Recently, that company was acquired. Our payout? $1 million, maybe more.

But, we said NO.

My co-founder would be stuck in a job where he would not thrive for TWO YEARS. He’s a young man, two years would equate to 10% of his entire life.

He is an astonishingly masterful salesman, not even for his age, but in general. Being stuck in one company would stifle him.

So, what did we do after hearing the news? We high-fived each other. Why? Our cash-out from the deal was much more valuable for us.

Value that is eternal, not fleeting like money. He honored his soul, and I honored his choice. We did not waiver then and we do not regret now.

Why is it that the feeds in my social media communities are filled with people going viral touting easy money? Without proper context, most people would think our touting is insane or some humble-brag ploy.

The former may be true, but for this reason: We drew a line in the sand for anyone who wants to truly know us in future dealings. We do not sell what is eternal — time spent, family, friends, brotherhood.

We are patient because we have faith that our creator — whatever that creator may be to you — will provide us the prosperity we seek without compromise.

We chose happiness and life. What greater gift than to have your happiness affirmed by missing out on a life-changing amount of money and not even batting an eye?

Meta Commentary

My hope is this post can take a genuinely beautiful moment in both life and business and twist it into something with an asterisk. You may have seen posts like this on Facebook or other social media. A tale of perceived success, grit, and the underdog winning in an unexpected way. And now you are hearing about it. To what end?

To buy something, of course. And what are you buying? Most times, a course, of course. This ad copy is ultimately selling a story. The story sells the course and the course rarely has any value. The value was in the story.

It reminds me of when my mom would justify giving more money to a homeless man than the average homeless man. He would weave an intricate story for her and she would pay them for taking the time to do so. When you buy these courses, you are compensating people for their time putting that story in front of you because anything after that does not yield any further value in the transaction after reading the ad copy.

The Asterisk

So, what is my asterisk? I am trying to make connections with people. I want to be able to reach into a pool of like-minded people and provide them with something, whether they pay me or not. I’m not selling anything now, but I may in the future. If you feel like we jive, give me a follow or sign up to my newsletter on this website to keep up with all the weird stuff that will pop up in your feed/inbox.

I try to provide high value thoughts, software, jokes, memes, designs, and more. If I start spamming low-value stuff, consider giving me a chance and call me out on it before unsubscribing. Constructive criticism will be met with gratitude. I want to provide value for you, not my ego. I am still learning how to identify the difference, still identifying how to best serve.

P.S. — No, I’m not actually selling a course, and yes, the story at the beginning was 100% true.

In the last year, I’ve been doing a deep dive into understanding crypto as part of my partial shift in career change. In a sense, this is a continuation of my delve into blockchain learning about NFTs. I am not a wizard, nor is anyone else in tech. Do not put us on a pedestal, our egos certainly do not need it. So, here it is, Bitcoin for Boomers, an act of attempting to help my family understand parts of what I do.

Why does Bitcoin exist in the first place?

The launch of Bitcoin came soon after the 2008 financial crisis. We all saw the negligent and/or malicious exploitation of our banking systems by wildly unethical financiers. Combine this with the aftermath of the majority of said financiers (at least in USA) getting out not only unscathed, but insanely wealthy and unpunished. The cherry on top was one decade prior. This was when the first iteration of the cryptographic/mathematical solution was created. This system, called Hashcash, laid the groundwork for making Bitcoin possible.

You don’t really need to understand what or how the cryptography or math works, but in a nutshell, it empowers a systemic design of being controlled by no one. This design is intended to harden Bitcoin as a currency against any artificial manipulation. In particular, manipulation against the collective will of the currency’s holders. In addition, the design ensures that it can be verified by anyone and everyone willing to commit their computer’s processing power toward that cause.

Huh, cryptography, but aren’t my bank transactions already private?

A common confusion with Bitcoin is that it is private because criminals use it for money laundering. It is not private. As the FBI and other law enforcement began to understand this, it became a godsend. This is because it cuts all the red tape out of auditing financial transactions. No more search warrants, just a free blockchain analysis tool.

Cryptography, mathematics, and criminal activity aside, I’ll put it in Bitcoin for Boomer words. Bitcoin has one purpose as a currency: remove the corruption and mismanagement seen in traditional centralized currencies from the hands of select, unelected individuals of questionable competence.

So it’s just a random currency with no nation and no paper notes to back it up?

Yes. But, keep in mind that most financial transactions of the modern world happen electronically anyway. The distinction between Bitcoin and other national currencies is that it is not controlled by anyone other than other Bitcoin holders maintaining a system of consensus. The consensus being that from one block to another, no one has manipulated the blockchain’s ledger along the way.

In other words… or, shall I say, Bitcoin for Boomers words, when the Federal Reserve prints more bank notes or changes a number in their holdings system, they are artificially manipulating their ledger. They can do this because they control the whole system and no one can stop them, even if the American people and its leaders protest. With Bitcoin, no one can artificially manipulate the ledger without consensus. No one.

What do expert economists have to say about all this?

The first argument I agree with whole-heartedly. Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are virtually insignificant compared to the amount of press and attention they get.

He also talks about the measures of a good currency and all the ways in which it does not fit those parameters (yet), which are currently all unassailable points (except for being unable to transact with it — I am slowly able to replace many of my online credit card purchases with BTC instead). As an investment, he is right — anyone who buys Bitcoin because ‘number go up’ have purchased it for all the wrong reasons.

It seems like there is a philosophical disconnect between Bitcoin and Boomers

Any true Bitcoin holder has Bitcoin because of Dr. Damodaran’s main cynical point of view about its value proposition: Created by the paranoid for the paranoid. But, to me, this will eventually be seen as an extremely antiquated view much as if someone today was to say, “Doors with deadbolts are created by the paranoid for the paranoid.”

Imagine you lived in a small village where everyone trusted each other. The village one day grew to become a city. Consequently, one day the idea of a deadbolt becomes necessary. Look at it from a philosophical and ideological standpoint. It can be extremely difficult for many of the older people to wrap their head around.

Imagine growing up and living in that city when it was a small, interconnected village. The concept of a deadbolt truly is absurd. Having lived in a small town myself, it was exceedingly rare to lock the door or use the deadbolt. I only ever understood the concept as a child because of my consumption of television and film.

That all just sounds like Libertarian hyper-vigilance.

In a perfect world, it likely would be. In the real world, especially post-2020, we are seeing a cascading series of institutional corruption, mismanagement, or outright failure. Bitcoin’s premise is being hardened against the very corruption mismanagement, and failures we are suffering. For anyone digging any deeper than ‘number go up’ with Bitcoin, it becomes an exceedingly attractive value proposition.

In this sense, investing in Bitcoin is very much the currency version of a Libertarian investing in firearms, land, and self-sufficient electrical and plumbing systems. It is an ideological distrust of systems that can have critical global impacts. It’s like gold without the physical burdens attached.

What about the environment?

Bitcoin by design is intended to be a burden from block to block. As a result, it uses a lot of energy. With its widening adoption, the energy burden is becoming measurably concerning. It is important to keep in mind, however, that traditional banking uses a lot more energy than the “credit card energy” comparison many people make.

If we were to genuinely compare Bitcoin’s energy use, we can’t count Visa, Mastercard, and American Express’ megawatts used and call it a day. Why? Because backing these companies are not just computer servers using electricity. There are thousands of employees, multiple office buildings, and all of the other overhead that comes from running these companies. Taking everything into account, the comparison seems a bit less drastic.

Yeah, but two wrongs don’t make a right…

Bitcoin for environmentalist boomers

You’re right. Comparison aside, it is still a lot of energy. Recently, Bitcoin developers have released the Lightning network. This is a way to reduce the energy burdens. In not-so-Bitcoin-for-Boomers speak, it reduces this energy burden by circumventing some of the consensus mechanisms. To many, this goes against the entire philosophy of Bitcoin, but it does give its holders a choice: faster transactions or sound money.

The benefit of the Lightning Network is that it does not replace or override the underlying system. It acts as a layer on top of it. In that sense, a savvy Bitcoin user will have a Bitcoin wallet dedicated to a larger pool of funds and what crypto people call a ‘hot wallet’ for Lightning Network transactions.

