Jack Kowalsky 0:14
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the bootstrap Experience podcast. Each week, Bjorn and I talk about running our bootstrap SAS businesses on Shopify and now elsewhere or expanding. So what do you have to have yarn? Yeah, it's been a good couple of weeks. I feel like I've got a lot done. It's always good to have a deadline.

Bjorn Forsberg 0:32
Yeah, you know, I've been stressing or not stressing, but working to get these app updates done for the Shopify average changes, which is when you're embedded inside the Shopify admin, like a lot of apps are, they're changing the way that we communicate with Shopify, for that whole process. So the way that you get Shopify to show buttons for you, or open a modal with some content and stuff, so redoing a lot of the JavaScript, but there's been pretty good process. But now they've pushed it off to march 1. Oh, nice. That's good. Yeah, I'm just trying to keep the same intensity going, though, so I can get it out of the way and move on to other things. Good plan. I was looking at this a little bit. Now it's like a little unclear, is it? They're just getting rid of the EEA SDK? Or do you have to upgrade to bridge 2.0? Good question. The Message says, we see that you're using the SDK or the compatibility layer. And I'm not sure if that means v1, or if EA SDK is v1, but I'm not sure. I should look into that. But I guess I have till March. Yeah, exactly.

And one of our next steps is to actually stop having embedded apps. So it feels a bit like double work to be spending time doing this average stuff. By low the changes, we can use, even if we're not embedded, but it's just the modals and things which are part of Shopify, they're quite complicated to work with in the embedded environment, you're talking from an iframe to the main app. Whereas if it was just a normal modal in your app, you don't have to sort of split the code in the same way. So it does make it a bit more difficult. But it's been good. And I've sort of been learning a lot along the way, too. So it's been nice.

Jack Kowalsky 2:02
It's awesome. Yeah, I would definitely go with nine embedded at this point, for me, at least, cuz I just think the appeals not there as much anymore, especially with the authentication stuff like that was always such a pain to working correctly, although I guess they're doing this token authentication, which looks a lot better now. Yeah,

Bjorn Forsberg 2:19
it seems smoother, and it's a little bit faster. But maybe I'm doing something wrong. But you can have like a little mini navigation menu at the top, we have some tabs for your app. And when you click on those, at least for the rails implementation, it basically reload. So you have this splash page first, which is like the loading indicator, and then it loads the actual page while it's getting the jadibooti token, go interesting. And so every time if you use those, if you navigate within the app, we can do it as an SBA. But if you navigate using the navigation bar that Shopify gives you, then we're sort of reloading the authentication token every time. Oh, wow, that just feels not quite there. At least, I know, a lot of other developers are not going for the embedded anymore, which is a shame, because I think, you know, it's a good user experience. But there's just too many limitations. And I think too many issues that caused a lot of work over the years.

Jack Kowalsky 3:05
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really cool. Like, I'd love to be able to do an app in that Shopify frame. But I guess embedded apps are just kind of on the way out as browser security improves. I mean, I think that's basically what it boils down to.

Bjorn Forsberg 3:18
Yeah, definitely. And even with the JW T stuff, you still got issues where you're ejecting out to go, for example, to a payment page, and then to come back into your app. It's still a janky sort of process, right? And like you're saying, technology that's getting in the way, right? Not technology, but security, which is fair enough. You know, we've also had this whole log for Shell thing. Oh, right. Yeah, just pretty well. But obviously, we have to keep these things secure. But it just makes so many hoops to jump through. And if you can give a similar experience outside. And I think Polaris helps a lot where you can still give the same user experience outside of the Shopify admin. And I think that will be a good pathway style solution.

Jack Kowalsky 3:53
Yeah, there was always this answer. I hated giving for support where someone would do probably the right thing for their situation and have their cookie settings really tight and just be like, Yeah, I'm sorry, you have to lower your cookie security settings to use an app. And that sucks.

Bjorn Forsberg 4:07
Yeah, exactly. It just doesn't feel the right thing to do. Right. Right. What do you been up to?

