What I learned this week #1
First week of following my dreams
Reflections: a wizard is never late…
Everything about me is a long story. I often tell people my journey so far has been about taking risk, learning by doing, and challenging myself. I keep repeating this cycle and have made some incredible pivots over the years. So far, it’s worked out well and I have nothing to complain about. In fact, I am extremely excited again for the first time in a while.
This time, the pivot feels a bit different. In retrospect, all my prior pivots were fairly superficial. This time, I am actually prioritizing what I’m uniquely interested in and suited for. It’s as if the universe brought me on this long and windy path, completing missions, leveling up, and occasionally doing side quests, just to bring me to this exact moment. I feel a deeper sense of conviction that is aligned with how I actually feel. It’s a bit more subtle and unexplainable, and I trust it more.
This is my first week working full time on following my dreams. As far as I can remember, I’ve always just wanted to tinker, build cool shit, meet new people, and hopefully make some money. Over the years, this has taken on different forms from working on my own products, startups, and other projects, and we’ll get into that later I’m sure. It feels a bit surreal and benign. Bizarrely, it doesn’t feel as euphoric as I’d imagined. It feels more “right”, in a subtle way. I think back to past occasions when I considered leaving my full time job and imagine what would have happened. My contemplation always leads me to believe that the timing wasn’t right and that there was a reason why it happened the way that it did. A good way to summarize the timing for me is the famous opening quote from Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie:
A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to
Weekly recap: stepping in shit
I was catching up with a friend and I learned a new expression: stepping in shit. Google it. It basically means fortuitous or serendipitous mistakes that ultimately lead to something positive. This week feels like that in many ways.
Most of my time was spent getting started and running into the thousands of minor issues you can’t anticipate until you get started. Camera issues, video issues, format issues, delivery issues, etc. There’s nothing exciting or even super frustrating about them, they are just little inconveniences. But for me, I take these as clues to building a long-term, efficient, and scalable system for producing wicked-ass videos.
In another way, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get started. I struggled through a few different approaches and finally settled on just getting started with whatever was easiest and most obvious. Keeping it simple helped a lot.
Lastly, in the broadest way possible, as I write this update, I felt a bit disappointed that I didn’t live up to my perfect week. But then I thought about how it’s important to enjoy the journey rather than obsessing over some arbitrary destination. I enjoyed a few moment throughout the week and as I current write, where I am grateful to be on this journey and that it’s part of a much larger, more awesome story ark.
nobackspace.io
This week I decided to revive an old project called nobackspace.io. Originally, this was a meme project that I created to just get back into coding and fuck around with ChatGPT. It sat dormant for about 2 years before realizing it actually had some potential.
It’s a serendipitous story. Back in ~2018, I listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Safi Bahcall and he briefly mentioned this concept of writing “FBR” - fast, bad, and “wrong”. That memory vacated my conscious mind and sat dormant for a long time. Later on in ~2022, it popped up and I thought it would be funny to produce a mechanical keyboard that didn’t have a backspace key. I remembered from my days in the finance industry how people would take off the F1 keys in their keyboards to avoid opening Excel’s crappy help option. I realized physically taking off the backspace key is a dumb idea, because it renders the keyboard useless for all other tasks. So I popped my question into ChatGPT and it suggested to build and app, which I did. It’s odd how this idea went completely dormant for 6 years and somehow came back. I remember that weekend clearly, I was making breakfast and I suddenly got the urge to do this. There was novelty and humour to it. I was hooked, and I spent the rest of the weekend figuring out how to ship it. And it gets even more serendipitous, but I’ll talk more about that later…
Around 2022 when the idea came back to me, I was working on some written product artifact, which I happened to be struggling with. Normally, my process for writing anything important is to write it down on paper first. This helps me feel less perfectionist and avoid distractions. I write sloppily and focus more on sections and high-level concepts, often scratching out and revising major parts of the page. But I noticed something peculiar: I was often getting stuck on something because I was trying to get it perfect. This lead me to derive the following principle:
Separate brainstorming, writing, and editing into discrete tasks
Ironically, I am currently listening to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (I am only on chapter 1, so forgive me if what I’m about to say is incomplete). In the early parts of chapter 1, Smith introduces the concept of Specialization of Labour, which he later argues is what drives productive economies. In the context of writing, we can think of it as a process with discrete tasks that require specialization of labour to efficiently produce content. When I wrote, I was often getting tripped up by not getting it perfect, but I never had issues getting the basic outline and concepts together. My diagnosis is that I was mixing up writing and editing into a singular function, when they should have been separated, but I was already doing a good job separating brainstorming. The issue with bundling writing and editing is that they require two different skills. Writing is much more of a creative grind than editing, and editing is much more analytical and optimization-oriented.
I then thought: how can I separate writing from editing, is there a tool I can build for this? Enter nobackspace.io
My recommendations to you all are:
Write out the outline and key concepts on paper FIRST,
Use nobackspace.io to break the habit of bundling writing and editing, and
Setup dedicated time to edit your writing before publishing it.
So back to my story. I was in Nashville towards the end of January and I was explaining the concept behind the YouTube Channel / this new journey I’m on. I casually mentioned how I’ve been building products on the side and gave the example of nobackspace.io. To my surprise, the person I was speaking to say “woah, that sounds like a great tool for Writer’s Block”. The surprising part of me was how quickly they understood the core problem and it’s potential value, whereas I had previously mentally categorized it as a meme project. This was a signal for me that others would understand it if I communicated it better and focused more on the problem it solves.
