Working Full-Time For 6 Months on my HR Training Products Business (Execution Thread)

[Beijing]

Background

Last Friday was my last day at my corporate management job. In the previous three and a half years I worked two different jobs (for about 20-22 months each) that significantly expanded my professional experience, got my student loans paid off, and allowed me to save up enough money for a 6-12 month runway on living expenses. For the backstory on some of my experiences over the last number of years, have a look at my previous thread, Taking a Ride in the Slow Lane.

Over the past 5 years, I slowly built a corporate training product, conducted target-buyer sales testing and got the product within 2 months of completion as of May of these year.

The product is a professionalized version of a gamified training system I used previously as a freelance corporate trainer. I spent two and a half years developing it to fit the needs of my clients. What I intend to sell is an expanded system with more content, development levels, and a range of flexible options to fit a wider range of trainer/client needs. It provides a naturally engaging alternative to the normally boring training methods used for a common area of professional development training routinely provided by many corporations' HR departments.

I created the product to solve several pain-points I was experiencing as a corporate trainer. During the professionalization process, I also added a number of features designed to solve a short list of additional pain-points that I encountered while managing a large team of corporate trainers at my most recent day job.

Plan

Having concluded my last day at my day job one week ago, my plan is to spend the next six months finishing the product, launching my sales website, and building a marketing engine.

I'll be doing this while living and travelling within southeast Asia. Last weekend, I packed up, sold or gave away everything I owned and left Beijing (where I've lived as an expatriate for nearly a decade). Since my product is a digital product that will be sold & distributed exclusively online, I'm not tied down to a specific location and I am free to work on it from anywhere, so I'll be living and working out of hotel rooms / AirBNBs in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.

I have a history to doing this in the past and have not had any trouble with travel being a distraction from the work I needed to do. I don't make for a very good tourist. I prefer to be working when I travel, and just work a normal 5 day week and then go out evenings and weekends to socialize. Museums and temples don't interest me.

Goals

I'm comfortable with the idea of job hunting again if I don't achieve a certain level of revenue/profit after six months. Although I am shooting for as much revenue/profit as possible during this six month period, immediate business success is not a goal. I think that it would be unhealthy to create that expectation in my mind at this point, since I have no idea what level of sales is realistic for my product (which is the first of its kind, so there is no good data on what I could reasonable set as revenue/profit goal). Even if the product is ultimately successful, it could very well be a three year project to fully achieve product-market fit.

Rather, I have two primary objectives:

• Product Development Phase: finish the MVP and make it available to customers on a sales website (first two months)
• Marketing Phase: experiment with marketing methods and identify at least one that produces more than 1 dollar of profit for each dollar spent on marketing (last four months)

My main reason for taking a period of time off of working a day-job is that it would take me one to two years of working weekends and evenings to achieve the two goals listed above. I'm not willing to wait that long to achieve these goals, so since I was ready for a job change anyway and I have sufficient savings to cover my living expenses for 6-12 months, I've made the decision to spend 6 months achieving the above two goals before re-evaluating and deciding whether it makes the most sense to continue to working on my business full-time or to take another day job and continue developing my business in my free time (which will probably be much easier to do with those two goals already completed).

Additionally, I have a few secondary objectives:

• Gain some customers/users who can be a source of feedback on how to further improve the product to solve pain-points that I am not yet aware of, as well as provide feedback on how effectively I have solved the pain-points that I have already attempted to respond to with the first version of the product
• Become aware of some of some potential options for pivoting down the road if my current product proves to not to be successful enough to building a business around
• Developing marketing and sales skills and experience to further expand my options if I do return to slow lane work for a period of time in the future

Process & Productivity Strategies

I first intend to spend 5-8 hours per day (five days per week) for the next two months to finish the product and the sales website. For the creative task required for the product development I am doing, I work best with this type of schedule, optimizing for consistent progress, rather than placing pressure on myself to squeeze as much as possible out of individual days. ADHD is an aspect of who I am, so I've learned that I am most effective when I don't beat myself up about not being able to work productive ten-hour days seven days a week even if some people are able to, and instead focus on doing my best work each day until my ability to concentrate is exhausted, regardless of whether it is a one-hour day or a 9-hour marathon.