You can think of a traditional wallet like a savings account, whereas the hot wallet would be a checking account. With banks, checking accounts insulate you from too many transaction fees. With Lightning Network, your hot wallet insulates you from slow and expensive transacting. Better yet, businesses can run their own Lightning Node instead of paying credit card fees that many small businesses consider to be the equivalent of extortion.

Okay, you’ve covered Bitcoin for Boomers. What about Crypto for Boomers?

The difference between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that Bitcoin functions like an actual currency. Most other ‘crypto’ are not currencies. Instead, they look and function much more like securities. Much as you would see in the stock market. As the United States government catches up with all of this technology, you can verify this for yourself. Dig into the SEC’s classification of many crypto coins. You will find that the majority are labelled as securities, not currencies.

As such, I’ve been curious about the term ‘sex sells’ because it seems antiquated to me. It seemed to be most prevalent in the ’80s and ’90s, but I wouldn’t know how to quantify that claim. Either way, the marketing ethos in my mind is this:

1980-1999: Sex sells
2000-2019: Fear sells
2020-20??: Crazy sells

After reading an article by Alessandra Lichtenfeld, something in my brain clicked. It occurs to me that perhaps my model better applies to content strategy for media and entertainment companies. In all cases, there is a biological response. Sex sells because in the ’80s-’90s it was becoming more socially acceptable. Yet, it was controversial enough that prudes would criticize and therefor advertise for free.

Starting around the 2000s, mainstream journalism began to utilize fear as their content strategy. I can assume it was likely after seeing the enormous gains in viewership after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Correlating that theory with the uptick in mass shootings at schools, it was a no-brainer to shift the emotional narrative. Fast forward ten years. Alternate news media began to adopt this strategy and optimize it. All they needed to do was simply use false and/or absurd information (such as InfoWars and that ilk).

The mainstream adoption of ‘crazy sells’

A manifestation of that optimizing fear-based content was a new kind of content strategy — crazy. Today, the trend of crazy content continues to become more mainstream and socially accepted. Alex Jones proved the ‘crazy sells’ model with the shocking quantity of viewers and fans he acquired. Donald Trump made the model mainstream in an even more shocking election victory. Now, the rest of the opportunists are catching up with the trend in their everyday content strategy. The most recent example being Andrew Tate with his algorithmically optimized buffoonery.

I am schizophrenic myself, and an entrepreneur with a couple of projects tied to my illness. I am very often tempted with utilizing this content strategy for myself. After all, who better to claim such a thing than someone with the doctor-verified credentials to do so?

Thus far, I refused to do this because heavily intertwined with ‘crazy’ is misinformation. As mentioned in an earlier post, I was constantly solicited to make false claims with my Curious Markings project. Why not? It’s easily on-brand and if I didn’t tell outright lies, what’s the big deal? So I tried it out. But I measured it like a scientist would. I could not and would not move forward. The data doesn’t lie. After seeing the results of my sample pool of about 300 users, it was clear I would just be grifting.

Finally waking up from our fear

Rewinding back to the ‘sex sells’ strategy, I recall it falling out of vogue as it became more fake. Fake boobs, fake lips, fake love. As a western society, it got boring and superficial beyond what it already was to begin with.

Now, we have been blessed with the misinformation tidal wave following Trump’s election and the COVID-19 Pandemic. We’ve all had some decent time to think about all of this during quarantine and came to a bipartisan conclusion. Fear is as out of vogue as sex. We all know that it exists, we all know it is making our society decadent and dysfunctional. We all want it to go away.

But, marketers being hungry as ever for attention, something has to take fear’s place. Crazy is on the fast track to claiming the throne. I say this with as little pessimism as possible, but I believe it is inevitable. The voice of reason will continue to be drowned out. That is unless the reasonable among us can begin formulating ways of utilizing this tactic for truth and justice.

Reclaiming ‘crazy’ to sell truth

So now, I have come full circle. My conclusion as I am formulating my way forward: I am using my crazy in marketing once and for all. Except this time, I don’t need to tell lies or mystic half-truths.

Sex went out of vogue because it lacked truth. Fear went out of vogue because it lacked truth. Crazy is now in vogue, but it lacks truth. To this end, I hypothesize that crazy will go out of vogue in the reverse direction. It will begin when ‘crazy’ people like me can bring it in vogue with truth woven into our message. When our mission is complete, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

One of the most sparsely found resources on the internet I can find is how to be successful as a creative. If you are the type of person that has endless ideas, you may know exactly what I am talking about. The type of person that would need immortality to see all of your ideas to fruition. The moment you have finished creating one of your ideas, you already have at least three more. You probably have also started one of those three ideas before finishing the first. But, you need to make money, and working at a coffee shop for even just a couple of hours to pay the bills is like choosing to let someone waterboard you for money. Poverty is usually a better option. Hence the starving artist stereotype.

A quick disclaimer before we dive in: My spellchecker keeps yelling at me for my use of the word creative. For some, it may make more sense to replace the word creative with artist. However, many artists like me use unconventional mediums like software/code which often seems like a contradiction to people of conventional cultural bias about words like coder and artist. This is why I say ‘creative’ rather than artist.

A quick rant about society accepting, even celebrating artists living in poverty

How fascinating it is that a stereotype such as the ‘starving artist’ exists. Yet we as a society cannot acknowledge that a creative like this has a form of disability. I should acknowledge that I sometimes place the limitations from my ‘actual’ disability on other aspects of who I am. However, I will put a big !OPINION ALERT! disclaimer to my disability to artist equivocation. Either way, my schizophrenia diagnosis makes my outcomes as a creative slightly less dire. Disabled people in progressive countries enjoy certain entitlements that the ‘disabled’ label grants them. Undeniably, living with schizophrenia is certainly not a desirable way to live. Even so, I have a great degree of compassion for creatives that do not have a physical or mental disability. Without the ‘disabled’ label placed upon them, society is not nearly as lenient with their true expression of who they are.

A creative’s profession is at odds with their opportunity for a positive financial outcome. Keep in mind, this is not a profession they choose. It is a profession deeply engrained in their physical being. A feeling as profound as gender identity, sexual orientation, or the desire to bear children. It is a part of who they are. Much like homosexual and transgender people, that way of being will make them an outcast to society. Certainly, the plight of all these groups looks very different from each other. The degrees of suffering vary wildly between them, as well as the individual. My point being, the common thread between these circumstances. Large parts of our society deny them a dignified living simply because of who they were born to be.

The difficult choice between conventional comfort and true self expression

More recently, I have become more comfortable with being a straight white man that has adopted masculine traits. Specifically, I have become more comfortable with the ‘white guilt’ shame that many progressives often face with this admission. Being such a painfully conventional eurocentric person can result in the delusion that such an admission translates to being racist. (Side note and spoiler alert: saying I’m not racist is the strongest expression of unknowing racism among progressives). This has led to more comfort around conversations like the one I had with my friend, a gay man. One of our conversations observed that many gay men express feminine traits more often than straight men do.

Being comfortable with my masculinity led me to own my various expressions of femininity. My friend and I made an anecdotal conclusion about why gay men have this same comfort. Our theory is that expressing homosexuality can be so dangerous, that a gay man expressing their natural femininity is inconsequential, comparatively. Much like my sharing a schizophrenia diagnosis makes the small ways in which I express femininity largely inconsequential. If someone has come out as gay – a part of their true selves – it leads to them being able to express their full true selves. Who cares if your parachute doesn’t deploy while skydiving if you have stage four lung cancer?

Most people don’t have a choice, just a variable duration leading to acceptance

When who you truly are has a profound negative impact on your safety and security outcomes like a transgender woman, or on your financial security opportunities like a creative, what do you do? Ultimately, the choice lies between denying who you truly are, or exposing yourself to tremendous risk and adversity. For some, denying showing who they truly are is beyond excruciating.

Fortunately for the creative, the best works of art can come from constraints. Regardless, this is why when a creative takes the risk of making their need to create their sole source of income, it’s important to know what you are getting yourself into. This is ultimately the purpose of this post. To share my experience and hopefully provide what fleeting guidance I can share.

Are you serving a niche, or are you creating one? Either way, the creative is at risk.

