How far could I get in four months?

Thank you, I'm doing this full-time, as I'm investing in growing the platform and reach a point I can have an audience that's interested in what I could produce next (ebooks, courses).

I've been trying to grow an indie product business from the ground up for 10 years, tried so many things but I always failed to make something stick 😅 now I stumbled on this thing and seems to have a little bit of traction, I hope I can make it work.

Some random thougths:

More than a daily writing habit, it's a daily publishing habit.

Some days I don't write, I just do something else, like coding or non-work related. Some days I write 2-3 posts to keep the schedule filled.

Key to me is having a queue of posts piled up. I know I can't break the chain, and when you have enough posts, you can take a pause and recharge the batteries knowing your content is still being published.

When I know it's a good day to write I like to get up early, around 6AM, and just sit there and write, by mid morning I have a post done, and it's a huge productivity boost. I can take a small break and tackle another post if I feel inclined.

I like to remove friction. For example I removed the comments section, so I don't worry about having and managing comments (I get feedback on Twitter and when I share on Reddit). This removes the back-of-mind thought about possible comments on the content I write.

I like your project. Have you thought about publishing the posts on a bigger publication that already have an audience? My impression is that self-published posts on Medium tend to do poorly.

I think my accountability buddies are the people that regularly like and retweet my posts on Twitter. I might not know them but I recognize the avatars and names, and I write for them.

I also get some emails from time to time with nice words thanking me for a post, and it's great. I save each of them in a note.

Oh and I don't think I'm a good writer at all, also because I'm not a native english speaker, I'm confident I'm improving every post I write (hopefully so).

When I don't have ideas, I start a simple project and try something new, then I got ideas on what to write about.

Most good content ideas come when listening to like-minded podcasts. I listen to podcasts while driving and when walking the dog. Sometimes the inspiration strikes and that's when you take notes or do a small voice recording to remember the idea.

Thanks Joakim! I am around 1000 subscribers. I started about 5 months ago, so I think it's already good. However I stayed at 4-5 subscribers per day until I did a change in my newsletters about 10 days ago. What I changed was, instead of having a boring CTA like "get my posts in your inbox", I started promoting a course I'm going to launch at the end of July. For some reason this seems to "click" more and in the last 10 days I got like 25 subscribers every day 🤷🏼‍♂️

I use Hugo, a static site generator. I just published a description of my stack: https://flaviocopes.com/stack/

I do 3 things basically:

1. once a week I post one of the articles on Medium. Not on my personal account, but on a publication (I post them on FreeCodeCamp and HackerNoon). Oh and I import the post in Medium, so it gets the canonical URL that points to my blog (like you can do with IH posts). This helps SEO, as far as I can tell. And since those publications posts get shared a lot, as they have an existing audience, I benefit from that.
2. sometimes I share the post on a relevant subreddit like /r/webdev or /r/javascript
3. I share the post on Twitter. I don't have a lot of following but I have a small group of people that seem to like my posts there. I also repurpose old posts regularly.

Cool! Yes it's hard to write, but I think it's even harder to consider a piece "finished" 🙆🏼‍♂️

Sales are pretty good! Not enough to live off for me, but thankfully I have other digital products I built in the past to support me that still bring home something and help me move forward.

For an ebook that just sits there and had no launch (since I had no audience to launch to), I can't be happier.

I'm planning a more organized launch in 2 months for a course, rather than an ebook, which will have a higher perceived value and as such a higher price point. I'm currently looking up at other technical content creators and what they share about their courses.

Betting on this, and with growing the existing inbound channels with time and more content.

It depends on the topic! Sometimes I start at 6AM and I finish in the afternoon, if I need to first actually learn the thing from zero.

Sometimes I manage to write 2-3 posts and I just schedule the posts in the next day. I got up to 3 weeks of content scheduled at one point, now I just have 7 days as I took a few days off.

Here's the link

This is kind of casual. I started posting a lot on my blog last summer, when I decided to learn Go. I always learn better in this way, trying to explain something in words. So I did maybe one entire month of posts.

I then moved on to something else, and in November / December I began realizing those old posts started gaining traction from Google, 100 - 120 visits per day, and in January it was apparent that this natural growth was real.

So from the end of January I started writing every day, as I never had any traction with anything but this thing seems promising.

Why every day? I had a bunch of content piled up that was part of another project I was building. So when I decided to double down on the blog, I already had all this content and instead of putting it all at once, I started scheduling one topic per day.

So I had like 2 weeks of scheduled content and I started writing more, so in the end it gradually stayed this way and grew into a habit.

At first it was 5 days a week, but I had so much content piled up that I decided to do 6, then why not 7.

Hi Emeka, I just published my stack description: https://flaviocopes.com/stack/. In short, it's a Hugo static site.

I host it on Netlify, I highly recommend it for static sites.

Thanks Cyril,
The designs were done by a designer who I was working with at my day job. We have an agreement to pay him in equity.
Looking back at that statement about 50 hours a week, I realize that was a bit high. I've been closer to 40-45. However, they are exhausiting hours! Given that I'm not making money any other way, I feel the need to be hyper-focused for every moment that I'm working... no slacking off! :)

Yes, and yes. I spoke to many at the beginning. At some point, I had to stop taking input and start building. Given my tight timeframe, it was critical to make something happen quickly. I've just gone to market this week.