i.e. whenever you are considering being lazy, remember, it won’t kill you, it will “simply” make you feel miserable in the long run.

And then - nothing. That’s OK. Sometimes you don’t need to make changes. For example, Hacker News is as good as it was 15 years ago. If they don’t make any changes, I’d guess it will still be OK 10 years from now. However, with the rise of online influencers and their presence on multiple platforms, there was a need for something even simpler than about.me - a page where one could list the links to all other accounts online. That’s how services like linktr.ee and their competitors were born. All they had to offer was an easy way to create a mobile-friendly page with a list of links or buttons. Nothing more. No fancy widgets or anything.

They could have easily won that market against Linktree. For example, about.me/StanBright looks better and is easier to communicate than linktr.ee/StanBright. Yet, they didn’t do it. About.me was launched six years before Linktr.ee. They had the time advantage, they had a working product, they had a better brand name, yet they didn’t make a move. They failed to pivot.

What’s the missed opportunity? According to Similarweb, about.me has ~1.3M monthly visits as of today, and Linktree … wait for it … it has ~132M, and it’s growing!

Moral of the story - a simple pivot, sometimes, costing you almost nothing, could result to a 100x growth of your product.

Unfortunately, that seems to be valid for everything we do in our lives and everything we work on. Why “unfortunately”? Well, as it isn’t obvious. We don’t always have that opponent waiting for our mistake to score. So we lose track. And we lose focus very easily without any apparent repercussions. Then, we still want to be pro and play the majors, and we wonder why that isn’t happening. It also happens that we blame external circumstances. At the same time, the simple truth is that we just can’t sustain our focus at a pro-level.

Fortunately, that is something that we have control over, and as long as we are willing to develop that skill - we can play the majors. In any discipline.

To me, there were three big benefits of taking part in it:

• Health. Undeniably, walking more will keep you in better shape than sitting in front of the computer all day. Taking part in such a challenge forces you to get out and move.
• Charity. It always makes you feel good when you do something for others. It’s one of the best win-win things people can do. First, you help someone and then - you feel better because of that.
• Social and more offline time. I spent some extra time with friends and had some extra walks in nature, away from the screen.

To summarize: I did 10,000+ steps every day in September with an average of 12,683 steps/day! That’s more than double my usual daily average of 5,800. I’m sure this has positively contributed to my health and wellbeing. Also, our mighty team of four - “Lorikeets” (kristina.spaghettina, stoyanova.kristina, xpucto89 and I) was invited to join Canva’s organization, and we were #1 🎉 in total team steps - 1,674,064 (in a company of close to 1000 employees)!

Was the time I spent writing my RSS scripts more than the time I would now spend thinking about the “best” RSS aggregator and reader? Doesn’t matter. I enjoyed writing the scripts. I learned new things and got satisfaction out of seeing them run correctly. I get nothing like that out of comparing apps and services.

I concur so strongly not only because he writes about RSS, which I’m on record as supporting and using. I enjoy rolling my own simple software in almost any domain. Simple has a lot of advantages. Under my control has a lot of advantages. But the biggest advantage echoes what Dr. Drang says: Programming is often more fun than the alternative uses of my time.

I program because I like to, and because I can.

Eugene Wallingford

I read the above this morning and just wanted to chime in. It resonates so much with me.

I think that there are three main reasons why time spent programming is well spent and joyful (when you are not dealing with “bugs”).

Learning

I have an endless desire to learn, and I genuinely believe that doing is the best way to learn. I’ve started many toy projects along the years just for the sake of learning. Two quick examples: long ago, I built the EmojiHomepage to learn Vue.js; yesterday, I released Alertcamp Live for the sake of learning “Phoenix LiveView” and practice my OTP knowledge.

Control

Building things yourself puts you in control. And we, people, love being in control. You don’t like something, you need some quirky additional feature, or you think something else will work better - it doesn’t matter, you are in control, and you can do whatever you want. Sure, there might be some rough edges, yet the IKEA Effect will compensate for that.

Creativity

I believe that creating anything is an innate human desire and practising it always leads to joyful experiences. That includes anything - complex systems, simple scripts, an article posted online, a wooden box. I’m sure that any craftsmanship will bring you more joy than many other activities.

Here they are some excerpts from the relevant Hacker News discussion:

I’ve worked on a lot of personal projects over the years that were never finished or were quickly abandoned. I used to feel bad about this, feeling like I had wasted my time. But then I realized that I learned a ton by doing all of this work. - larrywright

- So, tell me, how did you land a job on Google?
- Yeah, I was trying to redo my website…

I spent countless hours on my side project Video Hub App. I’ve learned a great deal, and it’s immensely satisfying to work on. I’ve explored face recognition and server capabilities (learning a lot and having a good time). - yboris

An old colleague tried to convince me that I shouldn’t write my own job queue last night because “it’s all handled in the cloud”. It’s things like this that make me a better programmer whilst also allowing me to run software that does exactly what I want. - arbol

The Code It Yourself Manifesto

p.s. I will be building an RSS reader/platform in the coming weeks 🙈

Yup, domain names are very important for every business, project or idea you want to spread on the Internet. Many people spend a log of energy on finding the perfect name only to find out that the relevant “.com” domain has been taken. It is not a surprise South Park has an episode on that.

There are three major ways to perform a domain name search and see if the domain you are looking for is FREE.

First - check the domain availability directly on your domain name registrar

This is the go-to method for most people. It is the most direct and works in general. Why “in general”? Because you should trust your domain name registrar. It is not easy to prove; however, it is believed that some registrars are involved in Cybersquatting. You can read this relevant thread on Hacker News - Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com. What is happening is that you search for your shiny new domain name, it is FREE, but you decide to postpone buying it immediately. However, a few days later, when you have mustered up the enthusiasm to buy the name, you find out that your name is already taken. Believe me, it’s a very saddening feeling.