I have done a lot of foolish things in my career as an entrepreneur. One that really stands out to me is building a brand without really knowing what that means. Not only that but building that brand as an original, stand-alone brand. One that can’t use the glory or star power of another product or service. One thing a well-known and respected marker, Louis Grenier, says in his newsletter emails is to not create a niche. Serve a niche, sure, but do not manufacture one.

Of course, when I started my art project called Curious Markings, I was unfamiliar with Louis’ works. Even retrospectively, it was a forgivable mistake. Curious Markings is art, and art is almost entirely all about creating niches. Art is an ancient form of innovation. Creating a niche is a primitive way of identifying and serving a niche. Louis suggests not creating a niche because most of the time it is a one-way ticket to failure.

Success is not always compatible with the act of innovation

In the sense of aversion to creating niches, Louis is empowering his brand and reputation as a marketing guru by driving his audience toward success. They will become more successful than other people consuming other marketing guru content because the foundation of his advice drives his audience away from larger risks. The downside of this way of doing things is that he is unknowingly stifling creativity. I do not fault him for this. In his own way, he has innovated a way to communicate marketing much more successfully than many other marketing gurus. Most people learn marketing because they want to make money. They want to create or work for a successful business and to create success for themselves.

However, the unfortunate reality of someone like me is that I am not intending to be a marketer by trade. I am not even intending to be an entrepreneur by trade. I am creative. A true creative. From how I have come to understand what I know a true creative to be, it is not a career. It is a visceral need to understand the truth, beauty, suffering, and ugliness of the world through the act of creating something. I am an innovator through the act of creation.

Being a creative isn’t a choice, it is a biological need.

The reason I have chosen to do marketing of any kind is that my visceral need to create is so all-encompassing that I cannot reasonably balance my act of creating with my other needs. Needs such as earning income, exercising, or sometimes even feeding myself. I am marketing my innovations to sustain my needs. My innovations are largely creating niches, not serving them. If I am lucky, they will do both.

So, what happens when my innovation is only creating a niche, not serving a niche? Well, that is exactly the experience I had when creating my Curious Markings project and attempting to market it. It was a massively uphill battle. I was doing social media, paid advertisements, getting an article in a magazine, working 40+ hours a week on various aspects of the project. Over a span of two years, my primary goal was to get people to sign up for my website/app.

Accepting the failure of a business while honoring the success of a piece of art

I ultimately ran out of energy with the project. Any additional efforts always ended up being contrived. The project failed. It took me a long time to accept that. But, eventually, I did. What helped me get there was recognizing that the project itself was not flawed. People loved my works. It was simply something that needed an established brand for a sustainable business model, and that building a brand is not my chosen career. Creating is my career.

So, I put the project in an indefinite suspension with approximately 300 sign-ups. To say that I was ‘once burned, twice shy,’ with putting that much fervor into a project ever again is an understatement. A couple of years and several volumes of journaling and mental gymnastics later, I finally had the courage to do a project again. One with an extremely limited scope, and a clear beginning and end to my goals. This project eventually became to be known as Enderbook, the social app for Minecrafters.

Why many artists find solace in fan art

The entirety of my marketing efforts with Enderbook was a couple of posts on a couple of subreddits, plus a few links through messages sent in a few Discord communities. Within months of largely non-existent marketing efforts, Enderbook had just as many sign-ups as the mentally back-breaking efforts of two entire years marketing Curious Markings.

Was Enderbook more successful because it was serving a niche, rather than creating one? Maybe. To this day, I’m not entirely certain there is an existing niche for a social platform specifically catered to Minecraft players. Time will tell on that one. I do know, however, that leveraging the brand of a globally known sensation makes things easy. Minecraft is such a sensation. Because my creation was a Minecraft service, the task of getting 300 sign-ups felt effortless. It virtually was effortless.

I often found myself marketing Curious Markings not because I was trying to grow it as a business, but because I wanted to share my creation. I would say maybe 5% of my sign-ups were from sharing that personal excitement around Curious Markings. Sharing my excitement about Enderbook yielded 100% of sign-ups in a fraction of the time with zero dollars spent on advertising.

Are you truly a creative? Maybe you’re an innovator or businessperson

At the end of the day, your marketing strategy as an entrepreneur needs to be very clear on who you are as a person. Are you an innovator, a creative, or a businessperson? In my experience, being a creative can often be in direct contradiction to being a businessperson. While I am extremely proficient in both fields, my lessons over the past years have led to being able to discern which of my creations I should choose to be financially dependent on.

If you are a creative trying to sustain your visceral need to create, it is important to ensure financial outcomes. If your creation has a niche of unknown size, you are at risk of being a creator of that niche. The only reason I was able to survive Curious Markings was that I was also working parallel to my other business, Objektiv Digital, a more conventional business creating websites for small businesses. In my case, I got lucky. If you are a creative, starting a profitable, parallel business (or creatively inclined employment) should be your business strategy from the get-go.

Business models: Research & Development vs. Manufacturing

I originally had the concept of this post as being about how enormously easier it is to create a piece of art or technology that leverages the power of another brand. I also wanted to write about how difficult it is to create a brand from scratch, and how crushingly depressing it can be when a brand fails – even when your creation is well received by anyone that discovers it. Ultimately, if you are a true creative, focusing on a single product or service as a business model for your art is doomed for failure. Why? Because your job is to create many things. Many things that may be vastly different from one creation to the next.

If your career is creating these vastly different things, then taking one of them and turning it into a single product or service, you end up inadvertently prematurely ending your career. You find yourself locked into indentured servitude to your single idea that you had already created and moved on from. Imagine Picasso if he created a business from his Blue period and centered his entire career around manufacturing these works and growing his brand as ‘Blue’ artist.

A surreal alternate universe is created when creatives deny themselves

Through manufacturing, Picasso would have destroyed any possibility of exploring cubism, surrealism, or any other phases that made him the wonder that he is. By pigeon-holing his creativity into a conventional, largely capitalist business model, he ceases to be an innovator. Silicon Valley taught us that innovation and capitalism can play nicely together. We have clear evidence of that with Steve Jobs, the visionary CEO of Apple. What we often forget, however, is that without Tim Cook as Steve’s COO, the undeniable success of Apple may have come into question.

Then, you get a creative like me that has yet to find a co-founder, a collective, or enough capacity to collaborate with others in general. People like me have to be careful about how we make a living from our creations because there is only so much time in a day. I have said this before, but the visceral need to create is often at odds with other, more basic needs like feeding and shelter. We have to be extremely pragmatic with our time.

My point in all of this is that if you create a business with your creation, you need to do so in a way that does not hinder your capacity or availability to keep creating. When I graduated college, my visceral need to create was initially satisfied by making websites for small businesses. Much like Picasso has moved on from his Blue phase, I have moved on from creating websites to fulfill my creative needs. However, I continue to do it for now because it keeps me relatively stable with my finances. At least, more so than if I were continually trying to make Curious Markings a viable business model.

Conclusion

The lesson I learned in this entire process is that building a brand as a creative like me ultimately means that my brand is me. Sure, I created the branding for Curious Markings, Enderbook, Grindset Factory, etc. However, my overall brand strategy as a business, as a creative, must be centered around me. I have fought the idea for so long because of how narcissistic it seems to me. But, again, creatives like me need to be pragmatic with our approach, and especially with our time. The best way to utilize my time is to build the IRM brand.

It is as simple as that. I can spend 100 hours on the IRM brand. Or I can spend 100 hours on each of the brands of all of my creations. Throughout the duration of my career, that can be up to thousands of hours depriving me of my visceral need to create. That is unacceptable. It will starve you creatively, perhaps financially, and even literally as well. I wish I could say that being who you truly are will allow everything to fall in place as all the motivational gurus seem to profess. But, we both know that many artists suffer their entire lives and are only revered decades or even centuries after their death.

Based on my experience, not embracing your creativity will ultimately lead to more suffering. So set some of that creativity aside for surviving the reality of your existence.

Self-care like a salesperson

A zealous commitment to serving the customer

An often tired cliché of salespeople is that they will try to close the deal at any cost. That may have been true for 80s and 90s salesmen. These days, masterful salespeople care much less about making the sale and much more about serving their future clients. This is because this unwavering commitment to service will lead to increased trust. That trust can lead to sales down the road or to referrals from the person they lost the deal with. In today’s social media economy, reputation is everything, and they will do anything to make themselves look good.

