One full week into 2025.

How are your resolution and/or new systems looking?

A good start for me with only one really time consuming mistake this week, but otherwise, lots of progress.

For this week:

• New Schedule

• Don’t Use mailto:

• Free Websites

• Big and Small Cycles

• Relative Value

New Schedule

Last week GPT roughed out a time blocked schedule for me to follow on my path to the investor life, and it worked surprisingly well!

Turns out I was wasting so much time during the day.

I didn’t follow the blocks exactly, but I did start at 9:15 every morning which was a big help, then had about 4 hours of focused work, then a workout, then bonus work time some evenings but not everyday.

When I was only planning for minimum 2 hours per day, I found myself being too flexible with my time, usually not getting started on any work until at least 10:30 am or later.

This did not combine well with all the podcast listening I’ve been doing where one of the most common suggestions for living longer is to prioritize sleep.

Naturally I took that to mean I should just sleep in as long as I wanted, especially if I had worked out the day before - got to fully recover those muscles!

Basically I was in a pretty ineffective pattern, and this new schedule has been immensely helpful.

Not only that, but I enjoy it.

It’s amazing how I look forward to a “work schedule” when it’s things I actually want to work on.

Jocko Willink has a great quote (and book title) that sums it up nicely:

Discipline equals freedom

Sticking with this routine will be key to getting to where I want to go but luckily, since I enjoy it, consistency shouldn’t be too difficult.

Don’t Use mailto:

Web technology has passed me by and it caused a very long headache earlier this week.

I needed to get a new website up and running, but nothing fancy, just a landing page.

This time I decided I’d keep it simple and cheap.

I could spend hours crafting the perfect Webflow landing page which I enjoy doing, but instead, I gave GPT a few attempts to generate something I liked using plain old HTML and CSS.

The landing page included a contact form, so I needed some way to handle a form submit without a backend attached so I threw mailto: into the form as a temporary but “good enough” solution.

Once I had those 2 static files ready, I decided to use Netlify’s Drop feature which is perfect for hosting a static landing page - literally drag and drop your files and you’ve got a live page.

But when I updated the page to use a custom domain, I kept getting a warning about an insecure connection.

I thought maybe something was wrong with how I was redirecting the domain from Namecheap to Netlify so I decided to try GitHub pages instead, another free page hosting option.

Same result once the new DNS change propagated, so I bought an SSL certificate and set it up for the domain, but still the same issue once I could verify the cert was live.

I then changed the domain to be handled through Cloudflare instead, since they typically managed most security functionality automatically, but still the same warning after migrating to their nameservers.

In one last desperate attempt, I switched to Cloudflare’s page hosting instead (which I then learned they just use GitHub pages too) but still the same warning.

Losing my mind, I was chatting with perplexity and GPT this whole time but it kept suggesting that something was wrong with the DNS and I needed to let it propagate for the full 24-48 hours, so I decided to sleep and see if that helped.

The next day I woke up to the same issue, unsurprised.

I’ve never seen a DNS issue really take longer than 15 minutes to propagate so I highly doubted 24 hours would help.

At this point, I was beginning to seriously doubt there was anything wrong on the network side of things, which meant it had to be on the code side.

Finally, I remembered that I had put mailto: in the contact form as a workaround for form submissions.

I simply removed just those characters “mailto:” from the HTML, pushed the change live in a few seconds thanks to the magic of static page hosting, and of course - the warning about an insecure connection was gone.

A lot to unpack here.

We’ll skip the “it can’t be my code” knee-jerk reaction most developers have, and the fact that DNS and domain handling are blackbox magic, and go straight to the fact that no one uses “mailto:” on website anymore, so much so that it flags a security risk in Chrome if you don’t use it properly.

I might have not been using it correctly either, which was part of the problem, but it’s an old school, less than ideal user experience that would force someone to open their email handler and send an email rather than enter their info into the page and click Submit.

So lesson learned.

Probably better to avoid mailto: all together.

