branches again


- Posted today's nugget
I have family in town for the next few days so I will most likely just be posting the daily nugget for the next few.

- Had a planning session with @laura about Startup Academy content
- Hit a momentum score of 7 for realz!
- Posted today's nugget
- Started migrating the starter plan from paid to free, there is a fair amount of refactoring to do to make it work.


- Posted today's nugget
- Refactored all registration code into shared library across paid registrations, social logins and manual account creation.
- Pushed all registration related emails to a job queue.
- Pushed drip subscriptions to a job queue.
- Twitter, Facebook & Google oauth now working.
- Auto creating avatars with first two letters of username for those who do not have one.
- First pass at making the change plan page work for free accounts

- Updated
Edit
button to saySave
on edit popup /cc @jsh - Posted today's nugget.
NOW ON STAGING...
- Completed new Forever Free & Reach Orbit plans with social logins end-to-end.
- Users can join the Forever Free plan with two clicks if they have a Twitter, Facebook or Google account.
- Users can login via same accounts with one click if previously logged in
- Users can upgrade to a paid plan with one click if they have a card on file.
- Users can upgrade to a paid plan with a simple stripe cc screen if they don't have a card on file.
- Paid upgrade instantly unlocks access to all paid features.
The following upgrade prompts are now in place on the Forever Free plan:
- If you try to do a momentum checkin - If you try to view more than 5 premium nuggets - If you try to view a submitters contact details - If you try to join the Slack community
The following features are free for all (but require the user to be logged in):
- Viewing & commenting on momentum tracker posts by other people - Viewing & commenting on up to 5 premium nuggets - Viewing & commenting on all raw nuggets - Browsing around the startup academy intro docs - Daily raw idea in your inbox (paid members get daily premium)
Also note: Existing users can also login via their social account with one click as long as the social email is the same as the email they used to join nugget.
/cc @laura

- Posted today's nugget.

- Meeting with @laura to review current roadmap and marketing plan. Planning to start larger promotional push on the week of March 19th.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Added sort by "views" to nugget listings.
- Add new feature: If you select text from someone else's comment and then hit reply, it will now be quoted in the reply popup. See following screen shots.
- Now going directly to to [nugget]/discuss link from reply notification email

- Posted today's nugget.
- Created new /discounts page that has a list of nugget partner products with discounts. Will be part of new on boarding process. (stage)
- Now redirecting to originally blocked page after login (stage)
- Added interstitial to "Add Comment" on nuggets. It is a quick "read this before posting" and shows a few facts. It will show 3 times only. (stage)
- Created new nugget "shuffle mode". It makes it easy to keep clicking a shuffle button to see new random nuggets. (stage)


- Posted today's nugget.
- Sending new user's first and last name to drip so that, finally, we can send personalized emails for realz.
- Implemented on-boarding drip campaign for new accounts

- Changed daily raw nugget list to weekly free nugget list
- Added the server monitor to all machines (testing for high load, disk uage etc.) will alert to slack if there is an issue
- Added cron to clear Laravel cache once per day
- Did various house cleaning tasks to prepare for go live of new load balanced systems
- Happy Paddy's day to one and all!
- Make UPDATE-MOMENTUM, SYNC-SLACK only happen on salt nu-live-web-v3 (salt config)
- make sure the cron commands are correct ie nugget:momentum (salt config)
- Add the server monitor to base-machine (salt config)
- Clear the cache once per day: php artisan cache:clear (salt config)
- Make sure that db-backup is triggered on nu-live-web-v3 (salt config)
- Point blog.nugget.one directly to nu-live-web-v3 (salt config)
- Point beanstalk.nugget.one directly to nu-live-web-v3
- Configure servers to look at beanstalk.nugget.one
- Deploy new code to nu-live-web-v3
- Configure salt to only install beanstalk on nu-live-web-v3 (salt config)
Then I got stuck on enabling servers 2 & 3 to talk to the central beanstalkd server. :(
Will continue tomorrow.
- Oh, wait, I was able to fix that beantsalkd issue. I forgot to restart the deamon. That was the issue ;)

- Show raw nuggets as first tab for free users.
- Make the shuffle icon bigger on the main tabs screen.
- Pushed today's nugget.
- Add multiple machines nu-live-web-1, 2.
- Add load balancer and connect to said machines.
- Site is now being served via AWS load balancer.

- Launch planning meeting with @laura.
- Added hint about momentum nav that will show 3 times to new users.
- Completed (again) the on boarding drip for new members. Needed to rework.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Launched Nugget 3.0 for realz to the main email list of 6,500 people
- Posted Nugget 3.0 on Product Hunt and Hacker News. No joy. Will have to move to "other" marketing channels ;)
- Tested out 4 machines on load balancer, working nicely.
- Fixed various bugs introduced by the big ass merge of moving to social logins.
- Did a little bit of UI work to try to make it clearer that it is not possible to talk to nugget submitters directly through this platform, but that in some cases you can email them if there is contact info displayed.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Nugget is #2 product of the day on Product Hunt, we even got a little badge! (See screen shot)
- Planning session about the nugget startup academy with @laura.
- Added a popup (for new users) that makes it very clear submissions are added by a system administrator and not posted by the submitter. This will only show if they have not posted a comment.
- Added a hint (for new users) who look like they are about to mention competition in a comment. This will only show if they type
http
and have posted less than 3 comments.
- Posted today's nugget.

Nugget Product Hunt Launch Statistics:
- #2 spot on product hunt for 1 day (639 points)
- Over 1,800 free users signed up to Nugget
- Total premium nugget views: 1,300
- Total raw nugget views: 8,000
- About 15 comments on Nuggets
Learnings:
- Nugget as a free idea research tool works, people like it
- The free offering is attractive and can create a decent bottom end of a funnel
- Almost zero support email so the product/ui is probably easy to use
- Load balancing is working well no machine went over 0.10 load
- AWS RDS working well, never went above 6% utilization
- We need to wait and see if the drip campaign brings people into the community
Work Today:
- Setup gsuite app so that @laura and myself can have an actual nugget inbox rather than mail forwarders.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Worked with @laura on academy follow up emails.
- Added ability to batch upload new nuggets from mturk.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Fixed typo on the plans and pricing page.
- Made the drip unsubscribe goodbye page work.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Working on the private message system but it's going slower than I had hoped. It's morphed into an internal email system at this point. I guess another 1-2 days to finish it.

- Sent out yesterday's premium nugget by email because I forgot to do that yesterday.
- Scheduled weekly free nugget to go out next Tuesday.
- Just a gnats whisker away from completing internal mail between users. Should be on stage by early tomorrow.
- Completed a release version of the new internal mail system ready for staging.
- Rebuilt stage so that I can deploy said code and test somewhere other than my local.
- Tested system on stage. Works! Only issue is that anyone can view anyone's mail by hacking the id. Will fix next.
- Fixed the security issue and sent a test message to @laura.
In other news, I'm getting sick of the avatars downloading from S3 with every page view, so I'm going to pass them through the nugget backend and take control of the headers.

- Pushed the new internal email system to the live site.
- Sent some private messages to Nugget members!
Rats. I noticed a bug with the private mail. It does not order it properly because it's ordering on the updated_at field... but Laravel updates that all the time even if you just look at the mail. So, I need to add a new column like last_reply_at

- Fixed the issue where private mail was being incorrectly ordered.
- After some testing of the internal mail system with @jsh we realized it was not working very well, so, I reworked it and now it is better.
Two things are really bugging me right now:
-
All the query caching is done on a per server basis rather than from a central object store.
-
The avatar images are continually loaded with each page load. This must be a by product of the AWS load balancer. I need to find a way to deal with that.
I'll be working on those next.
In other news: @david17 wins the award for the best bio!
- Got bored of trying to setup memcached so am just going to use AWS Elasticache instead.
- AWS Elasticache up and running!
- The avatar images being continually reloaded has been fixed with much thanks to @bradbumbalough :)
- Made the links to Momentum log and private message look like buttons in the profile popup.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Spent a fair amount of time thinking about different UI concepts for a new content creator for the Startup Academy. Something to make it easy for myself and @laura to get content into the system. Worth noting that "thinking" about stuff is work too!
- Created stage editor for the Startup Academy and pre-populated with existing stage ideas. (staging)
- Fixed thumbnails that had stopped working in comments.


- Added a new hint for newbies when they type "you" in the comment for their first 3 comments.
Note! The idea submitter does not see comments here. Only other Nugget members see these comments. Ideas are sourced from Mechanical Turk.
Ack. We've gone over mixpanel quotas and now they want to charge us $2k to see our stats. Now we need to find a different solution for that.
- Posted today's nugget.

Am pretty ill today with flu but will try to get something done.
- Created a new YAML based markup language
Nugget Markup
to make it easy for myself and @laura to add academy content to the system. A small example:
- intro: - In this lesson you will learn xyz. - quote: - quote: Success is no accident. It is hard work and perseverance. - by: PelΓ© - heading: - title: A lesson about xyz - image: http://server.com/image.jpg
To ill to do today's nugget. That takes a different type of creative energy that I just don't have today.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Completed nugget markup rendering (stage).
- Had a discussion with @chrisfranklin about the issues he's having. We came up with a plan.