Jack Kowalsky 4:12
Not a lot workwise. So getting ready for the move to London. And just kind of dealing with all that for the last couple of weeks of the year doing a couple little marketing initiatives on translate CI, but I kind of also don't want to do a ton before the end of the year because I feel like between December 16 When we're recording this on the 31st It's not like people gonna be like, Oh, I really need to localize my application.

Bjorn Forsberg 4:36
Yeah, now's maybe not the time to have the big push. Right. All right.

Jack Kowalsky 4:39
I have a couple of things starting early January. So newsletter sponsorship, a blog sponsorship, and I don't know if you know, the social software podcast, Michelle Hanson does Oh, it's really good. You should check it out. She's in Denmark, too, I believe actually. Oh, really? Yeah. It's two people doing bootstrap businesses really is actually really good podcast ones like really pretty far along. I was just getting started. So it's really cool. Sort of listening to the advice back and forth. Ha, cool. I have to give a listen. Yeah, we can link it here. How do you find those?

Bjorn Forsberg 5:08
He said, just like you listening to them, but knowing them yourself, and then thinking, hey, that would be a good avenue because people like be listening and looking at these newsletters and stuff.

Jack Kowalsky 5:16
Yeah. So transistor FM has like a really good list of podcasts that specifically are about Bootstrap businesses. We should be on there. I don't think we are. But anyway, so I've gone through that a few times and just checked out various podcasts that one particularly I enjoyed, and I've continued to listen to like a lot of them, you know, I kind of listened to for an episode or two then fall off, but that one I'm stuck with. So I thought it'd be cool. The sponsor Mmm hmm.

Bjorn Forsberg 5:39
Nice. Is there any way to measure? Or do you just see like, hey, when this episode comes out, I can maybe see a spike in traffic? Is there any way to measure sort of the effectiveness of podcast?

Jack Kowalsky 5:49
Well, so the nice thing in general, I feel like No, unless you want to give like a coupon code or something like that. But the nice thing is getting 20 visitors a day, any uplift is going to be pretty obvious.

Bjorn Forsberg 6:00
Yeah, right. Definitely. Yeah, I guess it's to begin with. And when you say the coupon codes, a good idea, I guess you can also have a dedicated landing page, right? Whether you give away something or not, or just to have them use that link. I think marketing like that sort of soft touch marketing is difficult.

Jack Kowalsky 6:15
I feel like it's the way to go for the developer to like we talked about running paid Twitter ads and things like that recently, I didn't really feel too good. The other thing I've started to work on. So I realized, like, I'm not much of a writer, but I don't mind talking. So I've kind of started just daily. I'm going to start posting soon, I just posted one last week. But daily, if I'm doing something interesting, code wise, or marketing wise, or whatever, I just pop on my screen recorder and talk through it for like 10 minutes. And oh, wow, putting it on YouTube. So that's a cool way to do it. It's an interesting experiment. We'll see how it goes. Like last Friday, I did it like Friday, like 6pm just call it a soft launch for the first one. But I was writing the text for the newsletter sponsorship, because I got like two sentences. And I talked about how I think about that and just took like, 10 minutes to actually write that little blurb about translate CI. That's

Bjorn Forsberg 7:01
a good idea. Yeah. And I guess just saying it aloud sometimes helps a lot. Right.

Jack Kowalsky 7:06
Yeah. You know, I noticed I do that a lot when I'm working anyway, just kind of talk through things out loud. I don't know why I really should be writing some crazy idea. When I'm like writing code. I have to talk it out. That's funny.

Bjorn Forsberg 7:15
Oh, that's amazing. I prefer quiet. It's more boring like that.

Jack Kowalsky 7:20
I think I have attention issues. Like if I don't talk through it, like all of a sudden, like, why am I in the kitchen? I just wander off. Alright,

Bjorn Forsberg 7:27
okay. Yeah, I find walking is a good way to think about things. It's also a good way to talk when you're working. I've mentioned that before I meet up with a friend class, we try and do it at least once a month. And at the moment we walk around, there's a place called the Fredericksburg Gardens, which is this beautiful, sort of quite central in Copenhagen. And on one corner, there's the zoo, or one part of it's the zoo. And then it's a big sort of quite well kept gardens that you walk through with lots of big trees and stuff. But it's just a really good way to walk around and chat. And he also runs a bootstrap business. Yeah. And we've been doing it for a couple of years now. I think it's a really good way to get the creative thoughts going to walk and talk at the same time.

