Redesigns, Slowmads, and Laziness

The Weekly Variable

The Weekly Variable

Progress! Social media both failed me and was a huge success for me this week in my pursuit of clients. And of course, there were plenty of podcasts and videos for other ideas to distract from the main goal of getting a client. Here’s the breakdown:

  • divs.marketing

  • Webflow Course

  • The Slomad Life

  • The Pursuit of Laziness

  • Wikipedia Redesigned

divs.marketing

First client is in the books! I was expecting to find a client through social media but not LinkedIn for some reason.

I thought my genius tactic of advertising free development via a waitlist on Facebook would leave me overwhelmed with requests, but my ad campaign was exactly 0% successful.

With 5,299 impressions, 33 clicks, Click Through Rate of .68% and 0 actual form submissions, there is plenty of room for improvement in my advertising game. But I spent less than 10 minutes creating that ad, doing a quick GPT-inspired post on Facebook, a slapped together image in Canva, and only spent $5 a day in budget. The results should not have been surprising.

Instead, my post on LinkedIn from last week was way more successful and free.

Over 4000 impressions, 60 reactions, 20 comments, and 1 client referral! I did probably spend 30+ minutes writing and revising that post out of nerves more than anything, and I’m sure there’s plenty wrong with it as well, but it was no cost and is blowing past the paid ad campaign on Facebook in terms of performance.

Maybe people are right about the opportunity to grow on LinkedIn…

With that, the April Deep30 is a success! I aimed to get one client and now I can say, mission accomplished! They’re not a paying client yet, but paying client wasn’t part of the goal so it still counts. Time to get to work and earn some referrals!

Webflow Course

I talk about Webflow quite a bit on here, it’s the heart of divs.design and the source for jaypeters.dev but now’s your chance to learn it yourself!

A friend of mine (thanks molson!) sent a link this week to FreeCodeCamp.org’s new Webflow course. In less than 2 hours, you can starting designing your own professional websites with no code! Although the user interface is a little overwhelming because there are a ton of settings to represent all of the code.

Once you get the hang of working with the tool, you can build beautiful and complicated sites in a surprisingly short amount of time. If I’ve sold you on learning Webflow, this is a great resource to get started.

I’m planning to create my own videos about it and my process specifically as well, but I’d be happy to answer any questions in the meantime if you do want to get started. Check it out below:

The Slowmad Life

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) is one of the pioneers of the indie hacking, building in public, digital nomad life style. He operates a number of profitable apps and websites by himself, all from his laptop, while he lives in locations all over the world.

He grew a following because he was one of the early adopters of the laptop life, figuring out how to build apps quickly that solve problems for his customers, make enough money to pay for food and rent, and talk publicly and openly about what he built and how much he makes.

In this My First Million podcast Pieter goes into more detail about how he got started, some of his more successful apps, and some ideas for new ones, but I liked his term for his current lifestyle of “slomad”.

He still moves around regularly, but he’s at a location for a few months rather than every week or few days. It’s easier to book a place for a month or more at a time and settle in for an extended stay rather than constantly traveling a few times a month.

Not sure it’s the lifestyle I would prefer but fascinating none the less, and slomad is a great term to describe it. More about it below:

The Pursuit of Laziness

Continuing the My First Million trend, Sam and Shaan interviewed Jeremy Giffon who’s an investor for Tiny, a holding company that buys and maintains a portfolio of successful businesses, similar to Alex Hormozi’s acquisition.com.

Jeremy is a super sharp investor, and in this podcast, he talks about his experience working with the founder of Tiny, Andrew Wilkinson (who’s also been on MFM recently and is part of this ever growing podcast map I need to build…) and some of the deals and business opportunities they’ve experienced.

He talks about his appreciation for the elegance in finding a good deal and completing it in the least amount of moves. Shaan phrases it beautifully as “how can I be lazy and win the most”, but really it’s just a form of efficiency and working with your strengths. Something might seem like a lot of work to one person, but to another person it’s fun or it doesn’t take very much energy.

On the other side, someone might end up being lazy because they’re working on something they aren’t interested in. There isn’t much intrinsic motivation to work on whatever that is so their energy shifts into staying focused, or worse, avoiding the work. It looks like laziness because they’re not doing the thing, but really it’s just misaligned interest.

Find your way to be lazy and win.

There’s even more in this conversation I’d love to dive into, like the opportunity of “Distressed Ventures” but this is getting a little long-winded. You can listen to the full thing here:

Wikipedia Redesigned

This last one is more visually entertaining. After going through Juxtopposed’s UI crash course, I’ve caught a few other videos from the channel, and I’ve been using realtimecolors.com as a key component to the website building process.

In this video Jux redesigns everyone’s favorite free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org. It has basically looked the same for more than a decade now so it’s time for an upgrade. This is just a proposed concept of course, but fascinating none-the-less to see what exactly makes the site feel out of date, and some subtle but solid ways to improve it.

And it’s less than 12 minutes! Enjoy the redesign process here:

And that’s it for this week! A lucky client acquisition, redesigns, the slowmad life, and the opportunity of laziness.

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

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