Shash7

^Free Animal By Foreign Air | I was gonna link their video but it was hyper edgy so I decided to go with JohnnyFPV's version.

September was a pretty good month, with a lot of actionable stuff taking place.

• Actually went to The MCG and tried to sell digital artwork!(See my insta for more details)
• Contracting is back in action! Started working just like the good 'ol times. I'm really happy about this right now.
• Gave a talk at Melbjs which was pretty good. Still need to work on my delivery.
• Started wakeupbefore8 to keep me accountable to start my day early.
• (Almost) started selling on Etsy.

This month will be focused on a few mini-goals.

• Get fat - 80kgs to be precise. If I don't push myself this month, my fitness goal will be severely delayed. Currently I'm 74kgs.
• Do more growth hacks and validate ideas quickly.
• Start an etsy/shopify store and start selling canvas artworks. Even if I don't make any money, that's fine. I just need to setup the store and kick the marketing engine in gear.

Alright, let's rock and roll.

Before I go off on my monthly rant, there are only 2 simple goals I have in mind. 1) Get in the best shape possible by feb next year. 2) Start a business and start earning money before the end of this year.

The outcome of the first goal will be a professional photoshoot. For the business goal, it will be earning money, even if its $1.

Alright lets get on to last month's report.

redditwallpapers.com got really popular with the Reddit crowd last month. I posted on various subreddits and I didn't expect this much traffic from reddit. The traffic surge made my free Cloudinary credits overflow. Surprisingly, the Nuxtjs server kept happily chugging along without any issues.

Still thinking what next to do with redditwallpapers. Its more than a toy to me at the moment. I think there's a lot of potential with that site.

Other than that, I'm still working out the canvas stuff. Generating high resolution images programmatically from Maptiler tiles is really hard. This is probably the most technically challenging stuff I've ever done.

After not actively working on wpplugincheck.com the official strat is to throw stuff on the wall and see if something sticks. Within 3 weeks I've started australianskitrips.com ecommwatch.com plus I'm validating a few ideas on the side.

This is what I learnt in the last few years:

• Before starting anything, validate the idea. See if there's money to be made.
• My marketing techniques suck, I really need to get in front of people instead of trying to spam forums, blogs, etc.
• Validate quickly and ruthlessly.

With that doctrine in place, I started australianskitrips.com with a focus on physical marketing. There's no grand business strategy behind this but the idea was to get out of my rut and start making something.

ecommwatch.com is me taking another stab at affiliate marketing. Again, there's no grand business strategy here(does affiliate businesses even have any kind of deep strategies even?) but the idea is to push forward internet based marketing techniques.

As for the third idea, I'm not sure if it will ever work. The basic idea is to sell photo canvases, ideally of digital art. Currently I'm sussing out a cheap art stall at a gallery or something in Melbourne.

After a gruelling 2018 when I was working 7 day weeks and had zero to no social life, 2019 started with a bang then a thud. My PR application kept getting delayed and the dates kept slipping.

But now in mid 2019, I have my own office space, I am in the best shape of my life so far and the PR application is nearly done. From now on things are going to get better. What better to do then to kickstart this blog.

From now on, I'll be posting monthly updates on my projects. This will help me keep account of my progress so far.
One day I hope to read these blog posts and see how far I've gone.

Until then, its time to hustle.

Recently I embarked on a new revision of my tumblr theme. This one has more specific css geared towards individual pages.

However I discovered that tumblr has been injecting ~1.5mbs of crap scripts. Yeah that’s right - and you have no control over it. Not only that but I have been using the tumblr dashboard since the last three years and there has been no change it the developer tools, or theme tags.

Yessir we’re all using the same tools to develop and design tumblr themes since pre 2014. This sucks.
And so the executive decision has been made. I am moving my blog away from tumblr and on to wordpress.

There are couple of good reasons for this:

• More control over the website
• Excellent SEO tools and plugins from the wp community
• No more crap scripts and shit getting in the way
• More control over how content is served
• And much more..

Having said that I’ll miss tumblr’s dashboard.