When approaching self-care, we can learn from this by having an unwavering commitment to serving our aspirations and goals. We need to stop thinking about how much of a failure we are, how we didn’t do this or that. What we should instead think about how we can do and say the things that will motivate and inspire us. Toward thinking about how we can serve ourselves rather than what we think other people assume we should be.

Sell based on customer need and budget, not your income goal

As a salesman selling websites for Objektiv Digital, I try to sell my customers on a comprehensive website support package. However, some just want a landing page that will never need to be updated for 2 years or more. I’m not going to try to sell them on the support package. I am instead going to serve their needs right now. This is because I know that when their business starts to grow, they will want and need more. I know that inevitably, they will eventually need that comprehensive maintenance and support package.

Likewise, if you need to lose 40 pounds in order to be below the ‘obese’ threshold – yet struggle to lose even 5 pounds, a bit of pragmatism is needed. As a salesperson, you’re trying to sell yourself on the 40-pound package. However, all you can realistically afford to effectively execute is the 10-pound package. Sell yourself on what is realistic to where you’re at in your weight-loss business. Start with 10 pounds, and expand your goal from there. Otherwise, you may lose out on the business entirely, aka not lose any weight at all.

The presumptive close

One of the best mental tricks a salesperson can play on their own brains is assuming that the deal is already sealed. If you assume your customer has already decided that they are going to buy with you, helping your customer becomes a lot easier. Instead of approaching the deal like you have to convince them to choose you, you are instead focused on helping them get a package or solution that best fits their needs.

We can apply the presumptive close to ourselves and our self-care by presuming that we are already going to do the thing we’re trying to do. For example, going to the gym. If we tell ourselves, our brain, that the decision has already been made that we are going to the gym at 5pm on Tuesday, we remove any other options for ourselves for that time of that day in the week. Sure, life happens and maybe you need to pick up your kid from detention instead.

All the salesperson would do in that situation is simply say, “No worries, now wasn’t a good time. I’ll follow up next week.” This leads us to our next sales tactic.

Follow up is key

Any half-competent salesperson will tell you that the majority of their sales came from an unceasing commitment to follow-up. In stock market investing, they say time in the market always beats timing in the market. The opposite is true for sales. Timing is everything. That is why follow-up is so critical. Landing the sale can often be as simple as being the last person the buyer heard from. It sounds messed up, but amazingly, it’s true.

You can apply this to your self-care by teaming up with an accountability buddy that will follow up with you to ensure you are taking the actions you need to meet your self-care goals. Whether it be a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or some other kind of interval. Follow-up is everything when it comes to sales, and for many, it can be everything when it comes to self-care.

Mindset is everything

As much as I cringe at the thought of all the mindless cheer-leading of Tony Robbins seminars, there is an inalienable truth to the message: mindset is everything. If you start acting like a winner, your brain will start forming connections in your brain to perform actions that winners take.

Likewise, if you start saying that you are an athletic, diet-conscious, happy and healthy self-care expert, your brain will start finding ways to manifest yourself as that person. You can get as much or as little as you want with metaphysical stuff. The reality is, “fake it ’til you make it” isn’t just a saying, it’s an objective truth that cannot be denied.

Self-care like a marketer

Removing as many steps as possible

As a digital marketer specializing in web design, it is my job to reduce as much friction as possible. Make things extremely clear and simple to understand and navigate. To remove as many steps as possible in order to get a customer from clicking an ad to clicking that “Buy” button.

You can do this in your own life by figuring out how to remove as many steps as possible from your own self-care routine. For me, I have a big gaping space in my office. One day, I decided to fill that space with a yoga mat. Now, instead of sitting at my desk thinking about how I should be doing exercise, all I have to do is stand up, take of my shoes and pants, and start my yoga routine.

By doing this, I removed the following steps:

1. Thinking about what I should do to exercise — with the yoga mat laid out, the answer is easy: do yoga
2. Finding a yoga studio: my studio is right here, right now
3. Finding and unrolling a yoga mat: it’s already laid out, all I have to do is take off my shoes and pants

In my blog post about lack of motivation, I also talk about reducing the steps needed to get your body moving for weightlifting.

Reward good behavior with something ‘free’ – using pragmatism in self-care

Whenever you visit an eCommerce website, you’ll most often see something like, “Sign up to our newsletter and get 10% off your next order!” They do this so that even if you’re not ready to buy now, they can send you promotional emails to catch you at that fleeting moment when you are ready to buy. You signing up for that newsletter is the good behavior. Getting the 10% discount is your reward.

Personally, I am good at managing my weight. However, in order to reduce my schizophrenia symptoms, I need elevated testosterone levels. I can accomplish this by lifting weights. At the same time, wheat is not good for me, but I love to eat it. So, when after lift weights (good behavior), I decided to have a cheeseburger with a tasty brioche bun, or maybe some waffles with whip cream and maple syrup — a reward for my good behavior.

I’d like to open this article with the acknowledgement that I am not an expert in economics or criminal law. However, I am an expert in managing time (aka attention) via my business Objektiv Digital and an expert in managing my mental health due to my schizophrenia. You can find evidence of that effective mental health management in my writings on MSN, Yahoo, my blog, and elsewhere.

Nearly all publishers are guilty of this assault and robbery

First, let’s look at the title of the blog article: “The Attention Economy: Robbery and Assault.” I start with a novelty. Something that is fairly new in our vernacular, the “attention economy.” Next, it includes an exciting claim, you’re getting assaulted and robbed. I am by no means an expert in clickbait, but I’ve gotta say, I think I did a good job with this one. However, this title is part of what’s hurting you. I am attacking your psyche to get your attention. The title claiming that you’re getting assaulted and robbed — which you are — in order to get and keep your attention.

I am assaulting you with these words because I’m hoping it will be the last time that it happens. Words like this excite you. They should excite you. You’re being told you’re in danger. We are hardwired to keep ourselves away from danger. If we see something that tells us we’re in danger, we pay close attention and stop being in the present moment. Instead, we look for information that is going to cause immediate harm.

You’re being assaulted in the attention economy

The problem with the title of this article is that it is being inserted amongst dozens or even hundreds of article/video titles that you’re going to see today as you read the news, scroll social media, watch TV, etc. You are being put in a persistent state of alertness, and it is literally killing you. It is making you anxious, depressed, neglect yourself, and an endless number of other things that you probably aren’t noticing.

You don’t even know it’s happening

One of the biggest problems with mental health is that other people usually can’t see that you’re sick. An even bigger problem is that you often don’t know that you’re sick. This is because these mental health issues creep up on you slowly. So slow, in fact, that you thought they were always there. Being anxious and depressed is normal for you, and you only know you have it because you’re able to observe its most extreme moments. What you probably didn’t know is that you’ve been anxious and depressed for years, you just didn’t know you were until it reached the extremes.

I was able to observe this in myself with my schizophrenia. I was diagnosed when I was 17. About four years later, I realized I was hearing voices. Yet, something I realized was that I had been hearing voices as early as the age of 13. Hearing voices was such a normal part of my life, that I didn’t even realize that it wasn’t part of a normal human experience. I was deep in the throes of schizophrenia and I didn’t even know it.

We already know that news and social media damage our mental health, right? Yet, we still go to the news every day. We still scroll our social feeds. Sure, we take a social media break every once in a while. Maybe we’ll uninstall an app or two. But it never really goes away. We still need to be informed about the happenings of the world. We still need to keep in touch with our friends and family.

Reduce consumption

What is the solution, then? That’s where it gets tricky. I don’t have a turn-key solution, because much like any psychotropic medication, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for everyone. My methods might work for me, but could be disastrous for others. The only thing that works across the board is much like losing weight effectively — cutting down consumption. Less calories, less weight gain. Less news and social media, less mental health degrade.

Long story short, cut your news and social media diet by half or more. Keep cutting it in half until you start feeling better. Then stick to the volume that you started feeling better. I am by no means saying this will cure whatever ails you, but it will at least improve your condition. Advil doesn’t cure the cause of headaches, but it will make you feel better. Cutting social media may not cure depression, but it will sure as hell make your outcomes for managing it infinitely better.