Jack Kowalsky 8:04
Yeah, I'm actually really excited. So this place we got in London. Right now we're in the middle of the city in Las Vegas. And the place we got in London is also in the middle of London, but it's attached to like a nice, like three acre park, literally walk out the back door, and you're in it. So yeah, I'm super excited about that. I think that'd be good. But did you ever do like a standing desk? Because I tried that. And I just was not glued to my computer, I would just wander off. So funny.

Bjorn Forsberg 8:28
Yeah, I've never been good at it. We had him at the Saxo Bank where I worked before, and my desk can go up. Right? It doesn't know, I'd much prefer to get up and walk away and do something different. And then come back. One of our COVID or corona purchases while being in lockdown was this massage chair. Very nice. So even though my back may not be super happy about sitting down so much, but I can go in and sit in that sometimes. That's cool. It's like the most extravagant one of these lockdown purchases. But it was definitely worth it. That's awesome. You know, in Shopify, they have like 15 days sort of payout periods. So the first of the 15th, and then the 16th to the end of the month, which is usually 15 days. If you look at the last two payouts, we've just finished the 15 I've broken my records, which is nice. Wow. Congratulations. It's awesome. Yeah, thank you. It's been happening. We break records quite often. At least it's growing. But this one was like a big round number in Danish Kroner, which is fun as well, which has been a long goal to hit that amount. So that's very a few things to celebrate, which is nice.

Jack Kowalsky 9:29
You know, I was thinking about that, too, just getting towards the end of the year. I mean, I only launched translate CI, six weeks ago, maybe, but I just hit $2,000 with it, which is not much. But it took me probably a year and three months to hit that with the Shopify app. So that's like really amazing.

Bjorn Forsberg 9:48
Yeah, that's a great start. And I think it's a long time ago since you know you're starting from scratch again, for sure. And the thought scares me so I think you're a brave man. It's always fun to see how they start out Anything you get traction and get somebody to pay for it just like $1, right? And all sudden people are paying you $2,000 or even $2,000 on that project is not too bad.

Jack Kowalsky 10:09
It is kind of crazy, because I remember just hitting $1,000 Mr. With the Shopify app, that was about a year, and it blew my mind that that was even I think, yeah, very

Bjorn Forsberg 10:19
interesting to look back, because I remember, I maybe remember those days more fondly than I should. Because it really did take a long time for sure. You know, a lot of people are asked for advice around Shopify apps, and my best advice is to give it time, as long as you're seeing some growth, then there's definitely give it time is the best.

Jack Kowalsky 10:37
Absolutely. You know, this is something I was thinking about. I was seeing this thing on Twitter, where I guess all these people are sort of doing this challenge to build a SaaS business and sell it on micro acquire in 30 days. And like, I'm kind of skeptical of that, like, it's cool. I don't know, I think micro acquires like an awesome platform. They've done some really cool stuff. I think, though, that sort of making it a goal to like, I'm just gonna build this thing and then sell it for $80,000. You know, get it up to $1,000 a month, celebrate. You have to just do that four times a year as my career. I don't know that part of it. As someone who's in it right now, that part of it kind of sucks. I can't imagine wanting to go through that. Just struggling to find traction, wondering if your ideas No, good. There's a lot of doubt in my head at this moment. But you got to work through.

Bjorn Forsberg 11:25
Yeah, I think building out the app and getting it launched and getting that initial traction is the hardest part. Absolutely. If you see if you've got $1,000 MRR, why would you sell it for? Okay, 80,000. It's a pretty good markup, right? But sure, then to try and do that multiple times a year. I think that's insane. It was like, yeah, why not? Hang on to it? Give it some more time. And you can maybe also game the numbers, right? How did you get your 1000? MRI? So I don't know. But I saw the tweet and thread on that as well. And I thought that's insane. Fair enough. Like if that's what you just absolutely love that part. And you hate the rest. Fair enough. But like you're saying, it seems like the goal is to sell it on micro acquire, instead of building a business.