- Posted today's nugget.
- Conversed with various Nugget members about various things.
- Completed the startup academy content creator! It's going to make it super fast to get our pre-written content into the system in a tightly defined and agnostic data format.
I recorded a video so you can see it in action. In the video I'm clicking buttons that add different components to the page which we can then quickly customize.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o2vcnYmk16w89NqbGLpoJT8BF7NGzBvY/view
Note: The left hand side is a simple text area where you edit YAML and the right hand side is a preview pane. It will update the right hand pane (ie save to disk) if you hit return or hit save or hit a template button.
/cc @laura
- Pushed the new startup academy content creator live

- After trying to input real content in the content editor I decoded to take it up a notch to make it easier to work with. It is now way better, I actually think it might be a potential product in its own right. Here's a video of it in action.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12R-w_Pw22scDuGp2NfHge3cBN1WHyKYN/view
/cc @laura
- Posted today's nugget.

- Uninstalled Shift, the app I was trying out to manage multiple Gmail accounts, it was way to laggy. Browser tabs simply work better.
- Added tweaks to the Startup Academy Stage Editor as requested by @laura
- Posted today's nugget.


- Created the schema and models (as it is seen at this moment) for startup academy.
- Posted todays' nugget.

- Started work on the academy user signup flow which includes a tool for us to review applications and push the good ones into a user flow that is the signup journey for the academy.

- Posted today's nugget.

- More work on Academy review and approval system.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Spent the bulk of today looking after my 3 year old ;)
- Did some customer support.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Worked on wife's website!

- Some work on startup academy review and approval system.
- Added a
next nugget
button inside each nugget. - Posted today's nugget.

- Worked on Startup Academy payment screen.
- Posted today's nugget.
- 6 hours looking after a 3 year old.

- More work on the Startup Academy on-boarding flow. I'm constantly reminded how everything has a lot more detail and nuance than you originally think it has. Ergo: It takes twice as long is you expect!
Here is the signup flow so far (work in progress):
- Email is sent to user saying they are accepted
- User signs up and pays for academy
- User fills out profile (pre populated by what they already submitted during application)
Next screens I need to make in this step-by-step flow are:
- Slack setup/connect screen
- Countdown screen until the course is open
- Screen to view all batch members background story
- The first lesson in stage one
Note: Not edited by @laura yet.
/cc @jimmy with regard to user on boarding :)
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- More work on the flow to join the academy. Here's what I've got so far:
I have 2 steps left:
- After the countdown is over, we need a screen to introduce you to your batch members.
- After you've looked at your batch members we need to direct you to stage 1 lesson 1.

- Posted today's nugget.
In other news, other than posting that nugget, I pretty much got nowhere with most things I tried to do. Not the best day!


- Posted today's nugget.
Wow, at this point I've posted a nugget (almost) every day for over 1.6 years. Phew!

- Posted todays nugget.
- Posted episode 309 of TechZing the tech startup podcast I co-host.


- Fixed a weird formatting bug with the momentum tracker.
- Planning call with @laura
- Designed a formidable lesson title banner ;)
- Posted today's nugget.


- Posted today's nugget.
- First pass at making the TOC popup work for real.
- Making headway with the main TOC page tracker.
-
3 hours looking after 3 year old.
-
Added a panel to ensure you are never more than one click away from the current lesson you are supposed to be viewing.
- Made stage locking work for realz.
- Added screen to celebrate the completion of a stage.


There is one edge case with the momentum tracker... Let's say, on a given day, you missed a momentum checkin by mistake... but you did get work done. It sucks that you loose your current streak when you did actually do work.
Solution: The next day it should present you with the choice to fill in momentum for yesterday or today. This would stop you from accidentally loosing your current streak and would enable you to log what you've done for the day before.
- Now filtering main news feed by academy batch id where appropriate.
- Added academy progress to main dashboard.
- Posted todays nugget.
- Added a simple play icon to get directly into the current lesson from a stage tile.
- About 7 hours of looking after 3 year old.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Watching 3yo for 5 hours then family day.

- Worked on academy discussions to make it so that each batch can view their own batches discussion but also other earlier batches.
- Made the batch discussion slicing work using ajax because it was annoying to reload the page each time you changed the drop down.
- Created
Academy News
as part of social feed to recognize when someone finishes a stage. - Posted today's nugget.
- 3 hours watching the kid.

- @chrisfranklin Hit 222 karam! (a great number) and has surged ahead to the lead the leaderboard.
- Now auto adding momentum checkin punch card for academy members when they complete a lesson, comment on a discussion or perform an action.
- Added some core admin features to the Academy
-
FINISHED CODING THE ACADEMY
Note 1: I will be pushing the academy to stage ready for @laura to test tomorrow.
Note 2: Now that coding of the academy is finished next step will be to migrate content from our google docs for into the academy for realz.
Note 3: I will not be pushing a new nugget out today because I needed to commission a new batch of Mechanical Turk submissions. Expecting the next nugget to be pushed tomorrow.
- Walked 25k steps today for a fit bit challenge in the day job. Will NOT be doing that moving forward ;)

- Content writing session, that turned into a planning session, that turned into a testing session with @laura
- Various fixes and tweaks to Startup Academy
- Formatted and input stage one content into the academy for realz. It looks awesome!
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Started final work on Stage 2 of the academy.

- Posted today's nugget.
- The Startup Academy will be launching on Sun May 27th. The charter batch, #alpha-dogs, will have 10 members. We have confirmation @jsh & @habibalamin will definitely be joining the charter batch. That leaves 8 spots. if you want a chance to be part of this make sure to submit your academy applications asap!

- Added a few fixes for the internal mail system. Thanks @jimmy for finding the bugs!

- Posted today's nugget.

- Some work on stage 2.
- Fixing some nice bugs that @laura found during her system wide testing on stage.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Planning session with @laura lot's of stuff going on!
- Moved academy start date to June 10 but still opening doors for signup on May 13.

- Nugget now has 3,678 free users.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Worked on polishing academy content for stage 2. Nearly finished it. Expecting to complete it and get a good start on Stage 3 tomorrow. 32 days to go until the academy blasts off!

- Academy stage 1 & 2 polishing now complete! On to stage 3.
- Finished polishing Stage 3 Intro.
- Fixed 3 bugs that @laura found with academy on boarding.
- Finished polishing academy stage 3 lesson 2 and it's a good un'.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Startup academy batch signup is now LIVE! @habibalamin is the first member of #alpha-dogs to fully sign up for real. We will be sending out the rest of the invites on Sun 13.
- @jsh is #alpha-dogs member #2!

- Posted today's nugget.
- Fixed issue with academy payments.

- posted today's nugget.

- Working on polishing stage 3 content for the academy.
- I've finished polishing stage 3. Moving on to stage 4.

- Moving on to polish stage 4 of the academy today.
- Some tech support work with @chrisj to help him get started with momentum.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Finished polishing stage 4 academy content.
- Posted today's nugget.
- This was a good day. I love to seeing this much founder progress in the momentum tracker!

- Working on new GDPR stuff.
- Finished complying to GDPR. Ugh, how boring!
- Refactored and reworked the GDPR stuff, again.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Yet more work on the snarking GDPR stuff.
- After lots of testing and refactoring GDPR stuff is finally live. You will probably have already noticed due to the terms interstitial...
- Fixed low level Nugget access and entitlement bug as explained here which was wreaking all sorts of strange havoc.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Sent out
Updates to Nugget's Privacy Policy
email to all Nugget users.

- Watched the kid from 8am-4pm
- This eve. I'll be working on my wife's website
- Posted today's nugget.

- Discovered that I hear
Laurel
notYanney
but I can hear Yanney if I use this tool.

- Just realized I've have a 100 day streak so far, nice!
- Needed to stop working on content for a bit was wrecking my head so today have switched over to fixing last few bugs and tweaks for academy launch.
- Posted todays nugget.
- Completed the intro to the startup academy stage 5.

- Fixed what is hopefully the last of the pre-launch bugs and enhancements for the academy.
- Moving back to content creation and polishing. Now working on stage 5 which is all about creating a landing page and starter brand.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Finished Step 1, 2, 3 for Stage 5 on the Academy.
It's too late to post a nugget so I'll be doing that tomorrow. Got to get some sleep!

- Working on lessons related to
How to create a landing page
- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished
What to include on a landing page
lesson

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished academy lesson
Pick a method to build your landing page
- Finished more stuff from stage 5.

- Posted today's nugget.

-
Making great progress on the
What to say on your landing page
lesson -
Finished
Stage 5: Build Bare Bones Landing Page
-
Posted today's nugget.
-
Of note, we've now finished 58 steps/lessons of the academy content. For context 68 will be 50% complete.

- Working on the introduction to seed groups stage.

- Working on
Learn how to build your seed group with Twitter
- Posted today's nugget.

- Finished lesson
Learn how to build your seed group with Twitter
- Watching the kid for a fair few hours.
- Finished lesson
Learn how to build your seed group with online communities
- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished lesson
Learn how to build your seed group with Beta communities

- Finished lesson
Learn how to build your seed group with email cold outreach
- Finished
Stage 6: Pick a Seed Group Strategy
- Posted today's nugget.