You’re being robbed in the attention economy

If you’re using a service and you’re not paying for it, you are the product. The service makes money by serving ads to you. In this structure, you are giving the service a portion of your time and in exchange for that time, you receive the privilege of using that service and getting a customized experience. Many people are okay with this. Many are not, especially when privacy issues are taken into consideration.

By browsing the internet and using these services, you are passively compromising your privacy and giving one of the most valuable commodities – your attention – away for free. Most people don’t even realize that their attention is a commodity. They don’t realize that their attention has a dollar value attached to it. If you knew you could earn money from peoples’ attention, would you give yours away so freely to the places that you give it to?

This whole situation reminds me of when I was a teenager play a collectible card game called Magic the Gathering. When I first started out, my friends helped me learn the game and traded cards with me so that I can create a competitive deck. What I didn’t know, however, is that in the trades I was making with them, they convinced me to trade them one of my most valuable cards that I had the luck of opening in one of the packages I bought.

I unknowingly, yet willingly, received pennies on the dollar in a trade. I was taken advantage of. Some might say I was scammed. Some might say I should have known better. Buyer beware, as they say. To that I say, bullshit. ‘Buyer beware’ is the go to phrase for greedy people who lack sufficient ethical and moral thinking that our contemporary society should demand.

‘Buyer beware’ is a cop-out for unethical & immoral behavior

When services convince someone to give up something of great monetary value knowing that they are oblivious of that value, they are what I like to call ‘shitty people.’ In other words, they are scammers, swindlers, two-bit, no-good, ne’er do wells. They are exploiting ignorance for financial gain.

And you, the news and social media consumer, have been getting robbed of your attention – at the cost of your mental health – so that Unilever can sell more bars of soap. Granted, we all need to wash ourselves with soap. I have no personal qualms with advertising. As a business owner, I have personally benefitted from advertising. I will shamefully admit, however, that benefit has been, at times, at the cost of peoples’ attention that they are unknowingly giving and have no way of knowing is at a fair price or not.

Are you spending your time effectively?

So, tell me, when you see 100 ads in a day, are you being sufficiently compensated for that time? 100 ads for about 3 seconds each is 300 seconds (and an extremely conservative estimate). 5 minutes per day. Over a month, that’s two and a half hours. I wonder what you could have done in that 2.5 hours?

You could have gone for 5 half-hour runs. Lifted weights a couple of times. Earned 2.5 hours of wages. Had more family time. Called that friend that you’ve been meaning to call but haven’t because you’re so busy. Learned to draw, play an instrument, or learn a new language. But no, you were looking at ads instead.

Again, you are being assaulted with exciting words that damage your mental health, and robbed of your time because there is no way of setting the price for your attention. Cut your media consumption by half. And keep cutting it in half until you are feeling better.

Solutions are coming

Thankfully, there are many forward-thinking creatives, engineers, and thinkers that are coming up with solutions to these problems. A way to have our cake as advertisers and creatives, and eat it, too. A perfect example of this is the Brave web browser.

Brave blocks all intrusive and invasive ads while serving ads in a non-intrusive way. You can opt out of these ads if you choose to. However, you will earn Basic Attention Tokens if you decide to opt-in. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a cryptocurrency that can be used to tip creators (such as YouTubers, Twitter users, webmasters, and more). The Brave company itself only accepts BAT as payment for serving ads. This in itself makes the intrinsic value crystal clear and easy to communicate.

Your attention is valued and respected

Using Brave, you are given monetary compensation for your attention. This should make perfect sense. The privilege of using an app is simply not enough of a justifiable compensation for the enormous amounts of time our eyes and ears are exposed to ads. Additionally, content creators should be sufficiently compensated for their work. Getting a little bit of exposure and maybe a follower or two is a pittance compared to what these platforms profit from by hosting your content.

I am by no means a crypto expert. Hell, I barely pass as a novice. When it comes to crypto talk, it all seems like a bunch of jibberish fueled by hype and greed to me. When I did my research on BAT, however, it was the first time I could clearly understand its purpose, value, and potential for being a substantially viable form of currency. It may never become wildly valuable like Bitcoin. But, because its value is easy to communicate, I see it as an extremely attractive option for earning and investing in.

Finding Your Formula

Everyone’s formula is different. For me, it started with a low-carbohydrate diet. For me, it helps reduce psychotic symptoms. For my productivity, however, its most significant benefit is the simple act of exercising self-discipline three times a day. Choosing between not eating wheat, sugar, rice, potatoes, or corn, and compromising my health and good habits. For me, the choice is simple and easy to do. If you’re creating your formula, don’t start with something hard — you’re setting yourself up for failure. Start with something easy. Then build on your next habit.

Building Up Habits

Once I was on my low-carb diet, and my routine of exercising self-discipline was established, I started going to the gym once a week. The goal was to go every single week, no matter what. It took me more than two months to be consistent, but I eventually succeeded. Now that my diet and exercise was honed in, I set my sights on a far more significant challenge.

Managing Sleep Intelligently

Next, I needed to manage my sleep. My sleep habits were pure chaos. I would go to be anywhere between midnight to 5 am — or not at all. It was awful. I would get obsessed with work and push bedtime back further and further. It disrupted my responsibilities and my body’s ability to function correctly. In the past, I tried controlling my sleep habits, but I always slipped back into my old ways.

This next attempt, however, was different. I had a secret weapon. I discovered a key component of what was keeping me awake — my work. In particular, my ability to work at home. My poor sleep habits rested on the fact that my laptop was always home. From then on, I kept my laptop at the office. My bedtime has consistently been between 10 and 11 pm and has no signs of changing.

And that, to date, is my formula: managing diet, exercise, sleep, and digital exposure. It seems so simple and obvious but is quite profound once you put it into practice every single day, every single week.

Thumbnail/header photo by:

Photo Credit: Brooke Lark

Is it pushy, though? Let’s look at it from the perspective of two different prospects. There’s the prospect that was never going to buy in the first place and the prospect that wants to buy but needs to be convinced. I’d wager the only people, outside of a few outliers, that say the marketing tactics mentioned above are too pushy are in the “was never going to buy in the first place” camp.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my experience as someone offering a product and being in the driver’s seat of marketing that product is the people that love what you have to offer are going to buy. There’s one problem, though. Spending money can be a scary thing. What if they regret the purchase? If you know, with 100% certainty that your customer will be satisfied with their purchase, there should be no reason to feel wrong about being “pushy.”

People will thank you for being pushy.

The people who are true fans of your product don’t see marketing tactics to convince them to buy as pushy. And we shouldn’t either. What we are doing is convincing, encouraging, and allaying fears. If you think you are too pushy, you need to re-assess whether your product is as stellar as it was once you first started your company. Your product is solving problems. You’re solving specific problems that will enhance someone’s life. The people who will genuinely see benefits from your product will thank you for being pushy once they enjoy the benefits. Let me repeat, people will thank you for being pushy. Now start marketing effectively!

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Photo Credit: John Schnobrich

Let’s be real with ourselves here for a moment. Procrastination can be a problem for even the most successful and driven people. Unless you’re in a position like an emergency responder, procrastination can quickly take over your work. For me, procrastination is a huge cause of stress. The longer a task lingers, the more I can feel it eating away at me.

One of the best ways to train your brain into doing something is positive reinforcement. If you’re on a rigid diet but love candy, reward yourself with a single Skittle. If you’re an entrepreneur like me starving for any indication that you’re making forward momentum, being able to tick the checkbox next to a task can give you that endorphin rush to keep you going.

As someone who played MMORPGs for a massive chunk of my life, my brain has been rigorously conditioned to chase those tiny little endorphin rushes. In these games, you would get it from killing a major boss, defeating your opponents in Player vs. Player combat, acquiring a piece of rare, high-value equipment. These small things that happen at seemingly random intervals create huge positive reinforcement that keeps you playing the game day after day.

For me, my endorphin rushes are now completing tasks, getting a prospect to ask for a demo or proposal, making a sale, having a great conversation with a prospect, being able to meet with my advisor and accountability buddy and telling them I accomplished my goals for the weeks. Being able to get this same reward for starting something that I could potentially procrastinate on has been a fantastic way to keep me focused on priorities and making forward momentum with my business.