Free Websites

Despite massive frustration trying to solve the really dumb mistake mentioned above, I did have positive experiences with a few free website hosting solutions.

I’m really impressed at the number of ways to get a website live and hosted for free.

The only thing you have to pay for is the domain, which if you’re not trying to get a super short or super trendy domain, could cost about $12 per year.

If you don’t need a custom domain, and just need a website, there’s any number of solutions to host a page with your own code.

• Netlify

• GitHub Pages

• Cloudflare Pages

And Vercel if you’re hosting a React-based page.

With some creativity, you could build an impressive custom landing page and host it for free (assuming it’s basically display only and doesn’t get a ton of traffic) on any one of those sources.

But that freedom comes at the cost of what I outlined above.

Managed solutions like Wordpress or any number of built in webpage builders out there will handle the hosting for you, preventing most issues, but also severely limiting customizability.

Webflow may be one of the best fully featured website builders that actually has a free-tier, so there you could create a visually stunning landing page for free, but as soon as you want to add your own domain, it will cost you $30 per month.

It’s an interesting balance.

With free pages, you assume responsibility; with paid pages, you sacrifice customizability.

Like anything, it just depends on the situation.

Right now I’m quite happy with my free page, even though it cost an entire day of troubleshooting to get there.

I’d highly recommend giving one of the free hosting services a try.

Big and Small Cycles

It’s funny that I’m back to where I was nearly two years ago.

I started down the path of researching Automation Agencies before I fell for the allure of “design” instead.

At the time, the big trend with automation agencies was chatbots, at least that’s what was all over YouTube, and I was having a hard time feeling inspired by that, despite the fact I was using ChatGPT regularly.

Recently it seems automation content has really branched out into more interesting and robust ideas than just chatbots, which has probably helped bring the idea back around for me.

I had played around with Make.com and Zapier.com but I wasn’t exactly sure what to build, and only after diving in this last week, I’ve started to get an idea of what automations to offer from a business perspective, especially as I’ve dipped my toes into operating a few businesses.

Now that I’ve gone off and tried to custom build a few different ideas, platforms and services, putting weeks and months into something with 0 feedback, I am coming back around to the value that something like a No-Code tool can provide, much similar to the free webpages mentioned above.

Hosted solutions are tested and pre-authorized to a ton of other platforms and services which makes it much easier to get something up and running and in front of users quickly and reliably.

Automate, use other tools, then build custom later once there’s a demand for something specific, or the automation stops scaling.

Feedback and iteration, then custom build.

One big year long cycle to find out I just need much smaller cycles.

Relative Value

Diving deeper into the world of business automations has reinforced the difference in perspectives on value.

It’s one thing to know something but a different thing to experience it.

Engineers typically value engineering things.

Writing code, unit tests, scalable architecture, fixing tech debt, and any other number of things we find important that the business doesn’t understand or prioritize.

But being on the other side, the business side, it’s much clearer what’s valuable in terms of operating the company if your timeframe is small.

The company needs to pay bills and salaries so it needs to make sure enough money comes in by the end of the month.

Unit tests typically don’t make a ton of money, although they can save a ton of money.

And good ideas and good intentions are great, but they can’t pay someone’s salary.

The other problem here, though can be the shortsightedness.

If you’re constantly worried about next month or next quarter, it can lead to only focusing on quick wins.

This activity is making money now so keep doing it, but it’s taking the same amount of time every month to do it.

It’s not scalable.

But it needs to continue until there’s another source of income.

A tricky balance.

Right now I’m at the revenue generating end of the scale and now appreciating the idea of income producing activities.

Finding and closing leads brings money into the business so that is the most valuable activity to spend the most time on.

Then, when there’s enough money reliably coming in, it’s time to build more scalable approaches that take longer to become valuable but ideally produce more value in the long run.

For now, it’s automations that help the business operate smoothly and find more business.

Anxious to share more once I get things working.

And that’s it for this week! Getting serious about automating businesses this week despite some free web hosting hiccups.

Those are the links and ideas that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I worked on.

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