So, I decided to revive this project and rebrand it as “the writer’s block app”. By the time you read this, it might still be the old crappy version without a backend. I initially debated how to proceed. Normally, and as part of following the Million Dollar Weekend framework, I should have started with getting 3 paying customers before doing anything else. I thought about this and concluded that I may as well build it now since:
Getting started is more important than following some “framework”,
Customers can’t “get-to-value” just by hearing about it, and
It’s fairly small (and I’m a bit bored!)
To expand on #2, and #3: in my experience demoing the as-is product, people have a hilarious reaction when the first try it and this is the exact moment when the user “gets the value”. I figured it would be more work to explain them of this rather than to just let them try it, especially considering I can rebuild a fully-featured version of the app in just a few days. So the potential-benefit-to-cost ratio is pretty high. That’s a bet I want to take. I also my friend Stefan (@stefanbuilds on X) shared a similar project that was recently on ProductHunt called Flowdrafter which essentially does the same thing. Given the reception on ProductHunt, there appears to be demand for this and I was pretty convinced that the time spent this week rebuilding it would not be wasted.
I pretty much went balls deep on adding features, which I don’t necessarily recommend but did anyway. Again, I figured I just want to get started, have fun, and it’s not costing me a lot in the grand scheme of things… I added:
Login
Unlimited notes for premium subscribers
Account/Username
Stats page
Leaderboard page
Customizable themes: font and colours
My next challenge was figuring out how to get the word out. I settled on the following:
Leaderboard page,
Going to meetups and talking about it
Organizing events around it, and
Launching it on iOS and ProductHunt
I developed a leaderboard page that lets anyone, users or not, to see who’s winning at this arbitrary game. I wanted to find a way to gamify this app, so that people could start competing against one another. This type of feature often leads to unpredictable and potentially viral behaviour that can benefit the product. I got the idea from Robinhood’s strategy to acquire 1M users before they even launched, which they later used to get fundraising. The idea is simple, people like to compete for things that they believe others value. It might not even be inherently valuable, but when we see others wanting something, we assume it does and it engages our instincts to compete for scarce resources. Right now, being the only active user on nobackspace.io, I currently hold the top spot in the leaderboard, but probably not for long.
I attended a new event series called 555 Nights: 5 slides, 5 minutes, 5 questions. It was a good crew of people. Got to demo the product and got some laughs, but no signups. My ultimate goal was not really to get signups, but a) to share the idea and get feedback, b) checkout a new event, and c) promote my substack/YouTube channel. So in that way it was a success.
The next meetup I plan to attend is called Shut Up and Write, a world-wide regular meetup for writers that helps them get shit done. Keep you posted.
I also plan to host a speed writing competition, using nobackspace.io. The idea is that it would be fun to have a competition using this new product that ultimately gets people to try and potentially use the product. I could see this kind of thing being fun and spreading across many different cities and if that happens, nobackspace.io will have a growing community of users to build for. So far, I haven’t been able to get anyone to attend, but I will keep trying to get attendees and promoting the event on X to get attendees. Keep you posted.
Lastly, I plan to launch this on ProductHunt and iOS/play stores. I need to finish setting up the monetization and compiling it for iOS, but it will be released there in the next week or so. I’ll update you later on the details of the release. For the ProductHunt release, I plan to really lean into the theme of writers block and the leaderboard, since I think it beats flowdrafter in that way. It’s also important for me to get the top spot in the iOS/play stores since there are no apps that come up when you search for “writers block” and being the only option to appear can be a lucrative niche.
What I’m reading and listening to
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations on Spotify. Quick thoughts:
Economies of scale are actually just Specialization of Labour at scale?
Interesting choice of words, ol-timey
Clearly smart, very insightful
Timeless and still relevant today
Founders Podcast: How to Sell Like Steve Jobs. Quick thoughts:
Wicked podcast, wicked episode. It’s probably the 5th time I’ve listened to this one episode.
Steve Jobs used to put in 90 hours of prep for every 1 hour of presentation
Steve Jobs hated slides and often used single pictures instead of writing
Macrovoices: The Nuclear Story Has Never Been Better. Quick thoughts:
Still bullish Uranium
Cameco might be a good way to play the enrichment cycle, since there’s no instrument in the market that can give me that kind of exposure
Art of Manliness: Dark Horse, Achieving Success Through Fulfillment. Quick thoughts:
This book transformed my life in 2019-20. Rereading, since it was super important to me then. It has a lot to do with what I shared above in Reflections
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. Quick thoughts:
Interesting concept that can be applied to a wide range of disciplines
Initially I thought it was going to be more of a motivational book, but it’s deeply philosophical and leveraging insights from technical research
Main point for me so far: objectives are defined by what we know of them today, but when you’re trying to innovate you can’t get to your objective in a straight line, so you have to forget the objective and focus on novel approaches
Things to come next week
Weekly recap on 680 Club (next week’s project)
More updates on nobackspace: ProductHunt/iOS/Play launches, meetups, etc.
More updates on the shift knob for Toyota 4Runner (not mentioned here, but in my YouTube video)
How to get involved
I’m looking to people who like what I’m doing and want to be active. If you want to follow my journey, I’d appreciate a follow/subscribe in any of the following platforms:
Also, I am always looking to connect with you guys to understand your day-to-day and what challenges I can turn into weekly ideas. You can always book a 1-1 with me to talk shop and get acquainted.
Best,
Adam
Very cool. I love the concept of nobackspace!