deprocrastination.co
Turn your browser into a calm, lean productivity machine
Hello fellow hackers!
Yesterday, I launched the new Deprocrastination product—a video course called Predictably Productive—on ProductHunt first, and HackerNews second.
While the PH launch fizzled, the HN launch exploded. I got some feedback, some haters, and most importantly, dozens of customers!
The HN launch drove 8K+ people to the site, and I'm happy about it.
Course page:
https://www.deprocrastination.co/course
Version 2.0 of our browser extension (Chrome, Firefox) helps you manage how you use the browser even better!
New features:
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Site Limits - to help you not check sites compulsively and establish some healthy boundaries
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Fun Zones - Want to go on Twitter only after lunch and from 8-11PM? Set these Fun Zones and distractions will be automatically blocked unless you're in those time windows.
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Batch Rules - Do you want to be responsive to others, but not check every 5 minutes if there's an email in your inbox? Set a Batch Rule to process incoming messages at the start or end of an hour!
If you want to know how each feature can help you be less distracted, check out this short guide.
Check out the extension, give it a try and let me know what you think!
We've passed both 3000 followers on our Twitter account and 3000 subscribers to our email list for deprocrastination.
Biggest boosts for Twitter were threads. Some miss, but many hit. Leading to 20-50 new followers. I retweet them from my personal account (@vitabenes) for extra reach.
The biggest boosts for email list were HN posts that blew up (+500 emails roughly) and PH launches (+100-300) emails.
Adding a quiz to our blog and importing our extension users also provide a steady email stream.
If you're interested in overcoming procrastination, to celebrate this milestone, for the next 10 hours, you can get 30% off our book (or book + extension bundle).
Have a productive day!
We've just launched our new version of a 4 week anti-procrastination program!
The new year is a time of change.
If you have resolutions, ambitious plans, or don't want to repeat the same productivity mistakes again and again, we have a program for you!
For this run, we've made the action steps shorter, easier to apply, and added video for the first time1
There are 12 short anti-procrastination video that unlock week by week (firs 4 are available now!). There are also over 15 additional bonus action steps (text + audio) to cover various procrastination issues!
Each action step comes with its own worksheet so that you can easily apply the information to your life.
If you want to structure your day as a solo maker, learn to systematically prevent yourself from getting distracted, or finally get started shipping things consistently, our program is for you.
Go to our website and check it out on ProductHunt today!
We've just released a new guide (How to finally stop procrastinating) on overcoming procrastination!
As a maker, founder, and indie hacker, I use the knowledge from this guide daily. Many of our past customers are freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Our previous book and behavioral program have helped them get more done and procrastinate less., so I think this guide could help a lot of people here.
We're really proud of it because this guide will help even chronic procrastinators overcome the issue, step by step.
There are over 70 illustrations and over 300 pages (but don't worry, you don't have to read them all).
The first 6 chapters are for everyone.
They deal with procrastination in general.
The next 12 chapters are optional.
You can read them only if they're relevant to you.
It took us 10 years of experimenting, reading, thinking, and working with others to put this together. We've done the work so that you don't have to.
The audio and web version of the book will be ready next week, but the fresh new PDF is ready today!
If you're interested, you can purchase it here - the Black Friday discount (up to 40%) lasts until Monday (just over 3 days), so don't put it off!
Have a great Saturday!
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Hey @vitabenes thanks for the guide. One of the books that has really helped me with procrastination is Hyperfocus book. I am not usually a fan of self help books but this book was different because it talked about our daily actions and used simple sentences which made it easy to absorb and remember the steps to follow.
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Hey @Nakkeeran, I've read Hyperfocus. Our book is more comprehensive than that, but similarly actionable (if I do say so myself).
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Every since 1 article did well in January (bringing 55k visits), I've been posting more articles on HN with the hopes of repeating it.
Soon after that, I got banned because I posted only articles from our site deprocrastination.co. I got unbanned after an email exchange with a kind admin.
I started posting interesting stuff around the web and occasionally a link to our site. That brought dozens of people to our site, but not more.
Until this Tuesday. I posted a link to this article and it blew up. 783 upvotes, 270 comments.
I stayed active in the thread and only managed to have server crash 2x at the start (potentially losing some momentum).
I made the article page static to load fast and then all went well.
Massive boost across all business metrics - revenue, emails, social media followers,...
All from 1 link that worked (while about 50 others didn't).
Lesson: try again and again, you never know what's going to work.
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This is great man. 30k is not a lot of views for 783 upvotes. You should check if the clicks are being recorded accurately. 783 means it spent a lot of time on Page 1.
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A lot of HN people can have Google Analytics blocked, so I think the number might be higher. Also 30k is unique visitors, there were about 35k sessions. The article never got to #1 (#3 top).
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Yesterday, a couple hours after my co-founder Mat posted on /r/entrepreneur, the post took off after 3 hours of not getting any traction (don't know why later).
Mat was super careful with not linking too much to be considered spam and noticed that the post became popular only after he woke up the next day, so we were slow to turn it into traffic.
Even so, 45 visits to our site directly from reddit (+ some probably through google) + a handful of new emails is a nice boost.
Further experimentation needed.
Just reached 2000 followers on the Deprocrastination brand account, finally.
Wouldn't be nearly that far without my personal account, where I retweet what I think is worth it to my followers.
However, I also made a couple changes to get a bit faster growth:
- Wrote a couple 3-5 tweet threads with illustrations.
- Took a couple tweets from a year ago that performed well, rephrased them, posted again.
- Got a steady queue of tweets scheduled via buffer.com (2 tweets / day minimum - may raise this much higher).
I plan to include more visual (re-use illustrations I'm creating for the Instagram account).
What really pushed the account over the 2000 were a couple RTs from people with 15k+ followers - some that I've interacted with personally, some that I didn't know. Each RT like that has attracted 30-150 new followers in a short amount of time.
Hope this helps!
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That is really impressive : thanks for the tips :)
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Happy to help!
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I really like the illustrations, What devices / tools / softwares / Apps do you use to create them?
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Thanks, here's my workflow:
Use the Sketches app on iPad + Apple Pencil --> Take image PNG from iCloud Photos --> Convert to SVG with https://convertio.co/jpg-svg/ --> Open in Inkscape (Linux SVG editor) & edit, align, polish in SVG --> Export back to PNG --> Post via buffer or manually.
A bit long, but it get's the results I want.
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We want to help people procrastinate less, we've redesigned our 4 week online program on all fronts - UI, action steps, communication rules,...
A couple learnings that lead to the redesign:
- Unsurprisingly, it pays off to follow up, follow up, and follow up.
- We've also learned to present much less information at a time.
People are busy and too much information that is not relevant kills engagement. - Small size of the program --> We can afford to be personal and individually help each student.
Excited to see what learnings this run will bring.
We also started an Instagram account to grow our audience (add another pillar) and got from 5 followers to 101 within 7 days, which is pretty good.
After the first run the 4 week online anti-procrastination program, we're starting enrollment for the 2nd version of it - with improvements on the technical side (UI + UX), the content side (more audio, better action steps), and the communication side (better structured communication).
From the last run we learned:
- Keep communication alive.
- Follow up 3-5 times if necessary.
- Accountability is important for our customers.
- Students have different communication preferences.
- Some students are looking for more help than others.
If you're looking for someone to hold you accountable to your own goals, enroll today!
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