Jack Kowalsky 12:05
Yeah, I guess for me, I like the building part. Like I get that it's fun to just sit and write code and be in a room for six months doing that, or whatever, three months, whatever. But that initial just flailing around trying to find marketing channels that work and you don't know is its marketing channel bad? Am I bad at this marketing channels at the problem? Like that whole thing? Just Oh, I can't imagine going through that multiple times a year?

Bjorn Forsberg 12:28
No, absolutely not. And I'm still lucky enough to have a app store that sends me a lot of traffic, and to go out and try and do that. Without that type of platform, I think would be even more daunting. Yeah, for sure. I had a call with our member mentioning it last week, or a couple of weeks ago, where I was going to speak with Vishesh. About the App Store marketing. He's sort of giving a presentation on Gumroad. You can book a session with him. And it was so valuable. We spend about an hour together or something. And it's $100. And it's probably the best $100 We've spent in a long time anyway. That sounds like a deal. Yeah, definitely. I think he should have his price on that. If you're listening, make it more expensive.

Jack Kowalsky 13:07
Now you got in for 100 raise the price.

Bjorn Forsberg 13:09
Yeah, in the fun part was we were like, okay, me and my wife, were both on the call afterwards, we had some other stuff planned. But then we just went, Hey, let's just try it out now and play around with it. And it's been super good. And just he goes over a lot of different things. And obviously, I'm not going to give away the whole thing here. So go out and book a time with him if you want. But I found that super valuable and were inspired by it. And were able to implement things quickly and easily, which have been really valuable. Especially like you're saying December's usually not the best month, sign up start going down as a seasonal thing. But we've so far been at least able to change that trend for December, which is pretty amazing. So Wow. Yeah, be interesting to see next year when traffic starts picking up back after the holidays and everything to see what happens, whether it's now or later, it was a really good way to look at how to market within the Shopify app store without being shady about it. Anything like that, which was really nice.

Jack Kowalsky 13:59
Right? I miss that app store. And actually, that's like one of my major goals for like maybe first quarter, hopefully, of 2022 is get into the GitHub marketplace.

Bjorn Forsberg 14:10
Yeah. Have you checked out what's required there?

Jack Kowalsky 14:13
Yeah. So the big thing is that you need 100 connected accounts to your application already before they look at it, which I don't

Bjorn Forsberg 14:20
have yet. So just like, oh, auth tokens, re similar to Shopify?

Jack Kowalsky 14:24
Yeah. So yeah, you basically got to get those 100 installs on your own, and then they'll look at your app. But the cool thing is they seem to have a ton of users, they do list install numbers, and they don't have that many apps on there. I didn't really see any apps that didn't have like a huge number of users listed. I don't know if those came from the App Store. And maybe they're doing a really good job marketing beforehand. But I think it's a good goal, because what I'm hoping is that kind of sets up for for traffic on translate CI, so even if I'm not actively promoting, it'll be getting some traffic.

Bjorn Forsberg 14:52
I think that's a good avenue to explore, right? Because it could become your sort of main driver and like you say, there's not a lot of apps in there and getting it Early can always be a super good boost.

Jack Kowalsky 15:02
Yeah, I was looking at one on there, though I thought it was such a smart idea. I think it was called Image bot, something like that. All this thing did was he connected to your GitHub repo and it just went through and ran your images through a compressor, basically. All right. Yeah. So smart. And like everyone use I saw Shopify uses, it just makes so much sense and charges five bucks or 10 bucks a month for it. And I'm sure he's got I mean, it looked like he had 10s and 10s of 1000s of installs.

Bjorn Forsberg 15:28
Wow. Things like that. It sounds so simple. Right. But it's amazing what you can build a business on? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that's always been surprising. I think once you understood how much is actually behind these app stores, and how much money you run through them?

