Went through today's launches properly this morning. Generate this, automate that, no code needed. Every page is a capability list. Not one of them tells you what the product does on the day it gets something wrong.
That's backwards for anything a person puts their name on. The failure that actually costs you isn't the crash, because a crash announces itself. It's the confident wrong output that ships looking fine. A video that publishes a false claim to someone's channel. A generated model that's subtly the wrong shape. An agent filling in its own verification field.
My most valuable '23 lesson you can not grow without trying something new. We reached Ramen profitability with https://www.makerbox.club/ (marketing resources for Solopreneurs) in '22 and decided to double down on what works. The formula was clear: 1. come up with a new product idea
2. build it in public on Twitter
3. launch on Product Hunt
4. acquire users with tweeting, newsletter featurings, writing guest articles, and being active in communities (Indie Hackers & Product Hunt discussions)
5. write valuable content on Twitter The problem is that this formula only worked to get 5K/Monthly. No further growth. In April, we changed the approach and decided to try something new: - double down on email marketing (free newsletters, content freebies, email chains)
- launch a new product type - AI wrapper (paid tool - marketing strategy generator https://founderpal.ai/marketing-...)
- launch free AI wrappers to collect emails & upsell paid products. That was the most successful experiment cause we got SEO & Influencer marketing on autopilot. Millions of views without any effort and sponsorships: TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Newsletters. Tools we launched: 1. Value proposition generator (https://founderpal.ai/value-prop...)
2. User persona generator (https://founderpal.ai/user-perso...)
3. Business ideas generator (https://founderpal.ai/business-i...) Now, we're going to double down on these channels. BUT as soon as we reach the new plateau, we'll return to the experiment stage
Wednesdays are usually the most challenging day to stay focussed for me and I was wondering how you manage to remain productive/motivated on an off day.
I m restyling a live app screen by screen, with Claude Code doing the edits. My test suite has 262 tests and all of them pass, but none of them check how a page looks. So a change to shared styles could break a screen and nothing would tell me.
Before each change, I have the agent screenshot every screen I m not supposed to touch, using a fake signed-in session and mocked API responses so no real data is involved. After the change, it captures them again and compares them pixel by pixel. Anything that differs has to be explained.
That caught something I would never have seen. 34 screens matched exactly. One modal didn t: 1,334 of about 215,000 pixels were different. To my eye, before and after looked identical. The cause was that my first version moved the page into a new wrapper, and the old container had been quietly centering the modal s heading. The new one didn t. No test would have complained.
It also showed that a modal kept outside the new wrapper still changed colour, because my theme variables are set on the whole page, not just the wrapper. I had to re-scope the old colours around the modal.
There are a million books on how to become successful and what entrepreneurs do/don't do, and it's kind of attributed to that. Whether it's waking up early, meditating, or other practices.