- Working on new Stage 1 lesson/action
Plan for failure
- Completed audio lesson
Plan for failure

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished
Introduction Stage 7: Listen & Learn
- Finished lesson
Learn how and why to run the Listen & Learn Loop
- Finished lesson
Learn how to setup a Super Seed factory
- Finished action
Setup your Super Seed factory

- 8 hours watching the kid.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Academy starts in
6d.16h.50m.38s
- Finished lesson
Learn how to listen & learn in-person or on the phone
- Finished
Stage 7: Listen & Learn: Steps 1-6
just 7 steps to go! - Finished lesson
Learn how to listen & learn using email

- Got started on lesson
Learn how to listen & learn using using surveys
- Gave all users a profile URL like https://nugget.one/@justin
- Added ability to publish your profile to the public internet.
- Updated the profile popup
Momentum Log
button to link to someone's new @profile.
Thanks for the idea to have public profiles and momentum logs @jimmy!
Some notes about the new public profiles:
- To publish your profile click into edit bio
- For non logged in users it is not possible to see other people's comments on someone's pubic profile (for privacy reasons)
- For non logged in users it is not possible to see a profile when clicking an @link (for privacy reasons)
- Posted today's nugget.
- 4 people now have a momentum of 7
- @chrisfranklin & @jsh now both have more karma than me!
- Academy starts in
5d.10h.59m.8s
- Fixed an annoying @name parsing bug.

- More work on Stage 7
- Academy starts in
5d.1h.39m.57s
- Finished lesson
Learn how to listen & learn using surveys

- Posted today's nugget.
- Academy starts in
3d.23h.59m.28s
- Finished action
Listen & learn

- Posted today's nugget.
- Added a real add attachment function to academy actions. Cos, before it was just adding a link into the text field which was a bit low brow to be honest (even though that does work well in the context of these comments).
One of these day's I'm going to add a real image preview rather than opening in a new tab...
- Fixed an academy bug where the student was not able to reply to comments posted by admin in an action.

- Adding admin dashboard to see where each batch member is at.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Academy launches in
1d.11h.9m.31s

- Demoing Nugget to my buddy.
- Posted episode 310 of TechZing the tech startup podcast I co-host.
- Working on Stage 7 lesson
Learn how and why to mockup your best guess solution
- Finished lesson
Learn how and why to mockup your best guess solution
- Pushed all new features, fixes and final Startup Academy content to the live servers.
- Academy starts in
0d.11h.54m.10s

- The
Nugget Startup Academy
is LIVE! - Watching what happens as people start the academy.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Added capability to see an academy member's progress by viewing their profile.
- Added academy member's progress to the batch page that lists all batch members
- Posted today's nugget.

-
Removed double web middleware bindings in Laravel as described here because there has been some weird session issues with ajax. Hoping this fixes it.
-
Working on lesson
Learn how to Mind Map your product's full potential
-
Realized I need to make a lean canvas for GetHappy and also a Mind Map

- Created lean canvas for GetHappy.io example
- I'm being knocked off the leader board!
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished lesson
Learn how to map out your product's full potential
- Finished lesson
Learn how to turn your product's full potential into a little snowball

- Working on
Learn how to sketch out your MVP

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Happy fathers day!

- Planning seasion with @laura
- Posted today's nugget.
- Automated so that when I convert a nugget to premium it auto mails it out.

- Fixed a bug in the new premium nugget mail out system.
- Thinking about marketing for the second academy batch.
- Added some tweaks to academy content around the idea of Vapor landing pages.
- Posted today's nugget.

- More work on marketing ideas for batch 2 of the academy.
- Spent time talking with @jnoetzelman who was able to guide me to a sense of clarity about marketing the for batch 2 of the academy
- Posted today's nugget.

-
Wow, it's so much easier creating the daily nugget now that all the pieces are automated.
-
Used the academy's
Super Seed
principles to brainstorm with @habibalamin @jimmy @chrisfranklin @theill @jnoetzelman about marketing the Startup Academy. Very productive. Think I've got a good direction now. Watch this space. -
Posted today's nugget.

-
Added a 60 second delay before sending comment email notifications. This gives us 60 seconds to fix typos before a comment is mailed to the recipient. Why? Because I keep making typos and it's annoying as hell to keep mailing them out!
-
Posted today's nugget.
-
Mocked up new batch dashboard so you can see the status of each person in your batch. The main goal here is to try to make the asynchronous nature of the batch feel more cohesive. Oh, and also to see who's kicking your butt ;)

- Added an academy batch status board. This means you can now see how each batch is progressing within the academy. Here's how the #alpha-dogs are doing...
https://nugget.one/academy/batch/alpha-dogs
- Looks like @chrisfranklin @jsh and @habibalamin are neck and neck leaders right now!

Watching the kid today but will try to add enhancement to batch status board tonight.
- Enhanced the new batch status page so that if you click on a users rocket/line you can see what step they are on and also the latest comment they made in a batch discussion.
https://nugget.one/academy/batch/alpha-dogs
- Posted today's nugget.

- More updates the the academy activity dashboard
- Posted today's nugget.
- Initialized the second batch of the academy and invited some folks to join.
#beta-cats
will go live on July 14th.

- Flying to Chicago to meet with the day job team.
- Posted today's nugget.
- Added a simple nav on the academy dashboard to surface batch activity.
- Fixed weird signup bug that was stopping @chenster from joining the academy.

In day long meeting with day job, will try to post a Nugget later.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Fixed an admin bug related to working with multiple batches.

- Added multi batch discussions ready for #beta-cats
- Posted today's nugget.

Ah rats. I broke my momentum streak. Ah well it happens to the best of us! ;)
That dang @chrisfranklin now has the longest momentum streak as well as highest karma. He's powning my site! What the... ;)
- Posted today's nugget.

- Working on marketing for the academy.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Pushed new stage summaries in the academy table of contents. Thanks @jsh
- Working on wife's website.

- Happy 4th everyone!
- Posted today's nugget.

- More work on marketing
- Talked with chris and habib about startup academy idea
- Completed new nudge feature for academy members
- Posted today's nugget.
- #beta-cats now has 9 people confirmed. We just need 1 more person to complete the batch. If you know anyone you think would be a good fit let them know.

- Thinking more about stages 8-12
- Posted today's nugget.

Doing some hard thinking about the course structure after your product is validated (i.e Stage 8+)
The complexity is that there are so many different product types but as we have it planned right now it assumes a standard SaaS product. But, what if you validated an info product? How does it fit then?
Wondering if there should be some kind of branch
event after stage 7 and, if so, how can that technically work within the platform.
This is complicated by the leaderboard system that compares all founders in the same way.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
Thinking long and hard about how to handle different people's use cases in the academy. One size does not fit all. Now we need to figure out how to handle that.

- Nice chat with @jhunter about academy progress
- I've decided I'm going to let go of worrying about people posting things like
xyz does already it
orthis exists already
on nuggets. I've already put in a lot of messaging that explains that doesn't help move ideas forward. I even look forhttp
in the comments and show an alert not to do that. But, at some point I just have to let it go. I can't police everything. In any case, it's good to have new folks coming through the site. Moving forward I'm just going to upvote them so they get some karma for participating.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Discussed online learning paradigms with @laura
- Watched England loose the World Cup
- Watched the kid

- Posted today's nugget.
- Now auto embedding youtube videos that are posted to these comments.
This was not a great day for me. I was mainly focused on selling my car that was on it's last legs. So now we're down to one car that is 100% electric and only has a 60 mile range. Yikes.

My car broke down, my oven broke down, my fridge broke down, my tv broke down.
Well... Universe... you don't need to give me any more hints.
I just got out my 2TB HD and I'm backing up my Mac Book Pro as we speak
(232GB of 646GB completed so far)
- Posted today's nugget.

- #beta-cats launches today! Just 2 hours to go
- #beta-cats are live!
https://nugget.one/academy/batch/beta-cats
- Posted today's nugget.
- Working on finishing up Stage 8

- Checking in on the #beta-cats!
- Recording a podcast
- Based on work I did with @habibalamin and @jsh I created a new Stage 2 lesson called
Learn how to generate ideas using Mechanical Turk
. I felt I needed to get it in there real quick since @johngarcia is racing though Stage 2 and I wanted to get it in there before he (and other #beta-cats users) get to Stage 3.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Checking in on #alpha-dogs and #beta-cats
- Working on wife's side project.

- Chatting with some #beta-cats about the niche and mechanical turk lessons.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished lesson
Learn the physics of sales
in stage 9.

- Added tweak to mturk lesson. Basically to give some hints on how to choose a niche.
- Completed lesson
Stage 9, Step 3: Man on wire
- Posted today's nugget.
- Started work on lesson
Stage 9, Step 4: Learn how to structure your sales site
- Added a final sanity check to make sure that only viable ideas get past
Stage 4, Step 7: Pick your top three ideas

- Got a new car

- Family day
- Posted today's nugget.

- Chat with #beta-cats @jeanpaul about his top idea picks.
- Watching kid.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Working with various batch members.

- Posted today's nugget.
- More work on Stage 9.