As I already become competent at doing when working on my product on weekends and evening before quitting my job, each day I'll focus on the most important/logical task to complete that will get the product finished as quickly/efficiently as possible.

Once the product is finished and the sales website is up with a functioning payment processor, my focus will shift to a second phase: marketing and sales. My work at this stage will include the following:

• Reaching out to established Youtube content creators in my niche and negotiating profit sharing promotions
• Recording and editing product demonstration videos for my own company Youtube channel
• Writing posts for SEO blogs to drive traffic to my product website
• Reaching out to potential customers who submit their email on my website to collect data and develop a stronger insight on how my marketing approach could be modified to result in more sales
• Experimenting with Google ads/Facebook ads/other paid ads
• Contact businesses with parallel products to propose marketing collaborations

Working on marketing and sales related tasks will be a new experience for me, so I'll have to experiment with how I work best for this type of work.

Althought I definitely believe that my approach to not giving myself pressure to work a subjectively chosen number of hours each day while doing creative tasks has been optimal (and instead allowing when I have creative energy and the ability to focus productively to dictate when and how much I work), I am anticipating that I will need to be open to a different approach when I shift into the Marketing Phase of my six month plan.

The nature of product development when working on a product that requires the development of innovation solutions is that a lot of the productivity is based on solving problems. Working more time often result in solving problems slower, not faster, or in making regrettable mistakes that require a lot of time to go back and fix.

However, most of the tasks I'll need to complete during the Market Phase of my plan will not require problem solving, but instead be about producing a certain amount of items of content. Therefore, I anticipate setting output goals, like a certain number of blog posts each week, completing one product demo video for YT each week, etc. I'll need to experiment to determine what works best for me for achieving the best productivity, but I'm comfortable with the idea of it being a grind that will involve learning to push myself beyond my normal stopping point when doing mentally demanding creative/problem solving tasks.

I anticipate that I will find some of these marketing content creation tasks more demanding. For example, editing product demo videos for YT my be a mentally draining tasks that I can only do so much of each week. Therefore, I'll need to identify which other useful tasks are best to switch to when I've exhausted my ability to focus productively on a more demanding task.

Accountability & Productivity Tracking

To retain some privacy I won't post specific weekly tasks within this thread, as I don't want to give away too many details about my business and product. However, I'll share what I can about my general product development progress each week.

For accountability, once I shift to the Marketing Phase of my plan, I'll post my marketing content creation goals each week on Monday and share a progress update each Friday about how much work I completed and provide some reflection on how realistic my goals for that week were, as well as some commentary on how I might adjust my future goals and the strategies I might experiment with the next week for increased productivity.

 

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[Beijing]

Week One Goals:

Priority number one is finishing up a component set with 1440 individual scenarios cards for the challenges training participants can encounter will participating in a gamified training experience overseen by a product buyer/user during a corporate training event. The large number of individual scenarios is because (a) my product is designed to support a series of training events and therefore has four development levels and (b) the product is designed to offer training functions for a wide variety of job types. I wrote all of the scenarios over about a two year period back when I was working as a freelancer to meet the varied needs of my clients, so the content is already complete. Right now I am just in the process of moving that content to printable and digitally viewable cards that utilize the card design I've slowly improved on over the last five years.

I finished an earlier version back in December, but after testing out that version, I discovered a number of problems with finding specific scenarios that would suit a trainer's needs and sorting the scenarios after a training session, so I developed some new features to solve those issues back in March and April and am now just in the process of updating all the scenario cards to include those features. At this point, getting the scenario cards into a finished, product ready format just requires that I complete a set of graphic design tasks, but I'll also need to do some rigorous testing once I'm finished updating all the scenario cards, just to make sure that all the organizing/sorting features work as intended.

Updating all the scenario cards may take one to three weeks, so that's the task I'm going to focus all my working time on this week. It'll be much easy to do the other remaining product development tasks (without making mistakes that will need to be corrected) once these cards are finished, so all other tasks are things I can wait on until the scenario cards are completed.

 

[Beijing]

I'm posting my goals for this week today on Tuesday, as I'm in Canada right now and took Monday off to spend some time with relatives for Canada Day.