• Taking medication
• Receives therapy
• Self-administered cognitive therapy
• Identifying triggers
• Controlling sensory inputs
• Exercise
• Healthy diet
• Getting enough sleep
• Avoiding drugs/alcohol
• Being spiritual
• Keeping the mind busy (work, video games, etc.)
• Supporting friends/family

Taking Medication + Therapy

In my opinion, this is the foundation of staying healthy as a person with schizophrenia. Without medication to keep us level, everything else is going to fall apart. Being regular with dosages and checking in regularly with our doctor to make sure the dosage is still effective is the best way to stay level. From there, we can build on better well-being by doing all of the other recommended things on the list.

Cognitive Therapy, Identifying Triggers, Controlling Sensory Inputs

Knowing what can cause stress and heightened emotions are the first step toward mitigating situations and environments that can make psychotic symptoms more prevalent. For identifying triggers, I try my best to avoid political news and discussions. Just because I avoid political news doesn’t mean I don’t try to stay informed, but I have to be extremely careful about how I consume news and who I am trusting with the information I am taking in. I’ve gone down some pretty frightening rabbit holes because of fear-mongers like CNN and Alex Jones. For controlling my sensory inputs, I have to avoid going to events with large crowds of people. Things like concerts are especially distressing to be around not just because of the loud noises and flashing lights, but also because of the immense number of strangers around me. Being surrounded by people who I don’t know sends my brain into overdrive because it’s trying to assess whether every single one of them is a threat or not.

Healthy Diet, Exercise, Getting Enough Sleep

Sticking to my low-carb diet puts me on the fast-track toward higher functioning. Without it, everything else is insurmountably difficult. Once I’m on my low-carb diet, I can get to the gym more often, which boosts my high-functioning to an even higher level. As of this writing, I am in the process of developing a better sleep schedule, but at the very least, I am getting enough sleep. I find my productivity and symptom-reduction also gets better when I am getting enough sleep.

Avoiding Drugs/Alcohol

Fortunately, I’ve never been exposed to street drugs, but I do get a lot of enjoyment out of drinking a local craft beer. Unfortunately, it does seem to affect my ability to manage symptoms and generally makes my body feel worse. I also tend to get some pretty nasty eczema flare-ups on my face when I have more than one beer over a day or two. I suspect my body doesn’t handle alcohol well, which probably means drinking it makes my schizophrenia worse.

Keeping the Mind Busy

Ever since my schizophrenia started to develop around the age of 11, I naturally found myself playing video games more and more often. At the age of 28, when I found myself naturally no longer playing video games, I realized that between the age of 11 and 28, I was not so much a video game addict as I was looking for something to keep my mind busy. I am now 32 and have been without video games for four years now. I do not have the urge to play, because my career as an entrepreneur has filled the gap the video games did previously. Keeping busy with my work is a massive part of what keeps me healthy. Staying distracted from my symptoms helps my mind from wandering into all the distressing and toxic places a psychotic brain can take me. For this reason, I am a firm believer that if you have schizophrenia, you need a job or some video games that you love and never want to part with.

Supportive Friends/Family

Despite my pervasive inclinations to isolate myself, I sincerely appreciate the efforts my family and friends have made to be present in my life, and their patience with me when I am in my more extreme phases. Having people in my life that know me well and can help me identify when things are getting out of hand does wonders with helping me make course corrections toward better health.

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Photo Credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters

At the end of that first year, my summer break didn’t mean my education ended. I was self-learning at such an accelerated pace that I would argue I learned more in my summer than I did in my first year. I began working on Stridr, and my high productivity continued. I was quickly becoming accustomed to my ability to get a lot of things done in a short period of time with a great degree of quality.

Then, in the fall of 2016, I contracted mononucleosis. It had me bed-ridden for almost two weeks. I got lucky that it wasn’t more than that, but it severely disrupted my health management flow. I stopped going to the gym as much. I was less disciplined sticking to my low-carbohydrate diet. For the following two-and-a-half years, my physical and mental health declined. As a result, so did my productivity.

It was a slow and gradual decline, barely noticeable. Because I didn’t notice it, I was under the delusion that I was just as productive as when I was in the summer of 2016. I was really hard on myself. The less productive I was, the more I would push myself. The more I would push myself, the more my health declined. I was only able to get myself out of it when I made a potentially disastrous life-changing decision as a result of my poor health and mindset. Thankfully, nothing bad happened. The wakeup call ended up turning my life around back in the right direction, and I am now able to recognize what happened.

Are you a high-functioning schizophrenic? Maybe you have another mental illness. Have you fallen into this productivity trap before? Please share your story in the comments. Let’s start a conversation about this.

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Photo Credit: James Lee

Use eye contact when holding your finger up while you’re on the phone in an important call, don’t look away

In my experience, maintaining eye contact with someone is the best way to make a person feel acknowledged. When you hold up your hand with the “1-second” sign, it can mean drastically different things between maintaining eye contact and looking away. Imagine someone greeting someone, and they retain their gaze away from you while holding up their hand. It hurts. You feel like you are not only not a priority, but that you’re not even on their radar. Like you’re a burden to their existence. Then imagine the same scenario while they maintain eye contact. To me, it says, “I see you. I value your input. I would like to hear what you have to say, but I want to respect the person on the other end of the line. I will get to you as soon as possible.”

Be personally invested in your employees’ success

When you’re visibly working toward helping your employees grow, succeed, and be well compensated, they will take notice. They will be your staunch ally in business, and work harder and smarter to help achieve your company’s goals. Being swamped and not giving your employees enough attention can, over time, reduce morale and shake loyalty. But, if you have established from the beginning that you care and that your work isn’t just for your own success, but the success of your employees, they will be far more patient with you during those busy stretches.

Own your mistakes when you lose your cool

Being swamped can be trying on your emotions. Inevitably, you may lose your cool, and it can make for tumultuous moments. But, if you follow the advice from the previous point, employees can be a lot more forgiving. However, don’t lean on that forgiveness by itself. Be sure to follow up later when things have cooled down and apologize to the person (or people) with which you lost your cool. Most of the time, forgiveness will come quickly. If it doesn’t, however, you will have given yourself an excellent opportunity to hear them out and manage their concerns.

What are the meaning of the markings?

Attached to each marking is a title (in the unknown language), a subtitle (in English), a description, and a story. The description is my attempt of deciphering the meaning behind the marking. The story is a way for everyone to participate in its translation through the mobile game. I’ll talk more about the game shortly. With the Curious Markings project, I’ve attempted to make every aspect adhere to one of these four words: Empower. Create. Document. Share.

What was involved with this project?

This project involved several components:

• Process work
• Markings
• Tumblr/Twitter marketers
• Instagram account
• Website
• Mobile game
• Packaging

The process work (Document)

Over the course of the project beginning in early January until now, about 100 pages of process work have been written. This process work explores a multitude of ideas; some followed through with, some not. The explore my symptoms and how I’ve experienced them throughout my life, and discuss how to turn Curious Markings into a viable, marketable business. Here are some sample pages:

The markings (Create/Document)

The markings are seemingly endless. I can always see them, and I can always create more by simply putting pen to paper. Each marking starts with a thumbnail. In the beginning, I created a vectorized version of the marking, but I later opted to skip this step because the shapes didn’t hold true to the style I was going for. Then, I carved linoleum stamps of the markings (pictured below).

Then, I would use the lino stamp on white printmaking paper. These prints ended up being included in my product line. I then do a 7200 DPI resolution scan on the print saved as a PDF. This PDF would then be transformed in Adobe Illustrator with an object image trace. Any white parts of the image are removed, leaving me with a somewhat vectorized marking identical to what the prints look like. These vectors are resized and exported in various formats for the website and mobile game.

The Tumblr/Twitter marketers (Share)

Ever since my previous project, Stridr, I had been formulating ways to effectively use my knowledge of social media APIs. I decided to utilize the mysterious nature of the markings and Tumblr/Twitter’s tagging system by attaching keywords to each marking. These keywords would be searched for on these platforms, and an algorithm part of my application would generate a mysterious message with an image of one of my markings. Each message would have a call to action, leading to the landing page where the user can learn more and sign up.