- Posted today's nugget.
Started lesson Learn how to set your starting price point

- Family day!
- More work on
Stage 9, Step 5: Learn how to set your starting price point

- Family day

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finished writing
Stage 9, Step 5: Learn how to set your starting price point

- Posted today's nugget.

- Not too much time for Nugget today. Any spare time I had was working on the wife's side project.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Discussed
Learn how to turn your customer interviews into copy for your sales site
with @laura

- Posted today's nugget.

- Family Day

- Family day.
- Took kid to Leo Carrillo Beach. Chased the Crabs and other creatures.
- Recording podcast.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
Had to discard 30+ submissions to get this on here. That's the longest streak of unusable submissions I've seen to date I think.
- Finished writing lesson
Stage 9, Step 9: Learn about different methods and platforms you can use to build your sales site

- Posted today's nugget.
- Working on lesson
Stage 9, Step 10: Learn about different payment gateways you can use to collect money

- Working on the wife's project.
- Sent marketing email to 5,700 Play Therapists
Of course, after I send that email, all the inodes on the server were used up because of silent linux upgrades. 1000's of unused linux header files on the system. So when the mail was sent out php sessions caused the disk to overload inodes so all systems broke down. In the mean time about 25% of people clicked links in the email and stuff wasn't working.
- Completed writing
Stage 9, Step 10: Learn about different payment gateways you can use to collect money
- Reviewed an excellent lesson that @laura wrote
Learn how to turn your customer interviews into copy for your sales site
. She created the lesson by synthesizing a book written by Joanna Wiebe, one of the best online sales copywriters out there. - We've almost finished stage 9. Just a few actions left to write. It is the money shot, literally! Very powerful stage. Where a real business is born.

- Added new lesson to Stage 6
Learn how to build your seed group with Facebook Groups
- Edits to
Learn about different payment gateways you can use to collect money
based on @laura's feedback. - Posted today's nugget.

- Thinking about Nugget plans and pricing

- Posted today's nugget.
- Started work on new marketing drive

- Working on new release
- Lots of talk with batch members
- Posted today's nugget.

- Have done a fair amount of low level work to make the new startup academy launch offers work. It's basically the opposite of how we used to do batch signups. I'm calling the new system
ship
(internally) as in SPACE SHIP ;) Each offer will be the name of a planet starting with Mercury moving out to Neptune. The first offer will be the mercury landing at nugget.one/ship/mercury (not live yet).

- I selected 5 submissions in mturk where they had submitted no data or only 1 word and I clicked approve instead of reject by mistake. $5 down the drain. Doh!
- Posted today's nugget.
- Posted episode 312 of TechZing the tech startup podcast I co-host. There was a fair amount of talk about Nugget.
- With
ship
, if no offer selected within 1 hour, then auto assign to base offer

- More work on the new mercury offer. Hoping to ship on the 20th or 21st.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Ok, I think I'm done with the new batch assignment system and the new ship deal offer system. Next up is to design the first ship offer landing page and then one time offer on the backend.

- Family day

- Posted today's nugget.
- It's going to be another family day and then I'll be working with Jason to help him mock up Math Academy.

- Updated wildcard SSL for Nugget
- Wrote a quick post about corrupt Mechanical Turk submissions
All of a sudden, building Nugget, doesn't seem so hard.

- More work on ship mercury offer

- Completed mercury ship offer will launch next week

- Posted today's nugget.
- Sent ship offer to previous academy applicants
- There's a weird but where it is not showing profiles of anyone who has signed up for the ship offer. Looking into it.
- Fixed weird profile bug

- Posted today's nugget.
- Need to write marketing email for ship offer that will be sent out on Tuesday morning.

- Helping the wife paint her new offices

- More painting of the wife's new office
- Posted today's nugget.

- Got tomorrow's marketing push ready, spinning up a couple of servers just in case there's extra load that I'm not anticipating.

- Ship mercury, launching in 1 hour
- Posted today's nugget.

- Stopped using Teamwork for our shared inbox. There are lots of reasons why I really did not like that product offering BUT the main one was... They got us to signup for a one year plan and then one month into that they changed their plans and pricing (by doubling the price). I would not mind if they grandfathered us in but they put up a blocking modal that forces us to upgrade to the new plan at 2x price, or you just can't use the system. Well, goodbye "Teamwork" ;)
- More work on marketing the new mercury batch

- More work on the mercury offer, things progressing nicely.

- New mercury batches almost started working on matching them up..
- Posted today's nugget.

- Helping my buddy Jason mock up Math Academy
My kid Jack, who recently turned 4, said today: "Mummy, Daddy, sit down, I want to have a conversation with you".
So, we sat down, I said "What do you want to talk about Jack?"
He said, "Mummy, Daddy, where do babies come from?"
- #mercury-hawks have 2 members posting to today's momentum before the academy is open. Could this be a sign? Game on: #mercury-seals & #mercury-sharks ;)

- Watching new batches start
- Family day
- Fixed academy bug
- https://nugget.one/academy/batch/mercury-hawks/progress
- https://nugget.one/academy/batch/mercury-sharks/progress
- https://nugget.one/academy/batch/mercury-seals/progress
Wowzer. #mercury-hawks are rocking this!

- Starting to get serious about rejecting mturk submissions. Just rejected almost 50%. This is a new strategy for me.I have been accepting almost all until now. It seems like I have been targeted by spammers.
- Posted new TechZing podcast episode The Full Stack Entrepreneur. This is all about the future direction of Nugget and how our next major plan is to bring Mentoring online in a big way. Note: All Lifetime Alumni will automatically get access to these updates.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Checking in on mercury batches
- Starting to get busy around here. Nice!
- Posted today's nugget.
- It paid of to be harsher rejecting the mturk answers that were bad. There seems to be a few good ones this time round.
- Wondering how to deal with the busyness of this screen with more users posting here. One idea might be collapsed/expandable comment threads (unless you're in the thread).

- Working on posting momentum to slack
- Wrote lesson
Learn about the product βItβ factor

- Building an Ikea bunk bead
- Posted today's nugget.
- Noting that this is an nice amount of checkin's from everyone for a weekend. Nice!

- Posted today's nugget.
- Worked with Jason on mockups for Math Academy

- Working with batches

- Posted today's nugget.
- Now storing all comments in a cookie (and repopulating when you reopen the comment popup) so that if you loose connection, or timeout, or accidentally close the modal, the comment you were working on will not be lost.

- Planning session with @laura
- Work on making new middle plan possile

- Planning session with @laura
- Talking with Academy members
- Created email campaign for new lower cost Momentum plan
- Finished up mockups for new Academy Profiles, Batches, Leaderboard & Project Checkin

- Family day
- Created a database cleanup script
- Realized we were over optimized with AWS ElastiCache so switched to a smaller instance.
- Posted today's nugget.
- I note that I am really liking Trello

- Recording podcast
- Helping Jason mock up Math Academy
- Posted today's nugget.

- Spent time chasing my tail about Nugget brand
- Posted today's nugget.

- Creating a noop api endpoint to ping and keep the session alive while the browser is open.
- Posted today's nugget.

-
Posted today's nugget.
-
Completed CSS/HTML (including responsive) for 4 of the 8 screens needed for the new founder profiles stuff.

- Floated a brand idea past academy members

- Posted today's nugget.
- Helping wife work on her office.
- Created schema and models for founder projects
- State machine for add project html/css
I always forget that one of the most time consuming parts is to make the end-to-end user journey actually make sense.

- Working with Jason on Math Academy
- Recorded a podcast
- Working on profile stuff
- I thought this new project growth tracking stuff was going to be a breeze, done in a few days... it's not ;)
Note to self, however easy I think something is, multiply it by X

- Posted today's nugget.

- Released founder projects and profiles
Ah crap, I forgot to check again so broke my streak. I kind of like how unforgiving it is.
@theill better watch his back.... it's not me who's going to break his record it's the system! ;)

- More work on founders and profiles
- Posted today's nugget.

- Developing ideas around Founder First

- Family day

- Getting ready to bring new batches in

- Some work on a presentation

- Posted today's nugget.

- Work on new batches.

- Working on webinar deck

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Finalizing Gemini launch and webinar

- Hosted webinar
- Launched gemini offer
- This has been a long day, ready for some sleep!

- More work with new gemini batch
- Posted today's nugget.

- Going to camp Snoopy!
- Posted today's nugget.

- Watching the kid
- Recording TechZing podcast
- Keeping up with the gemini's
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Removed shift + enter from submitting momentum
- Cron script to remove command line history from all machines

- Posted today's nugget.
- Update project/create page so URL is optional (when first creating logo)
- Auto add user to nugget-heroes Slack if complete stage 7
- Auto add user to super-seeds Slack if complete stage 5

- Improving function that auto adds user to super-seeds Slack if complete stage 5
- No longer sending academy nudges if there was a momentum checkin within the past 2 days

- Family day

- Family day
- Posted today's nugget.
- Conceptually simplified the new plans and pricing page to a single orange button "Join the Academy", feeling a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.
- My momentum dropped to 5.3, ack. Need to bring that up!

- Family day

- Posted today's nugget.
- Stripping out all of plans and pricing account upgrade code
- Removing any capability to upgrade to the "Momentum" plan
- Moving forward there will only be one product here THE NUGGET STARTUP ACADEMY
- Removing legacy nuggets definitions, plans and code that is years old


- Posted today's nugget.