Week Two Goals:

This week's main goal is a continuation of last week's goal. I'm continuing work on the scenario cards, with the initial priority on a particularly complex feature that I want to get right BEFORE I update all the cards to avoid be unsatisfied with the finished look.

However, finishing this important and complex feature is a process best focused on for an hour or two per day, rather than 8 hours straight, so I'm starting each morning by working on the feature in question until I feel "creatively stuck" and then I will be moving on to other secondary tasks that also need to be done anyway to continue to be productive for the rest of my working hours.

I am setting a goal of finishing a minimum of five activity description sets this week during my secondary task time. This is a pretty low bar, as I anticipate having time to do several more than this, but I'm starting a goal of finishing five just to ensure that I have something specific to work towards and then based on how long it takes to do the first five, I'll come up with a more competitive goal for how many more I intend to do by the end of this work week. However, even if I only ended up completing five of the activity description sets by the end of the week, that would still be meaningful progress.

To compensate for taking Monday off, I plan to work Tuesday to Saturday this week to get five full workdays in.

Week One Progress Report:

I am happy with my productivity and effort during Week One. As I'm in Canada seeing family for the first time since 2019, I took off Thursday to spend some time with my sister and her family, but compensated by working on Saturday, and therefore reached my goal of working a five day week.

Product development productivity at this point is hard to measure, as I'm working on creative tasks for which it is impossible to predict the number of hours required to finish each task, so I measure my level of effort based on whether I kept going each day until I used up all of my ability to focus. I definitely achieved that goal all five work days during Week One.

 

[Beijing]

Week Three Goals:

This week is more of the same. I'm making steady progress with the work I am doing, so I am just sticking with the same routine. Although there's a lot of work still to do, the progress I've made the last two weeks are giving making having a finished product seem very real and achievable, so I feel like I'm in an ideal rhythm.

I'm going to shoot for finishing 4.5 activity descriptions this week, in addition to spending some time each day experimenting with my primary task. It's becoming clear that the primary task might be something I need to just play with for as long as necessary when I feel like doing so, since it's a creative task for which progress is dependent on having momentary flashes of inspiration, which is not something that can be scheduled or forced.

Week Two Progress Report:

My goal was to work 5 days last week, but I was invited to my sister's place to spend some time with her and some of my nephews and nieces on Saturday. Since seeing family is a priority during my six weeks in Canada, I decided to visit them on Saturday instead of a work day.

Otherwise, productivity was good for last week. I did struggle a bit with transitioning from just focusing on one task area into two (it took a bit to switch gears mentally), but by Friday I had a really good rhythm going and was pretty happy with my results.

I didn't reach my goal of completing five activity descriptions, as the work ended up being more involved that expected (a lot of extra graphic design work that I was not anticipating to modify some public domain images), but I was still really happy with the progress I made. If I'm able to be similarly productive most days this current week as I was last Friday, I'll have quite a bit done by the end of this week. I did two and a half activity descriptions last week and although I'd like to pick up the pace a bit, if I got an equivalent amount of work done every week, I wouldn't beat myself up about it, as it's solid progress and will get me to my goal within an acceptable timeframe, based on how much money I have budgeted for life expenses while I'm not earning an income.

Observations About Family Reactions

With one major exception, the people in my family who have concerns about my plan for the next six months have been extremely polite and even subtle about voicing their thoughts. The one exception is my brother, who about a year and a half ago, when I told him I was planning to quit my job as soon as I had enough money saved to have a runway to pay my life expenses for a while, starting telling me that I had to think about the opportunity cost of starting my own business instead of staying in a salaried position. When I didn't immediately agree to abandon my plans to start my own business (when the time was right), he got very angry and has barely spoken to me since.

More recently, since coming to Canada for a visit, I've had two family members (my dad and my uncle) very subtly indicate that they really think that I should get a paid job as soon as possible and not take any risks.

I don't take these suggestions as a statement on how much faith these three family members have in me, as what all three have in common is clinical anxiety, a fear of risk taking, and all three have spent their whole careers sacrificing pretty much everything to work long hours.

