Arhiva: iulie 2018

I was thinking of ways to generate revenues for content sites the other day. My focus is on interview based sites (for obvious reasons) and I remembered Indie Hackers doing a really good job about it. I thought I read a sort of income report on their site, but I couldn’t find them anymore, since the /blog section redirects now to the home page. I initially thought that since their acquisition by Stripe, they removed it. A “site:indiehackers.com/blog” search later, though, the articles were still available.

What is interesting for me in these blog posts is the fact that Indie Hackers started in August 2016, it was acquired by Stripe in April 2017 for un undisclosed amount, but by that time they were making around $5,000/month with not so much traffic on the website to speak of. They had a combination of revenue sources, from ads on the site to site sponsors and podcast/newsletter sponsors as well.

In case you want to read them, here they are, in chronological order:

• Launching to 300,000 Pageviews
• October 2016 Month in Review
• November 2016 Month in Review
• December 2016 Month in Review
• January 2017 Month in Review
• February 2017 Month in Review

Here’s also 2 answers from the founder on Hacker News and on the Indie Hacker Forum:

• I make a decent amount of money from ad revenue for Indie Hackers every month
• Ask CSALLEN: How do you find sponsors?

I hope they don’t remove the articles (they can still be found on archive.org, in case the links aren’t working anymore).

I was reading recently some article or book about getting off your ass and doing shit. And I remember thinking this: Reward each action you take. Or, better said, reward behaviour.

It basically means that whenever you choose a target or a goal, you define the actions you need to take to get you there and, instead of celebrating hitting specific milestones, you celebrate the consistency of doing those actions over and over again, until you achieve what you set your mind to achieve.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. Don’t celebrate losing 1kg, 5kgs or even 10kgs. Celebrate, instead, the fact that you got to the gym 3 times a week, as planned. Celebrate you had 1 day, 3 days, a week, a month, a year of eating well. As Cristina does, when she celebrates being consistent with logging the meals she eats in MyFitnessPal for 800 days. Not an easy feat, I tell you, as I only kept at it about 40 days, the most, without a break in habit.

When you celebrate milestones and targets you risk being demotivated when it takes longer than you planned initially. When you celebrate and reward your own behaviour you allow yourself to fail from time to time. You just need to get back in the saddle.

It worked for me for the last 6-7 years, since I first started to pay more attention to my actions and I kept my focus on a goal at a minimum. It actually made it easier for me to achieve what I wanted. But it took me several years to get there and I’m still a work in progress.

One final thought: you still need targets, because they help you establish the actions you want to take and they can also be tracked more easily. But focus on the consistency of actions initially and, once you get those working, go back to your goals.

The photo is just some really tasty ice cream I chose to reward my behaviour. You should try it, too

Cristina, my co-founder at The CEO Library, always praised sleeping. Well, not always, but in the last few years. She used to be a night owl that despised sleep, so it is a relatively recent change in her life, as well.

While I agreed with her on the surface (I mean, yeah, it’s true, more sleep is better, right?), I never actually felt it. I never slept a lot to begin with and I can wake up at any hour, after almost any time sleeping and I can function quite well after several minutes. I don’t need a “wake up”/morning ritual to start the day, I just go to the bathroom, wash myself and that’s it.

Recently, though, I started to feel that even when I sleep enough in terms of hours, if it’s not during the “correct” hours, it’s not good.

When I sleep from around 11pm-12am I always wake up around 7 and I’m really productive. When I sleep the same amount of hours (or even more), but I go to sleep at around 1-2am, the next day is a lot worse. It’s not that I don’t put in the work, but I have problems focusing on the task at hand, it takes longer to start tasks and, worse, I feel sleepy all day.

So, starting next week, I will go to sleep in the coveted 11pm-12am interval. And it’s next week because I’m traveling this one, on a short seaside vacation here, in Portugal, and not because of the “I’m starting on Monday” syndrome. Or maybe it’s the same, who knows.

In case you want to find out more about sleep as a productivity tool, you should read Why We Sleep.