- Finished rolling batches, working on new sales site

- Wife is teaching a course all day so looking after the kid today.

- Ongoing work on the next iteration of Nugget
- Posted today's nugget.

- Working though all the bugs that @laura found when she tested the new rolling batches stuff
- Continuing to create new deep marketing based website

- More work on the marketing site

- Working on marketing site "problems we solve"

- Oops.
- Family day.

- More work on the marketing site. Main focus has been
Problems we solve?
,Are you a good fit?
andFAQ
- My first case study call will be tomorrow with @chrisfranklin

- Will be interviewing Chris along with more work on the marketing site

- Scheduled for another case study call today. This time with @codyrigney
- I'm almost annoyed enough with having to hunt down and copy and paste usernames to build in a username lookup into this chat box right here. Not quite annoyed enough but almost.
- Awesome case study calls with @habibalamin & @codyrigney

- Weβre going through the βNo daddy! I want to do it!β Phase. Opening the front door. βNo daddy! I want to do it!β . Pouring a glass of water. βNo daddy! I want to do it!β. Opening the fridge. βNo daddy! I want to do it!β. Every. Single. Thing.
- Need to take a break. Feeling burned out on this marketing stuff.

- Added fixed header to new marketing site
- Ran final awesome case study interview with @charlesbrockman!

- More work on marketing copy
- New marketing site is now almost complete. The only thing left to do is to create "The Why" Founder First video presentation.

- Family day
- Commissioned 50 new idea hits

- Posted today's nugget.
- Getting ready for thanksgiving that never even used to be a thing when I lived in the UK.

- Happy thanksgiving everyone!
- Posted today's nugget.
- I think I finally understand what I need to say in "The Why" video. Will be working on the content over the next week or so.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Pushed the new marketing site and also rolling batches live. So, now, anyone can join any time they like.
- Next up is marketing
- Posted today's nugget.
- Added intercom to the site to see if it helps with sales. Let's see what happens.


Note to self:
A realized idea represents "a mountain of reality". The closer it is to reality, the harder it is to change any aspect of it. As an idea becomes more realized the more it descends through multiple "layers".
Here's an example:
- A thought in the brain
- A note on a napkin
- A bullet point list
- A discussion with someone
- A discussion with a group
- A light specification
- A wireframe mockup
- A hifi mockup
- A database schema
- An API endpoint
- Some HTML & CSS
- Some javascript
- A deployment to a test server
- A QA developer testing it
- A push to production
We should double down on iterating in layers 1-5 and try to get as close to the truth as possible before we move to the other slower layers.
This strategy is an exponential game changer. The fastest place to iterate is layer 1.
(Just want to record it here. Will probably put it in a blog, or the course, or both)
Thanks to @alexkuang for inspiring this.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Working on new drip campaign

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- More work on new drip series
- Posted today's nugget.

- Have been sick for a few days

- Posted today's nugget.

- More work on new drip campaign. It has been really taxing to write day 2 of the new drip campaign. I have been woking on it for a week.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Working on new quiz idea

- Posted today's nugget.

- Released new marketing quiz stuff to live
- Posted today's nugget.

- Finally, new marketing site and signup journey fully live

- Posted today's nugget.

- Sent email out to the main list letting them know the academy is open for business

- Customer calls
- Posted today's nugget.

- People keep asking "How is the Academy different to other programs? How can I be sure that this is the right place to invest my time and money?" so I'm making a video to answer those questions.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Happy holidays everyone!
- Spending the day with the fam doing things like baking cookies...
- That said, I'm going to try to get the script written for my next marketing video

- Ok, this is hard core holiday time right now...

- Haaaappy holidays to one and all!!!!

- More vaycay

- Thinking about and planning the new sales video

- Posted today's nugget.
- Winding down from the holidays and gradually getting ready to get back in to work mode

- Helping a friend move their house. Fun! ;)
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Working on new marketing video

- Man this marketing video is taking longer than I had hoped

- Posted today's nugget.
- Yayy, finished the sales video (I hope). Going to send it to a few folks to get feedback. Fingers crossed.

- Well I wasted the last 2 weeks making a marketing video, now moving on to a different strategy to try to get folks on the phone :)
- Posted today's nugget.
- Created a new funnel that offers people to have a 30 min consult after they take the quiz.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Great to see more people posting!
- Finished editing and releasing an interview with a co-founder of Zapier

- Updating http://justinvincent.com because a customer told me it looked bad and also because I'm going to start blogging again.

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- 3 founder calls planned for today
- I'm still trying to nail down how to convert new customers without squeeze marketing. I have some new tests to try. I'm still not actively bringing in new users until I can learn the conversion tricks. I have some ideas based on some recent customer conversations.

- Showing my sister all about Nugget
- Posted today's nugget.

- Spending today with the kid will try to get to make a nugget if I can get time later
- My sis came up with some great ideas for Nugget marketing during yesterday's conversation

- Posted today's nugget.
- More thinking through marketing stuff

- First mastermind call. Realized that we're going to need a lesson explaining how to make the most out of those calls.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- I'm still very much in learning mode with regard to bringing on board new users into the Academy. I have not yet started to find new ways to bring users to the site because there is a trickle every day already, and I want to learn from those existing users before going hog wild and paying for ads and such.

- Great to see so many posters here!
- Getting close to new marketing funnel release

- Posted today's nugget.
- So close to finishing the new marketing funnel I can taste it. Tastes good!

- Wondering if I should make a "dark mode" for nugget

- Got Nugget approved on Indi Hackers. Well, now you all know the revenue for realz ;)
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/nugget
- Following the Academy growth strategy of being helpful in a community. In this case IH. 86 Nugget signups yesterday. But of course that only works because the lead magnet of 4K free startup ideas is so strong. So, yep, itβs a great strategy, but your LP and offering needs to offer something that folks from that community actually want.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Watching the kid

- More being helpful in IH

- A couple of founder consult calls

- Working on a new funnel idea
- 3 no shows on founder calls. One is not amused.
- It looks like 14 day free trials (with cc) is the way to go with the Academy. Am building out the site to allow us to test that (and then switch back if necessary).
- Posted today's nugget.
- Note to self: Don't push new env variables to all the live machines unless you know you actually need them.

- Posted today's nugget.

- So may variables in my brain right now. It's hard to focus with so many plates up in the air.
- Running new free-to-paid funnel test based on learnings from @steven1 and @alexcosan - Thanks guys!

- Posted today's nugget.
- Finalized new free-to-paid journey for Academy
- Still being helpful on Indi Hackers. They've invited me to be part of their new founder stories series. Luck Surface Area in action. Here's a screen shot of my profile and follower amounts for posterity.
- Thinking about stages 10-12 of the academy. After the latest nugget work I think they just need to be completely different to planned.

- With the help of @chrisfranklin I was able to setup and publish some Facebook Ads. The goal is to drive clicks to the Nugget ideas landing page. I'm sure there will be a lot of tweaking moving forward. The ad-system has an interesting feature where it lets you add up to 5 variants of images and text. Then it mixes and matches them on display and shows more of the best performing version. Let's see how it works out over the next few days.
Here's one variant:
Also of note, I need to add a couple of fields to the user table that log the referring source and the campaign name. Will be looking up best practice.

- Improved
Axe ideas that don't fit with the physics of business
thanks @lees - Just had a nice call with a founder. No sale. Need to work out how to sell this thing! Problem is no one can understand how important/good it is for them, without them doing it.
- Great call with a founder I met on Indi Hackers

- Posted today's nugget.
- Lots of talking to nuggeteers

- Lots going on behind the scenes

- Thinking about a new idea I had that might turn into a new side project on top of all the other stuff

- Posted today's nugget.
- Big changes happening in my day job
- Starting a new side project in addition to Nugget

- Just showing Todd around Nugget

- Academy enrollment officially closed

- Academy enrollment has now been closed for realz this time.
- Completed basic HTML/CSS and design for Speak landing page

- Family day

- Added Payment History to the Nugget account screen. This enables Nugget members to download invoices.

- More work on new project
- Final founder call that was left over from academy doors being open
- Posted today's nugget.

- Mostly working on day job #2

- Family day

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- 50 years old today.

- More work on new project

- More work on new project

- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Lot's of looking after the kid, but trying to fit in small amounts of work on the new project where possible.

- More work on new project which is taking more twists and turns into unexpected areas
- Posted today's nugget.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Mocking up new project

- Great office hours call with Nugeteers today.

- Working on raising friends and family funding round for new project.

- Family day

- Demo call with JP and Nugeteers

- Pulling back from the investment idea for the new project and going to bootstrap as usual.
- Aligning myself with the fact that I need to get back to the daily grind of building something.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Beginning setup of new Laravel install

- Unable to do much work today because family in town

- Exercising makes it easier to have the willpower to do work.
- Upgraded Laravel from 5.5 - 5.7 with Laravel Shift (and a bunch of work)

- Posted today's nugget.
- Family day

- We're going to the beach today.
- Yesterday was my 3rd day of 30m on exercise bike just before bed. This seems to be having a positive effect.
- The Laravel upgrade has not caused any major issues so far, knock on wood!
- Hoping to do some work on new project by end of day.