The Instagram account (Create/Share)

The Instagram account is part of an ongoing social media campaign that seeks to explore nature, words, and to showcase the markings and sneak peaks into the Curious Markings world. The post sequence is a repeating sequence of: photo of marking print > photo of nature > exclusive look at cMc activities > photo of poetry/words on paper (written by me).

The website (Empower/Document/Share)

The website serves as a place for people to learn about all things cMc, whether that be about the markings, about the mobile game, or about me. It also serves as an e-commerce store where people can buy products featuring the Curious Markings. The website also houses components of the mobile game, such as the user profile.

The mobile game (Empower/Create/Document/Share)

The Curious Markings mobile game creates an interactive experience out of the curious markings. I believe there is more to these markings than just me, and I have attempted to craft a way for this to be a communal effort.

Start by collecting markings in the real world through your phone. Go to the map view and begin searching. No markings in your town? You can place a marking at your current location. Collecting markings serves as a global effort to unlock the stories attached to each marking.

In the camera view, you can photograph the area surrounding the marking. This creates an online visual history of the marking. Perhaps with a rich enough history, we can interpret further meaning in the markings.

The packaging (Create/Share)

The packaging was meant to give a hand-made, old-timey feel with a degree of mystery as to what could be inside. Wrapped in kraft paper, bound by twine, sealed with wax imprinted by the cMc logo, I attempted to make this beautiful, simple, and easily reproducible.

Who made all of this?

Everything was conceived, designed, developed, etc. by me with the following exceptions:

• Markings index page design by Sarah Fox
• Landing page and marking details pages with design contributions from Sarah Fox
• Product photography by Sarah Fox
• Typographic choices made with critique from Brittany King

What’s next?

cMc is completely catered to my strengths and what fulfills me in my work. As such, I will continue focusing my efforts on enhancing the experience of the mobile game, and to continue making new markings (2 or 3 every month). My immediate plans for the mobile game are features that simulate my psychotic experiences (auditory and visual hallucinations), and an offline mode option so that markings may be placed and collected offline.

Conclusion

Unlike Stridr, I can see myself working on this project indefinitely. It may take a few years before I become revenue positive, but because so many aspects of this project make me whole, I see myself working on this until I feel like the story is complete.

In the beginning…

In July 2015, I began daydreaming about a social app that put all of the platforms in one place. I spent countless hours thinking about it. I had started to learn to code and decided to build my skills up enough to make the app myself. This led me to my first year at North Island College starting two months later.

During my first year, the idea percolated as I focused on my studies. When the first year was complete, the idea started taking over my daydreaming again. Come July 2016, I felt that I had sufficient skills to begin a more serious pursuit of this app. I began working on the branding of the app soon-to-be and told my instructors at NIC about the idea. One of them put me in contact with Graham Truax at Innovation Island.

I scheduled a meeting with Graham, and we met the next day. Graham introduced himself and Innovation Island and we discussed my idea. I remember my idea being so profound and groundbreaking, and while not dismissing my idea in the least, Graham essentially said, “ideas are a dime a dozen.”

That was my first lesson. Ideas are a dime a dozen. More importantly, an amazing idea that’s half-assed will never be as successful as a crap idea that has been followed-through with completely. Even then, an amazing idea that’s followed through with completely may still fail due to factors like timing.

As an aside, for the following months, every time I contacted Graham, I had to remind him who I was and what I was doing. I wasn’t offended, I knew he works with a lot of people and I was by far a novice to the whole business and tech world.

Get to work!

After my first meeting with Graham, his message was simple. Get to work. He provided me with valuable resources for lean management, persona profiles, minimum viable product, and more.

So I did. I began reading more than I ever have in my life. I began incorporating Stridr into all of my class projects at North Island College. Between September and May, I had incorporated Stridr in five of my classes, including Portfolio Project, a class where we independently took on a large project from start to finish.

I knew Stridr would be way more work than I could possibly handle. I found Taylor Leach, who agreed to do the front end development and UI/UX design. Luckily, due to a hiccup in the program schedule at North Island College, Taylor had taken a class on UI/UX design, and did phenomenal work on Stridr because of it.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

By the end of the school year, I had created a business plan, business model canvas brochure and presentation, a social media plan; and with Taylor Leach, a minimum viable product built on Ruby on Rails and other open source technologies.

After a long duration of radio silence, I contacted Graham and showed him everything I had created. After that meeting, I no longer had to remind him who I was or what I was doing. That gave me a strong sense of accomplishment. Shortly after, he had invited me to the BC Venture Acceleration Program.

Refreshing the MVP

At this point, the MVP wasn’t that great. It didn’t really do anything useful, and I was determined to change that. I worked tirelessly to create a functioning recommendation system, to squash all the bugs that cropped up from meeting the school deadline, and to get the app to a point where I could comfortably start trying to market it.

Eventually, I got the app to that point. I started implementing my social media plan and was immediately getting user feedback. I had done some light advertising on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Pinterest was by far getting the most click-throughs. This was an interesting takeaway because Pinterest was the primary reason I came up with Stridr as an idea.

From the user feedback, I learned Stridr needs to be more than a recommendation system. It would gain a lot of value from having an all-in-one content feed. At this point, I was getting really good at coding, particularly with social APIs. I managed to have a working content feed within 4 days of coding.

Acceptance to the Venture Acceleration Program

While all of this was happening, Graham and I were plotting to have North Island College sponsor my membership in the Venture Acceleration Program. Being a starving college student, even a very reasonable price of $200/mo was too much for me.

We met with NIC’s Vice President, Randall Heidt. He was very supportive and enthusiastic about the project, and working with him was a lot of fun. He agreed to sponsor me. This made Stridr a big deal to me. I was so energized by everyone’s enthusiasm in the project.

Scale, scale, scale

By now, I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. A lot of eyes were on Stridr, and there was so much more work to be done. Squashing bugs, adding features, researching other content aggregators and how they grew, digging into platform policies, putting out the constant fires from using 9 different web APIs.

After contorting in a million different ways to manage my time more effectively, my research had begun to reveal grim truths about working with social APIs. In particular, they could stop working at the flick of a wrist (whether intentional or not). Additionally, my efforts of playing nice with all of the platforms could prove to be fruitless in the long term, no matter how many times I cross my t’s and dot my i’s.

I began budgeting my time and money and began to realize continuing work on the project would take substantial amounts of money, and 60+ hours/week of work. I simply didn’t have enough money in my bank account to keep doing that, even with the generous support of Randall Heidt and North Island College.

All was not lost

Diving into Stridr, I knew one of two things would happen. I’d either have created a successful company, or I’d have learned way more than traditional lessons could ever teach, and become that much more proficient when I take on the next venture.

For me, it was a win/win, despite the project as a whole fizzling out. What did I learn, exactly?

• Lean management
• Creating a business model canvas and how to use it
• Creating meaningful, realistic persona profiles
• Time management
• Value Proposition Design
• Social API integrations
• OAuth flow
• Redis
• Sidekiq
• Amazon AWS S3
• A multitude of Dev Ops proficiencies
• Rails console debugging
• Full text search development and integrations
• Enough JavaScript to successfully challenge NIC’s IMG250 course with an A+ assessment
• So many other things I can’t immediately recall everything

Conclusion

At no point do I feel let down by this process. Everything I have done up to this point has been an amazing experience, and I am far more confident with any future venture I may pursue.

Throughout this entire journey, I’ve been amazed by the immense support of my classmates, instructors, college administration, fellow entrepreneurs, and especially of my friends and family. I am disappointed that Stridr will not become a familiar name to all the social media savvy people in the world, but I’m grateful for the experience and all the rewards that came from it.

In my search for the wisdom of others, I found a lot of articles that don’t quite get into the nitty-gritty of time management, particularly in the context of software development. A substantial challenge is working as the sole employee (or co-employee) of a company performing tasks ranging from full stack development, graphic design, marketing, research, and so on. To be a jack of all trades, working 5+ roles and still manage to meet self-imposed deadlines as quickly as possible. As an entrepreneur, it feels like everything needs to be done all at once, and that can create a lot of stress.

Meet Tickit co-founder Alex Dunae ( ). Alex has been a developer and entrepreneur in Comox Valley for over ten years. I’ve been scouring the internet for the wisdom of entrepreneurs in my situation, and it turns out I only had to walk a few blocks from my house! I sat down with Alex at the Union Street Grotto in Courtenay and asked, in a few different ways, how he manages his time.