Jack Kowalsky 15:43
Well, I always think it's interesting to like you have, and I guess your apps tend to be a little lower price too. And I tend to go for a higher price. But the nice thing is, when you see these apps that are like under $10. and stuff, it's a no brainer, if it saves you five minutes. So you got that marketing problem of getting it out there getting that number of people to know about it, but I feel like you have a much lower barrier to install, which is nice. Yeah, definitely

Bjorn Forsberg 16:04
selling to developers. I think it's always a bit difficult, though, right? Because you've always got the bad just build it myself. It's about people. But in the end, the amount of money time you'll save yourself by just installing something for five bucks, instead of spending hours building it yourself.

Jack Kowalsky 16:19
Yeah, definitely fall on that side. I think that changes when you're running a working business to write because I don't have time to build a newsletter system or something. Whereas before, I probably would have just tackled it on my own.

Bjorn Forsberg 16:30
Yeah. And I think it very much depends on what stage you're at. Right. But even I think in the beginning, if I was going to do something differently, it would be also to spend more to begin with, right instead of just saving it all up. And obviously right at the beginning, I was using it for development, but then there would have been smarter to invest more back into the business because it would have freed up my time to do more valuable things, right, like marketing and whatever else. So I think it's one of these bootstrap mentalities. I think were in the beginning, because you don't have a big pile of money, you're weary of spending money, you're trying to just get this thing off the ground, you may be living off the money as well. And as my business has grown, it's something I've had to sort of say to myself is, hey, no, don't spend time on it, or to get better at spending money to hiring freelancers to doing all these type of things. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, it takes a mentality change. Because it's been ingrained in the bootstrap mentality. I've had at least,

Jack Kowalsky 17:23
I've definitely had that there was quite a long period of time, where basically, aside from my basic posting expenses, and everything else, everything went in my pocket. And you know, it's about 85% margins. And really, if I just taken a little bit of that and thrown it back in, you know, I could have grown things quite a bit faster. Exactly.

Bjorn Forsberg 17:40
That's my exact same experience. And I guess the ones that do throw more back in will have a higher trajectory faster. I guess. It's snowballing.

Jack Kowalsky 17:48
Yeah. So it's kind of nice is with translate CI. Great. Now, obviously, I'm not making much money, but it's just all going back in. Yeah,

Bjorn Forsberg 17:55
that makes sense. I think, especially you're in the situation where you've got the time and possibilities to do that. Right. Right. Yeah. Sounds nice. Just before we jumped on this call Shopify, or at least I saw that they put this new listing live in the Shopify app store. So now they change the layout. They've got a big heading, your tagline. And then there's a big image or video if you want that. But we've gone for static images now and then removed all these benefit images, made the screenshots more visible at the top, actually quite like the designers is nice and friendly and well laid out.

Jack Kowalsky 18:26
Yeah, like, I'm huge on the video. That's like my favorite tool for selling. So I love that they made that bigger.

Bjorn Forsberg 18:32
Yeah, I like that. There's a big sort of hero style thing at the top right, whether it's an image or a video,

Jack Kowalsky 18:38
yeah, I'm pulling up one with a image right now, I haven't actually seen that,

Bjorn Forsberg 18:41
it's going to be interesting, we sort of spent some time on it, we got seven days, notice that this change was coming. So we wanted to sort of get something up. But we didn't want to spend or we couldn't spend too much time on it. And we've got a few apps doing each. But we had a good direction. My wife made these images. And we had a really nice brand restyled, and we had new screenshots from recently. So we could use that similar style on these your own images. We don't want to spend too much time on this because we also want to see what others are doing. And to sort of measure how much text are people putting in it? How big are they actually going to be? How visible is that on a mobile? Well, that's type of thing. So yeah, it's been fun to do graphic work, but a bit stressful when you don't know how it's going to be displayed in the end.

Jack Kowalsky 19:20
Yeah, that's crazy. The only thing I wonder, like I'm looking at this is, so they took out the images for the benefits, I almost wonder if it makes sense to change some of that text to actually maybe highlight the features a little more, because I can see if you're really just going after the benefits, like they try to tell you, you can kind of see everything above the fold here and maybe not know what the app actually does.