My own speculation is that they all have a bit of a hidden fear of someone they know having career and financial success without giving up everything that they have, as it would suggest that their own life path wasn't necessarily the smartest one. They're also, probably, reasonably concerned for my wellfare, as when it comes to people living with clinical anxiety, it's very hard for them to not worry constantly about worst case scenarios.

Other family members have been more supportive. I appreciate the fact that no one has been a polite cheerleader (giving me encouragement just to be nice). No one has told me how successful they predict that I will be or told me how great my product is. They know nothing about my industry, so these types of statements would have no value.

Rather, several have given the feedback that dedicating six months to getting my product finished and then seeing how far I can get with marketing (and being open to taking a job again if necessary at the end of the six months) is a reasonable plan and not a major risk, as I'm not going into debt to do it. Several family members can very much understand my desire to not spend my life wondering about what I could have achieved if I'd taken a few calculated risks.

 

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[23Infinity]

Good talking to you about your biz.

I forgot to mention it before you left but there was one last thing I wanted to mention, I think you already have enough content created for the biz that you can actually start putting it in the hands of your target client (the freelance ones, not institutions). There's also a pretty good book you can read (or skim through) that will help you progress in your current journey: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: Ries, Eric: 9780307887894: Books - Amazon.ca. Maybe you've read it before.

The specific topic in that book I think you'll benefit from is "leaving the building" - although you have naturally already done some of this, I felt you would benefit from doing more.

Before the Design Process Starts: It’s Time to Get Out Of the Building

The mobile web means that there are many opportunities for start-ups, from bootstrapped home-based ventures right through to those with venture capital funding.

www.interaction-design.org

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbMgWr1YVfs

 

[Beijing]

Good talking to you about your biz.

I forgot to mention it before you left but there was one last thing I wanted to mention, I think you already have enough content created for the biz that you can actually start putting it in the hands of your target client (the freelance ones, not institutions). There's also a pretty good book you can read (or skim through) that will help you progress in your current journey: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: Ries, Eric: 9780307887894: Books - Amazon.ca. Maybe you've read it before.

The specific topic in that book I think you'll benefit from is "leaving the building" - although you have naturally already done some of this, I felt you would benefit from doing more.

Before the Design Process Starts: It’s Time to Get Out Of the Building

The mobile web means that there are many opportunities for start-ups, from bootstrapped home-based ventures right through to those with venture capital funding.

www.interaction-design.org

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbMgWr1YVfs

I've created the opportunity to "leave the building," so to speak, by putting product samples in front of a variety of people from my target customer group and getting their off-the-cuff feedback. I did this in several different ways as I was building the product, including posting online ads and seeing if anyone contacted me to buy the product (they did).

At my last 9-5 job, I did a lot of training of other employees. Before I put in my notice, just to be sure I wasn't taking an ill advised risk, I started used my own materials (from this product) during training sessions as examples of materials that my trainees could be creating/using themselves. I did not clarify that I'd created the materials myself.

A good number of trainees immediately demanded to know where I'd gotten the materials (they were quite aggressive about this) and when I explained that the materials were not yet for sale, but under development by a friend of mine, the usual reaction was for these trainees to ask to me tell my friend that they'd be happy to pay money right away for a copy of the materials.

I also currently have some friends in the industry testing elements of the product as I make it.

I hear what you're saying, though, and now I'm thinking about ways I could have a MVP out sooner than I'm currently estimating. My plan has been to complete the first two levels (out of the four levels I've planned) before launching. But now, I'm considering just starting with one level so that I can getting start getting qualified customer feedback sooner.



Week Three Progress Report:

My goal for Week Three was to work 5 days and complete 4.5 Activity Descriptions. I ended up working 4 days instead, in order to take advantage of an opportunity to spend another day with three of my nieces and to attend the Toronto forum meet-up on Saturday, but I did achieve my goal of competing 4.5 Activity Descriptions.

I also achieved my fitness goals for the week.

Week Four Goals:

Based on my experience so far, it's more than reasonable to expect myself to complete 1-1.5 Activity Description per work day.

My goals for this week, therefore, are to work 4 days (I will be travelling one day and have some other obligations) and to complete 6 Activity Descriptions.