- Posted today's nugget.


- Let's do this
- Got standard job processing working
- Delayed job now working
- Scheduled job now working
- App now sending email
- Now sending email via the queue
- Outgoing email design (logo etc) setup
- Sending password reset email

- Join with password now working
- GDPR geo lookup now working
- Resend validation now working

- Applied to twitter for a developer account for Speak
- Twitter approved the developer account
- Login via Twitter now works
- Auto create account via Twitter now working
- Opened new AWS account for Speak
- Configured AWS security groups, AMA users etc
- Launched micro EC2 instance for salt server
- Configured and installed salt stack on salt server

- Setting up RDS database for staging server
- Fighting with salt all day to get the staging server up and running. No luck yet

- Salt is now almost fully provisioning a Speak server
- Because of moving from ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 I needed to move jobs service from /etc/init to systemd which was... painful
- There were also shenanigans working with php 7.1 and getting salt to provision memcached and image magic
- Laravel is now correctly running on the command line, and jobs are working fully

- Created new mailgun account
- Setup mailgun dns records in Route 53
- Added mailgun config to salt and dev
- Purchased SSL cert
- Installed cert into stage
- Ran salt setup scripts
- Speak staging server is now live!
- Launched new AWS DB instance for live
- Setup salt config file and salt states for live
- Added beanstalk dns entry set to private ip
- Tested cli jobs
- Tested cli email
- Setup AWS load balancer
- Added live instance to it
- http://speakhq.co is live!

- Rejected a bunch of idea submissions nothing good enough for a premium nugget
- Created staging and live app on Twitter for oauth
- Twitter oauth tested & working on all environments

- Created new app on facebook for oauth login
- Created local and staging app for facebook oath
- Deployed and tested FB oauth on local, stage and live
- Created new app on Google for oauth login
- Deployed and tested Google oauth on live
- Google not working on local or stage. Too much of a pain to implement, meh, not worth it.
- Rejected a bunch more idea submissions because they were spam from Mturk. Getting much harder to get non spam submissions these days.

- Family day

- A member of the family is ill so we are spending the day in hospital

- Working on the Founder First book

- More work on the book

- More book. Stuck on the introduction.

- More work on the book. Still. On. The. Intro. Ack!

- Posted today's nugget.

- Removed social logins
- Created coming soon message
- Created stub dashboard
- Completed account edit username, name, email screen
- Completed account change password screen
- Added admin capability to create new accounts and invite testers
- Removed all traces of
username
from codebase as not required for this app

- Posted today's nugget.
- Working with a friend to create a brand blueprint

- Creating schema for [redacted]

- Recorded podcast

- Day watching the kid
- Cracked the [redacted] problem for the [redacted]
- Edited podcast

- Taking some time to think about the book. Perhaps the voice is too formal. Not sure.

- Now the [redacted] can see of the [redacted] is logged in

- New life problem - prioritization. When you're working on 3 equally important projects it's hard to decide exactly what to do on which...

- More work on book. More work on new secret project.

- More work on new project

- Was able to get much more work done than anticipated today!

- I haven't checked in for a few days but have made significant progress on the new project.

- I haven't been posting but only because what I'm working on is still under wraps. I am continuing to progress every day and will try to check in daily moving forward.

- Making real headway on the important stuff. Almost ready to really start sharing what is going on.

- Internet has been slow and spotty for months. Turns out the provider put some kind of filter on there because I got an "internet only" account and that cause the issue. Anyway, fixed now and getting 110 down and 14 up. So much better!

- Made something that was complicated work by accident. Then spent the rest of the day trying to work out why it was working. Finally understood it after 4 hours studying it.

- More work on complicated stuff that I will be able to start talking about within the next week or so

- Getting close to be able to talk about this thing!
- More work getting to alpha.

- My report card looks a bit spotty but I am working on stuff every day, maybe a little to obsessively to remember to check in. ;)
- I've had difficult problems to solve like how to keep accurate time in javascript because... it doesn't accurately keep time!
(Hint, none of the above answers easily solve my specific issue)
-
I'm getting close to an alpha release candidate for the project I'm working on. Looking like it may be as early as 2 weeks (stretch goal). With that in mind I've been looking for some inspiring marketing podcasts. I like the look of these:
-
I'm hoping to reveal the new project to you all by May 25.

- More work. So close to the reveal!

- More lots of work, just sayin'

- More work on the secret project getting closer to the reveal

- Continuing to work on secret project not quite ready for reveal getting closer.

- Lot's of thinking about how to progress

- Gah, stuff always takes more time than you think. I've got about 10 more enhancements and bug fixes and then I'll be able to make a short demo to show to friends and family.
- Was happy to see that TechZing was quoted by Justin Jackson in this post here: https://justinjackson.ca/niche

- More work on the secret project

- Had a great chat with a seed who really helped me understand the premium features that will sell this product
- He is going to use the product (it's a widget) on his site
- So yayy I have my second test customer with a SaaS app who's going to try it out for realz.

- Recorded podcast

- Family day
- Working on obfuscating code

- Auto bake obfuscation as I browse around local dev
- More grind, can't wait to be on a few customers websites. Really want shit to be real.

- Got some major UI work done.
- Will be starting to build the main player tomorrow.

- Creating stub HTML/CSS code. Grunt work to be honest.

- Polishing up the website widget
- On the one hand quick and dirty is the way we're supposed to go... on the other hand 2 hours refactoring and normalizing can just make everything else so much faster.

- Polishing animations
- When you get right to it. There's no point not building the basics of user accounts, and profiles, because that is going to be a major ask and I'm going to HAVE to do it and it's just going to take a max of 1 week up front right now vs much more legacy work. Also, it's going to make that mid plan even more valuable from the get go. I guess this is where it pays to wear the tech hat and the business dev hat at the same time.
- BUT before that I'm going to make a quick demo for you lovely Nugeteers
- Just tried to record a demo for you guys and...it is totally borked. So... I'll be working on fixing that then. Hopefully have it in hand by end of weekend.

- Family day

- Family day

- Had a breakthrough. Watch this space.

- Very first version of Speak is now live ready for @jnoetzelman to test out.
- If you haven't seen the demo you can check it out here: https://stage.speakhq.co/demo/nugeteers
- Posted today's nugget.

- Now logging and computing stats
- Building dashboard next

- Posted today's nugget.
- Making a commitment to keep posting nuggets. It's difficult because the quality of answers from Mturk has gone way down.
- Speak is ready for the first test customer to use I will be sending them an email tomorrow.

- Installed Speak on a customer's website today for realz! Lot's of bugs to fix and tweaks to make now that I have real customer feedback.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Base HTML/CSS for new opener prompt
- Posted today's nugget.

A checkin for the past 3 days:
- Re designed opener to be much more prominent
- Auto open widget after X seconds (set by user)
- Auto close widget after X seconds (set by user)
- Num times to auto open (set by user)
- Tracking state by cookie for above (including last played location)
- Stats - loads, impressions, users, opens, duration, dropOff etc.
- Enable Speak to keep playing correctly during a browser resize
- Hover over peeking widget show "Title of thing - by Joe Bloggs"
Will be launching on a customer site for real tomorrow.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Pushed first speak live. For realz.

- family day

- Posted today's nugget.

- Created a way to record a personal speak for any logged in user
- Invited second customer to test out Speak
- Recorded a personal intro for the new customer
- Recorded 3 general on-boarding speaks
- Thinking about the best psychographic profile of new customers to invite

- Launched private beta of Speak on FounderCafe

- Family day

- Family day

- For speak, moving away from the idea of supporting browsers and instead testing javascript for the available features and if not available the fall back to a more basic version of that feature.

- Posted today's nugget.
- More work getting cloudflare to cache speak assets

- Dreaming up machinations of a new podcast to promote speak

- Change of plan. Just going to release a version of speak where users can apply to beta test it.
- Posted today's nugget.

- Speak Private Beta officially live: https://speakhq.co
- Submitted Speak to Betalist

- Just noting that I am following the academy process and building a seed group. The strategy I am using is the BetaList strategy.
- Created new slack group for Speak seed group
- Stats for today's soft launch:
-
Speak Home Page Views: 341
-
Unique Users: 269
-
Speak Demo Plays: 165
-
Speak Demo Completions: 92
-
Speak Beta Signups: 22

- Completed on boarding pages now I need to "Speak" them
- Silly me I made an entire "open prompt" system that I didn't need. Removed all the code and schema.
- Recorded "Speak" vocal tracks for new on-boarding pages. Wow, this stuff requires voice acting skills!
- Posted today's nugget.


- Feeling quite frustrated with the design of Speak. Thinking I might hire a designer or move to a template/css framework.

- Posted today's nugget.
- Working on Speak API

- Working on speak api

- More work on building out the docs for the Speak API
- Irony: It takes longer to write the API docs than to make the API itself....

- Friends in town vacation!

- On-going vacation with family who are over from Ireland

- Renewing nugget.one SSL

- Commissioned a new HIT to get more startup ideas for this place
- Posted today's nugget.

- More vaycay

- Launching new Academy batch

- My guests have gone home so now I have a week to do some work before another set of guests come for 10 days

- Ugh, took car in for service and other work.
- Some coding work with drip to clean up the Nugget email list.
- More API documentation for Speak.