Bjorn Forsberg 19:44
Yeah. And I think especially with the tagline being limited to the characters that it has, if the timeline was a bit longer, maybe you could get a quicker impression. Yeah, yeah, but you're right, the benefits are going to be even more important than they were before. Especially we need to have visuals to sort Backing up at the same time, right? Yeah, I'll overall I like it except at the bottom app similar to, and then they've got four apps listed there. That's brutal. That is brutal. I'm wondering whether they show up on ads. So if I pay for a click

Jack Kowalsky 20:14
through to my Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah,

Bjorn Forsberg 20:16
they do. At least I guess I'll be showing up on other people's apps.

Jack Kowalsky 20:21
That's true. But I'd say what I don't like just kind of clicking on a few random apps. It's like, I click on a paid app without a free plan. And I scroll to the bottom and every app on there, and I've clicked on maybe four or five listings, they all list just free apps.

Bjorn Forsberg 20:34
Yeah. Free plan available is what I'm saying as well. Yeah.

Jack Kowalsky 20:37
I don't know about that. You could spend your whole page convincing someone that they need at least this solution, and then go Oh, but there's four free apps here that do it. Yeah.

Bjorn Forsberg 20:47
And there's no final call to action at the bottom of the page, except to jump to other solutions, right. So you can view all reviews, or you can go elsewhere. That's a good point. There's also no install button with a free to install. Oh, interesting. Yeah. With the pricing, you'd expect there some call to action there. Anyway, I guess we people are getting a stream of our thoughts as we go this for the first time. But visually, it's nice. I like the layout and everything. But as far as a converting landing page goes, and I'm sure they have a lot more data than we do. I don't know, I would like them to at least promote my app at the bottom one more time before put next to it, like have my app listed as the first one, right? Yeah, this is the app you're on. So you can at least see number of reviews and so forth next to it. So you're sort of doing more of a comparison than just a he has more stuff. The

Jack Kowalsky 21:33
only thing I wonder is, I would be willing to bet that not a lot of people scroll that far down on the page to see the competitors. Yeah, it doesn't look like the surface parameters. They add to the URL list that it was on a comparison page. It just says search. So hopefully they fix that. So you can actually see, are you getting traffic from that comparison? Or Yeah, right.

Bjorn Forsberg 21:55
That makes sense. I'm hovering over some on one of my pages. And it says surface intro position one.

Jack Kowalsky 22:01
Oh, okay. I do see that. But isn't where it says I could be wrong. But surface types. I were really diving into this. But where's the surface type equals search? Isn't that what it actually is? After you search a page? Because I think has an interposition. Based on your search,

Bjorn Forsberg 22:13
I've just browsed and click through. So I didn't use a search for this one. There's a lot to go through there. Yeah. Only time will tell if it actually good, bad. Average. Who knows? Yeah, it's

Jack Kowalsky 22:23
interesting stuff. I will say like, I do like the fact that Shopify is just constantly working on improving their platform, even if we don't always understand the changes, like it's actually cool to see, like a platform just evolving all the time. Yeah,

Bjorn Forsberg 22:36
I guess there's life in it. I would say, I'd prefer that the experimentation was done elsewhere. I think it's cool that they do it. And of course, they should do it. But since they have started running these tests, at least my traffic has gone down. It's harder to find by browsing, find my apps. The subcategories didn't help. So yeah, I'm sure the installs are going somewhere, right. And on some apps, it's gone. Okay. Other apps. It's like it's down. But it just makes you spend more on ads. In my view, I think experimentation and you come from an AV testing style. Maybe you look at it slightly differently to me. Yeah. I never mind an A B test. Yeah, that's it. And I guess they've got tons of traffic. Right. So it must be a fun challenge to work on. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I'm not sure if I have that much more for this week. Yeah. What have I been up to? I've been doing the marketing stuff. And well, I guess one thing I wanted to say on that marketing, I've spent so much time in the weeds building out, and how would you say doing like maintenance on my apps, paying down technical debt building advocate, and so forth. So now that we've started doing more marketing, it kind of feels nice that we're pushing, even though the apps themselves are not standing still, but they're in maintenance being cleaned up, and so forth. So there's not a lot of things that people see outside. But at the same time, as we're doing that, it feels really nice to see the business moving forward on the marketing side of things instead, especially when we had the call regarding the app store optimization and stuff. It's been a really nice sort of distraction from having my head in the code all the time.