I did not record our conversation, and I’ve already wasted enough of your time with the introduction, so here’s a summary of his answers to each of my questions:

As a father, business partner, entrepreneur, boyfriend, and someone who has to take showers and eat, how do you divide up your week?

• Four days/week dedicated to the kids with 4 to 6 hours at night assigned to work.
• Three days/week devoted to work. These days are where the bulk of things happen.
• Around 55 hours per week of week total work, with about 5 hours per week with his business partner, hanging out and talking shop.

How do you tackle tasks that you know will take more than a couple of hours?

(This answer is in the context of software development)

1. Create an issue on your version control platform of choice
2. Let the significant change/feature percolate for a few days/weeks
3. Justify why the change/feature is necessary. Find where you messed up. Be critical of its need – try to shoot it down.
4. Write pseudo-code – this will sate your trigger-happy coding fingers and give you a better idea of how to tackle the solution.
5. Think about how your program will interact with this feature. What is your ideal API? Continue to percolate.
6. Wait for components to reveal themselves. Find flaws in the logic.
7. Think about what may be affected by the change. What kind of work is involved in addressing that? Start laying the groundwork for those components.
8. Implement!

How do you set deadlines for yourself?

Priority-based with the following on a scale of 1 to 5:

• Customer demand
• Difficulty
• Customer pains
• Customer gains

What are customer pains/gains? Read about value proposition design here.

This priority system is trumped by:

• Major bug fixes
• A customer needs a specific feature (this is more applicable to the kind of app Alex is working on)
• Preparing for crunch times (Again, specific to Tickit, which relies on seasonal traffic)

How much time per week do you spend on interaction with your customers?

• A minimum of 8 hours per week
• Because of the nature of Tickit, there are about three weeks spent with in-person meetings with clients, on-site.

How do you know when to prioritize coding vs. behind the scenes work like research?

• When you don’t know how to do something (Needs driven – know when it’s time to learn and when it’s time to work)
• When you feel like technology is leaving you behind, it’s time for professional development
• At least twice a year, spend time on marketing position (research), this leads to ideas for new features
• When wanting to code a new feature, remember that percolating is necessary! Actively push off coding. Write pseudo-code if you need to be sated. Spend days/weeks/months developing your idea before you code it.

What have you learned about your journey that you feel is worth sharing?

Alex jokingly replied to this, “Nothing!”

He contorted for over 30 minutes trying to answer this question in an attempt to come up with a profound answer, but I think his joke is profound enough. I’m going to close with a few words on the assumption that it is true.

The internet is riddled with blogs glamourizing entrepreneurship, boasting a lifestyle and work ethic that is suited to very few people. Even for the people that it is suited to, it is still a tremendous challenge, and at the end of the day, the journey is not all that glamorous or worth sharing. It’s about working your ass off trying to get rich (or at least make a comfortable living and the ability to retire at a reasonable age) while attempting to create value where there was none before. This lifestyle is for us, entrepreneurs, people who are relentlessly obsessive. It’s in our nature to chase the white whale, and it’s important that we are careful about how fervently we pursue it. I hope these not-so-glamorous tidbits of information can help myself and other entrepreneurs tweak our schedules in a way that makes us more careful, and overall, healthier. For me, I think they will.

Thumbnail Photo by

Uroš Jovičić

As you all know, I’ve been hard at work since July 2016 seeing Stridr come to fruition. While I will continue my efforts, I am pausing any money being put toward the project. As of today, stridr.social is going on maintenance mode until I can squash all of the bugs and optimize a lot of the efficiency issues with the website. Continue reading to see what’s in store.

Faster loading and more transparency with wait times

Spinning Loading Icon

Stridr loads a lot of data from a lot of places. This inherently takes a long time to process. Some of this processing time is inevitable, but some of it can be improved on Stridr’s end. I will be working to decrease loading times, and to design the website in a way that will be more transparent about things that may take some time to do.

Chronological Content Feed

As platforms get bigger, they try their best to bias your feed based on what they think you’ll like. Sometimes it works for the better, sometimes it doesn’t. Based on feedback from Stridr’s registered users, the all-in-one content feed will be chronological to give an unbiased view of all of the things you follow.

A Facelift for the User Profile

The user profile is currently a place that shows your friends everything you like on social media. While this will still be an option, the user profile will soon show all of the posts you’ve made across social media. This feed keeps up-to-date with your feeds, so when you make a new post or delete an old post, these changes will be reflected in your profile. Additionally, this profile feed can be curated, so you can delete specific posts synced from your feed if you so choose.

Tag Based Search Feed

Stridr is all about connecting you with social media content that matters to you. A tag-based search feed for social media posts will soon be available so you can easily find what people are talking about, all in one place. This will be in addition to the regular search function, which is presently used for finding social media pages.

Enhanced Security

A driving factor behind taking Stridr completely offline was due to a security flaw in the way that Stridr makes requests from the supported social media platforms. In its current state, the flaw could not be exploited without access to Stridr’s application secrets to the nine supported platforms. While these secrets are very safe, I was not comfortable exposing Stridr’s users to the risk of a single source of failure.

This, combined with rather substantial performance issues, and a lack of users to justify paying for server expenses all led to the decision to take Stridr down temporarily. If I were more than one person, “we” would address all of these issues without having to shut the website down, but I am one person with obligations to family, my health, friends, and classes.

Conclusion

I look forward to re-releasing Stridr into a more usable, feature-rich website that I can be proud to have you use. Keep an eye on this blog for more updates, and thank you all for your enthusiastic support. Making you all proud is a huge motivator for me, so thank you so much for all the cheerleading!

The idea for Stridr came from signing up to major platforms for the first time and finding nothing that could assemble all of my social feeds into one place. I wanted to find new people and things to follow based on what I already like, without having to navigate all of these platforms blind. Every time I tried to find an ‘all-in-one’ social media app, I only found apps for social media managers, but nothing for the social media USERS. In this way, Stridr stands out from all the rest.

Below is a brief walk-through of what Stridr is, followed by a description of the challenges faced from creating it.

All of your social feeds in one place.

Supported platforms include DeviantArt, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube.

A hub for finding your favorite people across social media and to discover their interests.

Log in and sync your accounts to discover what you have in common with your friends and those you follow. Find new things to follow by looking at what your friends like. Find your friends on platforms you didn’t know they were on.

Find your friends (below) and view their profile (above).

Find new things to follow based on what you already like through the recommendation feed.

We take privacy seriously.

Privacy policy and terms of service were drafted to protect ourselves and our customers. We often refer to these documents when adding and removing features. These documents must be agreed to in order to sign up.

Customize your experience and manage your presence.

Filter platforms and topics from your feeds, customize your profile, and, in adherence to our privacy policy, delete your account.

Stridr is built on Ruby on Rails.

Stridr began development in February 2017 using the latest technologies available for Ruby, the Ruby on Rails framework, and a variety of open source technologies for Ruby, JavaScript, and CSS. Some of the technical challenges include:

• OAuth1 and OAuth2 authentication flow.
• REST API Interaction
• Asynchronous Tasks
• In-memory data structure storing

• Unobstrusive JavaScript
• REST API Development
• React Native Development
• Database design/administration
• Full Text Search development

Stridr’s initial interface was designed by Taylor Leach

Stridr’s minimum viable product was developed by Taylor Leach and I for our Portfolio Project class project at North Island College, spanning over an entire semester. While Taylor has since departed from the project, I continue to adhere to his professional quality designs. Stridr’s logo was designed by me, and all design implementations made best efforts to adhere to branding guidelines set out by the social platforms utilized. Additionally, Stridr’s Business Plan and Business Model Canvas brochure were designed and written as part of other class projects. Our tools/methods for design include:

• Adobe CC (Ai, Ps, Id, Xd)
• HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JS, jQuery

• UI/UX Design
• Branding

Stridr is operating under the principles of being lean with agile development and an imperative of designing value.

With this in mind, the business plan, business model canvas, persona profiles, and value proposition canvas were created to establish a solid foundation for the product and its future.

Conclusion

As of Jan. 2018, Stridr has been set aside indefinitely. For more info, see this post.

Stridr Business Model Canvas

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