The tricky part is that by using their search, registrars KNOW which domain names you are interested in as well as the trendy names that people, on the whole, are looking for. So, they have the data and means to buy those domains and then try reselling them for more (Cybersquatting). Of course, if they are caught doing that, it could be detrimental to their business. That’s why I still believe that most registrars are not doing it. Yet you never know.

Second - check availability through a third-party service

This is one of the options I’ve been using from time to time. These are utility services that make money when they refer you to the domain name registrars. For example, NameBounce and its alternatives can generate a few dozens of free domain names based on a keyword. In my opinion, this is a bit safer as long as you use a generic keyword. In most cases the base “keyword.com” will be taken but you will be given a list of dozens of other free options (e.g. KeywordLife.com MaxKeyword.com, etc) So, whoever knows that you have interest in keyword.com, they can’t know which of the other hundred options you’ve decided to use. Moreover, it will be very expensive to grab all of them.

Third - go “bare metal” and ask the official WHOIS database.

This is not the most straightforward option, but it is the most secure way to perform a domain name search and check if a name is available. What you have to do is opening a terminal typing whois my-domain-name.com (whois -v my-domain-name.com if using Windows) and reading/interpreting the results.

In the response from the server, you can find out who and when registered the name and if it is free. There are two inconveniences following this approach. You have to read all the data (a few screens) that was returned and learn to read it. That may take some time if you don’t have experience. If the name is free, somewhere at the end of the whois-response, there will be a line like No match for domain "SAASHUB123.COM".. Then, when you decide, just go and register the domain.

As this third option is my preferred approach for checking names, I’ve been using a simple bash script that automates the boring parts. You can copy-paste it from this Github gist - domain_check.sh. To set it up, copy that script to your ~/bin directory, chmod 755 ~/domain-check.sh and list all extensions (separated by a space) in the DOMAINS=( '.com' '.io' ) section.

Then checking for an available name is as simple as opening your terminal, and you don’t have to worry that someone will register the same name tomorrow.

stan@StansMacBook15:~$ domain_check.sh saashub123
saashub123.com - available
saashub123.io - available

And remember to follow “The 3 day domain name rule” before buying any new names.

But that is OK. All we have to do is push forward. Every day. Giving our all. And account that everything will take longer than we want it. Most of the time.

Two months ago, I started building a “simple” job board - 99remotejobs.com. I thought it would take me a week. It took a month!

This short post was supposed to take me only 15 minutes, of course, yet it took 40.

When I started SaaSHub I though AND CALCULATED that if the project had 10,000 visitors a day, I would be all set - making enough passive income to have a comfortable life. That was naive. It will take much more. The project has about 8,000 visitors a day today (80% of my initial target), and it is making only 15% of my target. But that is OK. I keep pushing forward - every day.

The moral of the story - be prepared both psychologically and financially that our endeavours will take more time. If you are pressed to give an end date of a project, multiply by 2 your initial guess (yes, it is a guess) and then extend it a bit more.

Here they are three of my highlighted quotes by Marcus Aurelius on Pragmatism.

Start with where the world is

Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward.

Anything can be an advantage

Just as nature of rational things has given to each person their rational powers, so it also gives us this power - just as nature turns to its own purpose any obstacle or any opposition, so any rational person can convert any obstacle into the raw material for their own purpose.

Don’t sweat the small stuff

It is essential for you to remember that the attention you give to any action should be in due proportion to its worth, for then you won’t tire and give up, if you aren’t busying yourself with lesser things beyond what should be allowed.

Apart from being exceptionally wise and one of the most quoted stoics, Marcus Aurelius was amongst the longest-reigning Roman emperors (19 years). As a perspective, many emperors lasted between a few months and a few years.

First, yes, I may make a hundred dollars through a particular affiliate program; however, each product will require separate management, accounting and collecting the money through a different channel. The overhead and admin will be more than I can afford in regards to time and energy. It is just not viable at this stage.

Second, I will always be trying to be as objective as possible with the product lists on SaaSHub. However, if there were affiliate links and the relevant disclosures, many people will start questioning how genuine the ordering of the products is. In essence, the cost of using affiliate links would be losing some trust even if you are trustworthy.

My “workaround” is offering a self-service and very affordable product promo. It is that easy. As long as a product has been approved on SaaSHub, it can be promoted for $99/month. That subscription fee is nothing for the marketing budges of most SaaS products, and they can easily test whether it works for them. At the end of the month, there are no additional admin costs and I get one single payment from one source instead of 50 payments from 50 distinct sources arriving in 28 different days (if I were using affiliates).

In the end, I don’t think that affiliate and referral programs are bad or dishonest. If one discloses them and doesn’t promote “fake” products, they could possibly be a viable revenue stream. They just don’t work for SaaShub and me and now.

This has always been one of my favourite Will Smith’s speeches. It’s short and powerful. If you haven’t listened to it, please do. Now.

I will transcribe it here, so it stays written down for posterity.
Here it is - Will Smith’s wisdom:

The key to life is running and reading!

Why running? When you are running, there is a little person that talks to you, and that little person says “Oh, I’m tired, my lungs are going to pop, I’m so hurt, I’m so tired, there’s no way I could possibly continue.”. And YOU want to quit. That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you are running, you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life.

Why reading? The reason that reading is so important - there’ve been millions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have - with your parents, with school… with anything. There’s no new problem that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about it in a book.

OK, as a person working in tech, I know that there are problems that are new and people haven’t written about them. Yet, “reading” helps us solve unsolved problems.

BONUS: Running makes you fit and happier. It makes you more productive in general.
BONUS2: For more motivation about running, I’d recommend listening/reading “Can’t hurt me” by David Goggins.