- Ack. Working on everything except my side project Speak.

- Kid is sick so watching him today
- Posted today's nugget.

- Family day!
- 7.5 hours until Academy enrollment is closed down

- Academy enrollment window now closed
- Some work on a project for the wife

- Starting work on the Speak API

- More work on Speak API docs

- On vacation in Vegas

- Still in Vegas baby!

- In Denver for business meetings

- Spending the day working in a co-working space (rather than at home). It's a new concept for me!

- Lot's to do for the day job and other life stuff so not very much progress on Speak for me right now.

- Talking to Merott
- I'm not able to work on Speak too much due to family and day job commitments right now

- Working on lot's of stuff behind the scenes

- Wife's birthday!

- Working on HTML/CSS step journey

- Building out a CSS/HTML framework

- Working on frontend html/css

- More work on html/css stuff

- Completed HTML/CSS now ready to start creating schema

- Not writing too much here but lots going on as always!
- Posted today's nugget.

- As always a lot going on. The main thing that is taking up time these days is buying a new house.
@jsh Where you go?!

- 2020 might be the year of Nugget. I have plans on how to get lots of people to join us here.

- Closed on the new house now working out how to move there and all the other fun stuff like setup wifi etc

Lot's going on. Now moved into the new house. Frantically working on the day job. Planning on what to do with Nugget next.

- Launched new batches for the current COVID-19 situation.
- Am going to enable users to be able to checkin momentum directly from slack.

- Going to level up to the same momentum as @theill part of that will be by adding momentum checkins directly from to slack using
/momentum My update etc.
- This is the first momentum check-in directly from slack using the
/momentum command

-
Finished up work on the momentum tracker allowing all academy members the capability to check-in momentum updates directly via Slack.
-
Replied to various folks emails reaching out about Nugget
-
Created a giant shopping list for the next 1-2 weeks of living during CV
-
Now auto adding bullet point to Slack momentum checkin
-
Added plus icon to Taskflow ready to make adding tasks work for real

- Came up a with a new strategy to promote Nugget by creating a free course with 7 lessons something like βFoundation of Business for Indihackersβ. This comes off the back of a few different discussions, meetings, discussions in my new podcast, and thinking about the final nugget module and other serendipitous goings on.
- New batch apollo7-jets filling up nicely
- Played 1h of Roblox Adventure Up & Naval Warfare with my kid

- Shoveled a mountain of snow so that we could get deliveries in and the car out
- Working on mockups for the day job

- Family day with the kid plus a little bit of mocking up for the day job

- Added T&Cs checkbox to checkout journey for day job
- Playing Roblox with my kid

- Starting work on Taskflow add task popup
- More work on dayjob mockups

- Recorded episode of reactor podcast
- Meeting with day job about the direction of mockups
- Created a static html based todo list inside Taskflow that lists the tasks that are the fastest path to creating a real database driven todo list! So, ironically still working within the context of a big ass text file to manage my tasks ;)

- Installed an SSL cert for an old client that I seem to keep doing support for even though I built the website about 5 years ago
- Played game of Roblox Naval Warefare with the kid and his buddy in Ireland
- Worked on mockups for day job
- Signed up to the latest batch apollo7-jets as myself (with a REAl cc no less) because I am going to dogfood nugget and experience it as a student while I work on Taskflow. I'm especially interested in rounding out the final modules.

- Tweaked nugget sales funnel to better represent activity going on here
- Updated login icon on Taskflow
- Can now add tasks to for real to the database in Taskflow

- I have been having a fair amount of discussion with founders via email answering questions about the Academy
- In other news, the current batch is almost full, 2 spots of 15 left. Also I now think that 15 is the perfect size per batch. Just enough to create a sense of community but not too much to be impersonal.
- Hacking on trying to make a dogfood version of Taskflow work for me, didnβt get too far


Taskflow
- Now auto compiling multiple module js files into single js file
- Can now change task status by clicking a status icon. Exciting!
- Make βtimerβ icon work
- Now able to use Taskflow as rudimentary task manager
- Think of a way to slice and dice entire system by project (aha, context)!
- Add way to edit the title of a task
- When set status to "done" push to top of done list
- List tasks by bullets on start view
- Fix input box on add task tool

- Thinking through the new Nugget startup bootcamp
- Great to see so many folks checking in their momentum
- Completed a large chunk of the new nugget bootcamp
Note: Still using big ass text file for task management until Taskflow becomes a little more sophisticated

- Dang it, can't believe I missed a checkin day and I've only been going for 2 weeks. How in the heck do you do it @theill !!
- Got the home page template ready for the new bootcamp
- Finished up 1st pass sales copy for new bootcamp landing page

- Mocked up final screen for the day job, hoping to start dev on Monday
- Great call with @laura about the new bootcamp

- Family day!

- Another family day but did get a chance to think about the new bootcamp content

- Working on the bootcamp. Outlining thinking about it from 1st principles perspective.

- More work on the new bootcamp
- My computer kept randomly dying and I was able to fix it with some $10 shareware what the heck. https://realmacmods.com/product/macbook-pro-nocrash-utility/

- Had a great call with @laura about the bootcamp she really helped me get my head clear!

- Finally got a complete draft for the intro page of the bootcamp, this is going to be good!
- list

Feeling like the bootcamp intro needs some tweaks as have shown it to a few folks and I donβt think it is instantly landing in the way I want it to.
- Happy to get a momentum of 6. I sort of wish it was out of 0-100 instead of 0-7.

- In preparation for the new Indie Founder Bootcamp I created a new single source of truth bio page - https://nugget.one/jv

- I think I finally finished the indie founder bootcamp intro page, again

- Showed the bootcamp intro v2.0 to a few founders and @laura and I think I've got it now. Next up moving on to lesson 1.

- Working on lesson 2 "context" in the bootcamp

- Still working on lesson 2 of the bootcamp - context

- Continuing to working on lesson 2 of the bootcamp

- More work on lesson 2 of the bootcamp. With this much time sink, it better be good!

- More work on bootcamp!

- More bootcamp

- Hoping to finish up lesson 2 of the bootcamp!
- Now on Page 3 (of 9) of the bootcamp

- Yet more work on the bootcamp! I Started this thing on the 23rd of Apr. and am now 20 days in, and still only 2.5 pages in (of 9). My current goal is to try to get the review version ready by next wed. 20th.

- Finishing up page 3, lesson 2 of the bootcamp


- Family day

- Family day

- Day jobs

- Bootcamp

- Working on the house painting and such

- Working on the bootcamp lesson 3 - "MARKET: Pick a market you can reach and sell to" split the lesson into 3 parts. Just finished part 1.

- Putting out fires in the day job

- More work on bootcamp really want to get this thing done!

- Sigh, more bootcamp. Taking way longer than expected.

- All over the map. Bootcamp and other stuff.

- Boooootttcammmpppp

- skiddly-diddly-bootcamp

- BC

- More bootcamp

- Finally making some better progress on the bootcamp

- Bootcamp on make something people want

- Hi this is a demo

- More work on the bootcamp

- Recorded Reactor podcast
- My buddy is making this Nugget branded backpack for me as present for fixing his server.
- Call with @laura to discuss the bootcamp. As always, she helped my thinking sooo much.

- Just 2 more lessons to go! (and an exit page)
- 2 lessons left!

- I just have 1 more lesson to go on the bootcamp (and the exit page)

- Family day

- Working on last lesson of bootcamp
- Finished the bootcamp! Now I just need to create an exit page and make it easy to get into the bootcamp from everywhere inside nugget.

- Lots of work on the bootcamp. Plugging in Speak to every lesson.


- Worked on the wife's site for the past two days. We released an on demand version of her Play Therapy Certificate. Completely automated the giving out certificates in accordance with various regulatory authority guidelines. https://playstronginstitute.com/certificate

- Fathers day

- Bootcamp written lessons are finished!
- Starting to work on the Speak audio for each lesson.

- Changed the name of "Momentum Tracker" to "Momentum Blog"
- Made the Momentum feature free for all Nugget members - to give @theill a run for his money ;) - and also to give people something to do after they finish the bootcamp
- Re-worded the verbiage around the momentum feature to be "Hustle" based.
- Momentum is now 0-100 because 100 is a BIG number f*** yeah!
- I should probably be cranking on the final part of the bootcamp right now but at this point I feel like having a break :o

- Thinking about Roblox and the idea of making a game to make some cash a side side side project.
- Man I really have to record the audio for each bootcamp lesson but for some reason I am finding it hard to get motivated.
- Ok. I have now recorded 3 of 9 "tapes" for the bootcamp.

- Hired a Roblox dev and started talking to him about building a small first test game to see what the land is like.

- Recorded 7 of 9 speaks for the bootcamp. I have technically finished #8 as well but I don't feel happy about it so will probably re-work it.
- I'm enjoying that the momentum number is 0-100. It feels much better to have a momentum of 75 than 5 and feels more reflective of the effort I'm putting in.
- I could work for the next few hours but feeling like just taking a break and vegging in front of the TV.

- Reworked the audio tape for the marketing section
- Started playing with Roblox studio just as an experiment but now I think I have the beginnings of a game

- Feeling great because I am so close to launching the bootcamp!