Jack Kowalsky 23:58
Yeah, that's really cool. Have you ever tried to do like a conscious division of your time, like, I'm going to spend, you know, Monday, Tuesday coding and Wednesday, Thursday, marketing or whatever?

Bjorn Forsberg 24:07
Yeah. And I'm pretty good at it. I've gotten better at the start of my week. So Monday is is catch up and meetings with developers and stuff. It's more like, hey, get ready for the week, plan it out and everything else catch up on emails over the weekend, and so forth. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday is when I'm trying to do sort of my focus work. And then Friday is also one of these. Okay, how can I clean up any things that are hanging around so I can go into the weekend with a nice fresh feeling so anything

Jack Kowalsky 24:37
nice, that makes sense. I've always tried that it just I don't know for some reason doesn't work for me either the most ridiculous system for all this now that is working for me for like a year. So I'm just gonna keep doing it as I just keep a stupid long to do list of everything of roughly equal importance, and I literally go to random.org and get a random number and do that thing on my list. And I've been doing that for like a year and it works.

Bjorn Forsberg 25:00
That's amazing. I've never heard of that before.

Jack Kowalsky 25:03
I mean it after I should write a book. Yeah, exactly.

Bjorn Forsberg 25:05
randomizing your to dues? Yeah, I guess it has to be sort of, like you say, around the same importance, right priority.

Jack Kowalsky 25:12
Yeah. Sometimes something jumps to the top of the list or whatever. But yeah, for the most part, if nothing's pressing, that's how I do it.

Bjorn Forsberg 25:18
You gotta buy a dartboard or something. Yeah, that's a good idea. Which number? Is it today, I guess the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for me where I say focused work. Now, before I was trying to say, right, Tuesday will be development, Wednesday will also be development. And then Thursday will be marketing, and then to map it out per day. But that doesn't really fit with how work turns up most of the time, right? All of a sudden, hey, you've got to create these images, or whatever the task may be. It's not always so easy to wait. So instead, I'd say okay, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays, like for focus work, where I'm going to take a task, and I'm going to try and get it done that day. And that's my one main thing for the day.

Jack Kowalsky 25:54
That was a big thing, I think kind of took a while to mentally get to, but my desire to work on development and marketing is around equal. So I just kind of do whichever one I feel like or whichever one the random number decides I should do. And that kind of works. Definitely before I would have just done 90% Dev and 10% marketing if I had my way. Yeah.

Bjorn Forsberg 26:13
And I think that's how I've always, not always, but most of the time been like that as well. But I think like you say you enjoy them equally now. And I'm getting towards that. I think it's what do I feel I'm good at marketing has never been something I've always felt that I'm super good at. But I think it helps when I get simpler things. Marketing can mean so many things can be really hard to put it down into Okay, what am I actually doing? When I say I'm doing marketing?

Jack Kowalsky 26:37
For sure. Yeah, it's tough. I think the thing I enjoy about marketing sometimes at least is just that it's usually I'm definitely a lot more uncomfortable with it. So a lot of times marketing is going to be reaching out to a stranger, I don't know or whatever. You know what I mean? And it's like, wow, adds a little excitement to my day, I

Bjorn Forsberg 26:53
guess. Yeah, sure. gets you out of your comfort zone. Yeah. Should we leave it there? Yeah, let's do it. Alright, cool, man. We'll talk in two weeks and Yeah, what's up make it I guess Christmas is coming up. Yeah. But yeah, let's aim for two weeks.

Jack Kowalsky 27:06
We'll figure it out. Yeah, exactly. Sounds good.

Bjorn Forsberg 27:08
Take care. Easy. See ya.

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