The Quit Work Project

After 27 episodes and 2400 downloads, I'm putting The Quit Work Podcast on hold.

My goal, when I launched it at the start of 2022, was to put out 100 episodes of 3 podcasts for a year.

At the end of the year, The Last Theory was taking off. The other two? Not taking off.

The Quit Work Podcast received a decent amount of attention and allowed me to meet some amazing people. But there seemed no clear path to consistent growth... or incentive to do so. Quitting work and going your own way is a sentiment that's close to my heart, but now I need to focus on going my own way.

That's not to say that I'll never return to The Quit Work Podcast. But for now, I'll be focusing on my other projects.

I let The Quit Work Project go dormant for a year, but I've always had in the back of my mind following up with The Quit Work Podcast.

The idea is to publish 15-minute conversations with people who have quit their job and gone their own way.

I love the idea of leaving a life that doesn't work for you and pursuing one that does. For many Indie Hackers, this is the dream!

Today I recorded my first interview, with Indie Hacker @BusinessHippie Bart Hofkin. I love Bart's story, which he has told on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-i-quit-my-tech-job-and-lived-on-the-road-for-6-months-aa74431997

Thanks for the great conversation, Bart. I'm looking forward to editing and publishing this one!

I started The Quit Work Project as an attempt to convince myself to quit my job in 2020.

It failed.

I imagined I’d quit in April 2020 and enjoy the summer travelling and starting a new life as an Indie Hacker.

That didn’t happen, of course. What happened instead was a pandemic.

With the stock market crashing and the world grinding to a halt, it seemed the worst possible time to quit work. I could no longer rely on my diminishing savings for a runway; and at a time when so many people were losing their jobs, it seemed wise to hang on to mine.

Now, in 2021, there’s still a lot of uncertainty, but I can’t put off my dreams for ever. In April 2021, one year later than planned, I finally quit work.

So that’s mission accomplished for The Quit Work Project.

1. You need to believe in what you’re posting

The Quit Work Project was a personal project, not targeted at any particular market, not intended to build any particular audience. I believe that work is broken, that it doesn’t need to be the way it is today, and that we’ll evolve from a world in which most of us are employed to a world in which more of us are Indie Hackers.

If I hadn’t truly believed in what I was writing, I wouldn’t have had the stamina to post new content every day for a year.

2. Posting isn’t enough – you need to engage

I attracted a few followers on Instagram and Twitter simply by posting every day and waiting for people to find me, through hashtags or the platform’s suggestions of who to follow.

A few followers, but not many.

If this had been a hustle rather than a personal project, those few followers wouldn’t have justified the time I put in. Instead, I’d have needed to find followers and engage them, through comments and direct messages. On social media as in real life, it’s important to talk with people rather than talk at them.

3. Posting is hard work – but this is an opportunity

There are tools out there for formatting text, finding an image, resizing the image to match the different aspect ratios required by the different platforms, adjusting the image to achieve a look that’s recognizably yours, placing the text over the image, and scheduling posts to social media as well as on the web. I even created a few tools of my own specifically for The Quit Work Project.

Still, posting was hard work.

As I put in the work every day, I couldn’t help but have ideas for niche social media management tools.

Starting something, anything, even if it’s not intended to be monetized, inevitably sparks ideas for products that might indeed be monetizable.

—
If you’re interested in my "348 reasons to quit your job and go your own way", you can find them here: https://quitworkproject.com/reasons

(I know what you're thinking: only 348? OK, I admit it, I missed 18 of the 366 days this year. After all, I wouldn’t be much of an advocate for quitting work if I hadn’t at least taken an 18-day vacation in the wilderness, far from tyrannical cell towers, where work couldn’t reach me.)

How to create content once and automatically publish it to my email subscribers, on my website, on Twitter, on Instagram, etc.?

I've already automated the emails (see my previous update for how I did it). Here's how I automated updating my website with the same content. (Twitter, Instagram, etc. coming soon!)

1. Automatically generate images with text

I store the text for my Daily Reasons To Quit in a database, and I store the background images on my website. When I started out on January 1, I was putting the text and images together manually, using Affinity Photo (like Photoshop, only much much better and much much cheaper). Since then, I have written a PHP script which runs daily on my website to load the background image for the day, renders the text for the day from the database, and saves the combined images and text.

2. Automatically generate a page for each day

I use an search-engine-optimized URL for each Daily Reason To Quit, e.g. https://quitworkproject.com/reasons/you-have-an-idea for yesterday's Reason. I use an Apache .htaccess RewriteRule to redirect to a PHP script which generates the page from the text in the database and the automatically generated images. It even includes a Twitter card on the site, using a different image with the 1.91:1 aspect ratio that works best for Twitter, so that I can tweet the day's Reason simply by tweeting the URL.

3. Automatically generate a gallery of every day so far

The same PHP script that generates the page for each day also generates a gallery of every day so far at https://quitworkproject.com/reasons so that, come 6pm PST every day, the new image for the day is automatically added to the gallery.

This all saves a huge amount of manual work for me, so that I can concentrate on generating the content rather than publishing it.

As ever, if you have any questions about what I did, please ask! And I'd love to hear about what you're doing to automatically publish content!

Here’s how I did it.

1. Decided not to do it the easy way

Yes, there are excellent email sending services out there. I decided against going with a Mailchimpish solution for The Quit Work Project because I didn’t want to pay anything (this is a personal project from which I don’t anticipate any revenue) and I didn’t want any third-party marketing at the bottom of my emails.

2. Chose a free email sending service

I use Mailgun https://www.mailgun.com/ which offers 10,000 emails a month for free. It’s extremely easy for software developers to integrate into a web site.

3. Implemented automated subscribe, confirm and unsubscribe

Subscribe’s the hard part, because there are bots that tirelessly fill any form they can find on the web. I hate captchas (if I’m asked to select all the squares with buses or bikes one more time I’m liable to throw my laptop out of the window), so I used a few other tricks to thwart the bots:

• create the subscribe fields and buttons in Javascript rather than have them hard-coded in HTML (I bet there are few bots that bother running Javascript);
• create fields that are visible to bots but invisible to humans (if there’s text in those fields, it’s probably spam);
• measure the time between page load and submit (if it’s less than seven seconds, it’s probably spam).

When someone (human) subscribes, I send an email through the Mailgun API asking them to confirm their email address by clicking a link with a code that identifies them. No confirmation, no subscribe.

4. Implemented automated daily email sends

All my content is in a database, so that it can be formatted for web, email, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I have a script that’ll send a test email to myself through the Mailgun API, so that I can check whether the content is correct, then send an email to everyone who has subscribed and confirmed but hasn’t unsubscribed. I do this every day to send daily reasons to quit work to subscribers to the The Quit Work Project.

I hate unsubscribe links that require you to do further work to unsubscribe (e.g. after you’ve clicked the link, you have to enter your email address, select which lists you want to unsubscribe from, etc.) So I include an unsubscribe link in each email with a code that identifies the subscriber, so that you’re unsubscribed from all emails in just one click.

That’s one of the great things about a service like Mailgun: software developers can very easily customize emails for individual subscribers.

Any questions about what I did? Have you automated email sending in some other way? I’d love to hear from you.