Very relatable to someone with way too many interests and too little time to pursue them all. Best of luck to both of us over the next six months!
Same. Just followed Michael on youtube.
I quit contracting 6 months ago
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#12There is high value in pieces where the author uses himself as a case study in achieving something and provides a lesson for others to learn from. In this case, however, it just reads like braggadocio. What's the take-away for us?
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#13This is a very interesting article, but hijacking middle mouse click to scroll made the experience of reading it pretty annoying.
Likewise - was very interested to read, but it didn’t zoom correctly on an iPhone. As soon as I tried to zoom to look more closely at the charts they disappeared, and on zooming out I then had a small scrollable window containing the content set within the larger page.
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#14I've been tracking my time in great detail as I work on various projects and I am hoping others will find this interesting!
This was definitely an interesting read, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't surprised with your results. I've been trying something similar, with the exception that I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria. This saved me a ton of time. More importantly - I just stopped doing those kinds of projects altogethe…
> I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria
How do you find customers? (I.e. people with buying power, and clearly defined unsolved problems.) Being able to do so is a pretty valuable skill!
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#15There is high value in pieces where the author uses himself as a case study in achieving something and provides a lesson for others to learn from. In this case, however, it just reads like braggadocio. What's the take-away for us?
>What's the take-away for us?
My takeaways:
1. If your goal is to try and make money, being focused on one idea at a time is probably better than deep diving in to several narrow niches.
2. I shouldn't be discouraged by not (yet) generating income myself. Despite lots of stories of success and people telling you otherwise, it's a hard thing to do, especially if you work a full time job.
3. I'm really glad I don't bother with the effort of micro tracking my time like this. On the surface it seems appealing but after reading this it seems like it takes a lot of effort, and doesn't provide much value.
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#16Site is nearly unreadable on mobile safari. Giant header, huge floating footer, had to rotate the phone multiple times to finally get something to render correctly.
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#17Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I suggest that as you continue writing, you should take a step back and try to read it from the point of view of someone that has no previous knowledge of anything about you. This could help you focus what you write about and make things more succinct, because most p…
Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them.
Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was definitely an interesting read, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't surprised with your results. I've been trying something similar, with the exception that I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria. This saved me a ton of time. More importantly - I just stopped doing those kinds of projects altogethe…
> I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria How do you find customers? (I.e. people with buying power, and clearly defined unsolved problems.) Being able to do so is a pretty valuable skill!
Almost everyone has some buying power and some unsolved problems, the issue is that most so-called problems are tolerable to an extent that people will not pay to solve them. I haven't solved this issue, which is why I use my trial and error approach.
As for finding people to share your product with, it's very easy. If you had any hypothesis behind your solution, you can guess where your customers might be - and if you just approach these people (whether online or in person, such as what the Pinterest founder did), very few will refuse to give your product a try if you offer it gratis. Getting people to pay comes after getting people to love your product, and the latter is difficult enough that if you really did it you won't have to worry about the money.
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#19Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I suggest that as you continue writing, you should take a step back and try to read it from the point of view of someone that has no previous knowledge of anything about you. This could help you focus what you write about and make things more succinct, because most p…
Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them. Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those…
I'll provide a specific issue I had, which is that the charts don't provide good units or labels. For example, on the Week by Week breakdown chart the vertical axis is labeled "Duration" and and has bars that range from 0 to ~2.0, but no units written there. Neither hours or days really make sense (hours are too short, and from the rest of the post it is pretty clear the author works more than 2 days per week).
Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").
Re: I quit contracting 6 months ago
#20There is high value in pieces where the author uses himself as a case study in achieving something and provides a lesson for others to learn from. In this case, however, it just reads like braggadocio. What's the take-away for us?
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