Day 100!!! of #The100DayProject: It's Over! 🎬

Okay, so here I am, the end of the line on #The100DayProject .

It's been gruelling, exciting, exhausting, frustrating, rewarding, educational, and ultimately, 'successful'. I'm will write a detailed post outlining all the things I've learned along the way, but not for a few weeks, I need to give myself a few days off from continuous posting (though I'll still be working)! ....and @Harlem will be pleased to have the #daily-stand-up less cluttered 😉!

At the halfway mark (day 50, duh) I wrote a summary of the key things I'd achieved up until then, you can read that here if you're interested: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/56da1d9281 and with that in mind, in today's post I'll talk list key things from the second half of the project!

Two bits of housekeeping first though... so, today 🥁:

• I created the About Page for the website.
• I shared the website with a few friends...not really pushing the 'launch' yet. I need a bit of a breather and to get my social media game ready.
• I fixed a few small bugs on the site
• I wrote this long recap post!

Secondly, for anyone reading this who might not have followed the project from day 1, in summary:

I started this project very much as a personal project. The simple plan was to set up a foundation to help friends and family pool resources and ideas to try and combat climate change – really it’s a charity for anyone that feels like they can’t do anything on their own but want to proactively and meaningfully channel that frustration.

I actually co-opted a hashtag that artists use on Instagram called #The100DayProject. The idea is that you make a bit of progress each day for 100 days and see where you’re at. It wasn’t really for starting a charity, but it seemed like a nice way to be accountable to some small audience, and importantly – to keep me focused and committed alongside my responsibilities at work and my family life! Posting it on IHers seemed like a good ideas as I was already part of the community here and I knew I'd get some great advice along the way.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, what were the key achievements from day 50-100 (not 100% chronological as some things are grouped):

• Created a Donorbox campaign, installed their plugin in Wordpress and set it up on target2030.org/donate to take payments.
• Setup and configured Stripe (for payment processing) to work with Donorbox and Woocommerce.
• Paid a lot of money in legal fees for setting up the foundation 😭.
• Joined the Impact Makers community to connect with some more people working to combat the climate crisis, get tips/feedback on my progress etc.
• Experimented with several newsletter tools, ultimately settled on TinyLetter.com as it's the most simple provision out there and it's free.
• Started crowd-sourcing a bunch of media resources for those interested in the climate crisis, you can find it on http://target2030.org/resources .
• Spent a few evenings 🤦‍♂️ troubleshooting technical issues with embeds in Wordpress.
• Designed various items for Welcome Packs for new donors and sourced sustainable suppliers for each of the items. I also added a form that users are redirected to after becoming donors where they can opt-in to a Welcome Pack and provide their address.
• Copied 3000 words of quotes on the climate crisis out of a book, it came in useful for an open letter I wrote and will do for social media content later.
• Spent countless hours drafting content for the website, and creating layouts in Wordpress for each page. To be more granular:
  • I must have deleted 8-9 pages that ended up becoming out of scope for MVP/launch too...so much experimentation.
  • I repeatedly made adjustments and changes to my sites layout, navigation, theming etc to get to the desired user experience, aesthetic and narrative sequencing of pages.
  • There were 8 key pages on go-live that I created content for, designed, and built.
  • Added meta descriptions to all pages.
  • The Open Letter was the real triumph of this endeavour. The plan was to really spell out my argument for a fight against climate change that starts with the individual. It's 4300 words in the end, but I easily wrote 6500+ that I chopped and changed to get to the final outcome. Aside from the copy/content, it was 2.5 full days work to make the layout as engaging and coherent as possible. Hopefully it will resonate with my family, friends and broader audience 🤞.
  • I found 5 donors before the 100 day project was up! That was a mini-goal I set myself and it feels great to launch the site/project knowing there's already wind in the sails.

Anyway, those are the biggest things from the second half! It's a pretty dry list, I'm not making many value judgements for now, but needless to say it was productive and I'm proud of the work I achieved.

As mentioned, I'll dig into the learnings at a later date. But in summary:

Using #The100DayProject has allowed me to carve out 5 weeks worth of work (if we're talking 8 hour days) alongside my full time job and family life. It's been brutal and tiring, but without the discipline it introduced I probably wouldn't be where I am - which is having a legally registered charity, banking and payment processing, a coherent pitch to encourage friends and family to take up the cause with me, a pretty decent website, a brand, a voice, a new appreciation for the value of consistent output, and a new network of awesome contacts that are interested in the same cause as me 😊.

Special thanks for a few IHers:

@rosiesherry for keeping a watchful eye throughout and chiming in with advice and encouragement.

@SuchIndieHackMuchWow for a ridiculous amount of support, feedback, exchange of ideas and general advice, more than I could possible have expected from someone I'd never met!

@shylands for also offering advice and reviews as the project reached it's final stages, and for the great work he's doing setting up the Impact Makers group, fixathon etc. And...for becoming a donor 😍

@joshdance - we only communicated right near the beginning, but you pointed out that momentum was a powerful thing, and that really stuck with me, especially in the hard parts!

Honestly, there's lots of people I've interacted with additionally on IH, but importantly outside of here too, so thanks to everyone...just thought it would be nice to call out a few people 👋.

I don't know if the idea will work out, but I'm glad I'm trying, and I've learned a lot. As Jeff Bezos would say, today is Day One 🙂

#daily-stand-up #winning