- Bootcamp ready to go! I just need some female founders to review it. Have been working hard to make that happen, but it is harder than it sounds!

- Well, my sister reviewed the bootcamp and it turns out it's NOT ready. She really liked lessons 1-4 and then I lost her from 5-8 because it was too developer focused. So I need to re-work to include digital product people as well as coders. Also need to keep the same flow/quirk. Ultimately this will also have an impact on the whole academy. /cc @laura
- I tested a game motion mechanic to my Roblox game and it made both my kid and myself feel sick. So, not going to do THAT then.

- Family day +
- Thinking about how to fix the bootcamp
- Thinking about game mechanics for my Roblox game
- Switched out 3 light fixtures in the house

- Bootcamp edits. Need to make the last 4 lessons as good as the first 3.

- Working on bootcamp edits.


- Finished "Set a price point that fits YOUR goals".

- Yayy! Bootcamp "content" is finished! Now I need to think through how the whole journey works.

- Family day

- Finally finished (and paid) tax.

Iβm liking my new Mac Book Pro

- Working on new Nugget site for bootcamp release

Finding it hard to get my head in the game today. Just one of those days I guess.

- Back at it after a week off at Grandmaβs!

- Been working on my roblox game but circling back to releasing the new bootcamp

- I must confess I have the madness about my Roblox game and I am finding it super hard to complete the Nugget work.

- More work on the game

- Working on the new Nugget journey. Setting up the home page as being the bootcamp and simplifying Nugget if you are new.

- Working on releasing the bootcamp

- Working on the bootcamp for real. Getting very close to pushing the new nugget.

- More procrastinating on the bootcamp ;)

- The Indie Founder Bootcamp is now soft launched!
- I will be testing and tweaking in production over the next few days

- Monitoring the launch of the new bootcamp and checking it's all working behind the scenes.

- Monitoring bootcamp tech

- Continuing to monitor Nugget bootcamp tech

- Continuing to monitor bootcamp and get a sense of how to improve the journey for new folks coming in

- More monitoring of bootcamp. Getting closer to sending out to my list,.

- Getting ready to release the bootcamp for real. Just need to ask some academy members to make a short testimonial video.

- Inviting founders to record video for the bootcamp!

- Working on final part of bootcamp / academy journey

- Created an intro for the reactor podcast

- Tweaked the bootcamp landing page and also initial emails.

- Changed my mind about the way I will create nugget testimonial will be using a zoom for an interview instead

- Getting ready to send an intro email out to alumni members

- More tweaks to the bootcamp journey

- Set a Bootcamp launch email to go out to 4,500 people on Sun morning. It's a very cold list so a good result might be 100 folks clicking into the bootcamp.

- Working on Slider

- Pushed out bootcamp to mailing list
- Happy for my momentum to be at 75 closest I've had it to 100 in a while :)

- Refactored all the code in my Roblox game, now it looks much more like the kind of code framework I'm used to!

- Watching how the bootcamp unfolds

- Fixed some scaling issues for one of my day jobs

- Recorded a podcast with Justin Jackson http://techzinglive.com/page/1696/333-tz-interview-justin-jackson-catch-the-wave

- More work on the roblox game
- More watching what is happening in the bootcamp
- Also a family day

- Family day

- Having unexpected discussions that might lead to unexpected things

- Refactored roblox game code
- Starting to work on server side of roblox game
- A lot more people going through the bootcamp
- Bootcamp to academy conversions not working so need to make it better

- Now I've had 300 people start the bootcamp I'm getting a good idea of completion rates. The industry standard is 5% and the bootcamp is currently 11%. But I know for a fact I can get it much higher since the academy is about 50% completion rate. I'll be working on that over the next week before any more major pushes.
- Nugget how has 6,930 users

- Monitoring the bootcamp. Continuing to think about how to get more folks to finish it.
- More work on slider backend

- Family day

- Family day

- Working on slider roblox game

- Created an awesome XP added effect in Slider

- Family is staying with us so lots of kids age 2-6 in our house right now! Let's just say it's kinda hard ot get any work done ;)

- Created an awesome effect in slider for after you complete a challenge and collect XP

- Working on more slider stuff. Should be able to start posting videos of the game pretty soon.

- More work on slider

- More work on Slider

- Family day

- Family day again!

- Worked up an intro idea for Slider

Got some nice exposure for the bootcamp thanks to this nice Tweet by Indie Hackers -https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/1311749733791260672

- Some great progress made on the Roblox game. Now it stores and displays your main score as you complete challenges.
- Same for XP and also started on the timer function.

- 399 people started the bootcamp.... will there be one more by the end of today?

- Next up is to build out an awesome level up animation for slider.

- Got data storage, pills, power, level up working in Slider
https://www.loom.com/share/ed1d4a5f4fdd43ba8e9f7ae9b6ca8449
- Added flowers and grass to Slider
https://www.loom.com/share/bb4e7c0d5eb74aae8d0357f3331d0171
- Added Emperor Zorg to Slider

- More work on Slider, now saving challenge keys ready for display and use to unlock challenge gates

- Started building slider inventory system

- Got the level unlocking working for real in Slider

- Polishing Slider ready for the grand finale

- Lots of work on Slider, and I forgot to say that the last few days as well

- Family day

- On a trip to Grandma's. Not really getting any side project stuff done. Need to use spare time for the day job.

- Still at Grandma's

- Setup ROJO so I can edit Roblox files in my regular text editor (Atom)

- Refactoring Slider and turning it from a linear game into a systemic one
- Got Slider ready to plugin analytics

- Plugging in analytics to slider

- More work on slider stats
- Created slider icon

- Plugging in analytics to slider.

- Slider is live and being promoted via ads. I've plugged in analytics too. based on 1,000 play sessions I'll decide where to go next.

- I tried Twitch for the first time and streamed myself coding Slider.
Here's a clip:

- Lots of work on Slider

- Lots of work on Slider

- Not sure where to start. Have done so much with Slider!
- 2,278 folks have played it now
- Top 10% have played from 20mins to 6 hours in game
- Added new scoring mechanics
- Fixed a lot of bugs that were breaking things for player types on different device types
- Currently working on a player rounds (race starting in 30 seconds) mechanic

- Removed weld scripts on Slider

- Currently building a rounds based system for slider after much analysis of player behavior
- Going to try to check in here more often being inspired by @andyd

- Itβs been more complicated than I imagined creating the group race functionality in slider. That said I think I am 85% of the way there at this point.

- I think I got the core logic of group races working. Now I just need to present the results to users after each race.

- Soo close with Slider challenges. Stuff always takes longer than I want and I always have less time than I need ;)

- Released the first version of group races for slider!

- Lotβs to do on slider but going to take a family day

- Taking a break from all side project stuff for a few days. Lot's of things to do with the house and day job.

- Taking a break from Slider for a week!

- Taking a break from Slider until next Wed I think. Catching up on day job stuff.
- There are now 600 people enrolled in the bootcamp BTW

- Continuing to tale a break!

- Family day!

- All caught up on the day job. Still feel like laying of Slider for a few day to prepare myself to get into "the zone".

- Recorded a podcast with Adam Wathan

- Making some nice waves with TechZing

- Bootcamp is filling up. Almost at 800 people :)

- 789 in the bootcamp, can't wait to hit 800!

- Boom, we hit 800 in the bootcamp!

- Thinking through a pivot for Nugget

- Made a decision to rebrand Nugget to IndieFounder

- Working on new book idea

-
Almost 900 folks in the bootcamp now.
-
I have clarity about my direction for the new year. I will be stopping work on the game Slider and starting to re-brand Nugget to IndieFounder.
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The first part of that re-branding will be to write a book (an enhanced version of the bootcamp) see brand and book below:

- I have started writing the new book IndieFounder!

- I have finished a first pass of the preface and the intro for the book done. Next up I will write a chapter "your path starts here" and give a broad over view of the different possible ways indie founders can make money online.

- I am making headway with this IndieFounder book. Currently on chapter 3.

- Working on the chapter "Get Unstuck" of the book IndieFounder

- Have created a first pass framework of the new book content (pre TOC). Sent it to some beta readers, waiting for feedback!

- Working on a 1st pass table of contents for the new book
- Created a 1st pass at a table of contents. Sent it to 14 beta readers and shared it with some folks in Nugget.
- I'll be honest, it's really late and I have no idea if anyone I sent it to will like it... AND that's the reason why you send it to people BEFORE you write the book. ;)

- Last night's table of contents has gone through quite lot of iterations, I am feeling much happier with it today. Getting close to closing the iterations and to start writing.

- So I'm feeling pretty good about the TOC now I'm moving on to write the main outline.

- No book work today, just too much other stuff to do

- Started writing again. Just working on the intro for this second version that is just about free traffic.

- I finally completed the intro to the book. This took a few days with each session lasting a couple of hours. I always find that these things start of slow and then get faster as I get further into the project.

- Written first part of next section "Why I'm a relevant source of advice"

- Spoke with Rob Fitzpatrick writer of The Mom Test. It is looking like we might do some kind of partnership on the first IndieFounder book.

- Working on book and also helping on my wife's side project

- Too much going on. Need to get focused and will then report.