 

[23Infinity]

I've created the opportunity to "leave the building," so to speak, by putting product samples in front of a variety of people from my target customer group and getting their off-the-cuff feedback. I did this in several different ways as I was building the product, including posting online ads and seeing if anyone contacted me to buy the product (they did).

At my last 9-5 job, I did a lot of training of other employees. Before I put in my notice, just to be sure I wasn't taking an ill advised risk, I started used my own materials (from this product) during training sessions as examples of materials that my trainees could be creating/using themselves. I did not clarify that I'd created the materials myself.

A good number of trainees immediately demanded to know where I'd gotten the materials (they were quite aggressive about this) and when I explained that the materials were not yet for sale, but under development by a friend of mine, the usual reaction was for these trainees to ask to me tell my friend that they'd be happy to pay money right away for a copy of the materials.

I also currently have some friends in the industry testing elements of the product as I make it.

I hear what you're saying, though, and now I'm thinking about ways I could have a MVP out sooner than I'm currently estimating. My plan has been to complete the first two levels (out of the four levels I've planned) before launching. But now, I'm considering just starting with one level so that I can getting start getting qualified customer feedback sooner.

Ok that's really good to know, it definitely sounds like its already ready for real use / to be in the customers hands from reading that. I sometimes have a problem when I'm doing new projects, either one of two variants, 'paralysis by analysis' or 'paralysis by perfection' - I have to keep telling myself that 80% good is good enough and that I'm doing it wrong if my first iterations don't embarrass me when I look back (this was actually the case for my first ecomm product as I used some really shitty packaging). I wouldn't know if this is your case/happens to you too, but just wanted to mention it.

Definitely think you will start getting some customer insights that will let you improve your product from doing that too, thankfully you can implement/improvements those changes way faster with your digital product than I ever could a physical one.

By the way check out this video (credits to biophase for posting), it's a bit more e-comm centric but is a great example of how the guy iterated / got the MVP out fast. He even briefly states it wasn't his first doodad he made from wood. Sometimes it's not your very first product that does well, but often times an iteration and second product (not to say the first product won't sell). This was the case with my experience in ecomm as well (first product did just okay, second one did really good). There's also an interesting family element spoken about in that video too.

 

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[Beijing]

Week Four Progress Report

I had 3 very productive days last week, but 2 others were kept busy with travelling to a different country and some meetings when I got there. All in all, I'm pretty happy with what I got done.

Week Five Goals

I'm not going to set any specific goals this week. Catching up with old friends and acquaintances has been time consuming and exhausting so far this week, so until Sunday, I'm just going to work when I feel like it and not set goals that may conflict with my need for rest after a very busy 7 days. With some more travel awaiting me next week, making the best of my remaining time in North America, enjoying some quality time with family and friends is a higher priority to me right now than a 10-20 more hours of productive work.

I'll get back to a normal work routine with normal productivity goals once my current travels come to an end.

 

[Beijing]

Week Five Progress Report

I had more motivation than I anticipated during Week Five and put in some really solid work on one day in particular. I did prioritize spending time with family and friends, however, since it was my last week in North America for a while and I wanted to make the best of that.

Week Six Goals (and Thoughts About My Week Seven Goals)

I'm spending three days in transit between Canada and Malaysia this week (from Tuesday to Thursday) and on Monday I focused on getting packed and seeing some family members one last time, so this week is going to be a bit of a wash from a productivity standpoint.

My goal is to be stabilized by Saturday morning and be able to put in a 6-8 hour work day that day, followed by a day off on Sunday so that I'll have had some rest and will be ready to hit the ground running on Monday and put in a full work week. I did some thinking about goals during my flight between Toronto and Hong Kong and decided to set some aggressive goals for my first month working from Malaysia. This is in line with the increased level of motivation I have been feeling. I really, really want to have a product up and ready for sale in a month and with the work I've already done, this may be feasible.

 

[Beijing]

Week Six Progress Report

As mentioned in the post above, I was in transit between Canada and Malaysia for three days last week (due in part to a substantial layover in Hong Kong), so between packing and actually travelling, it wasn't an optimal week for productivity on my product's development.

I did, however, follow my plan to take it easy on Friday and Sunday, but put in a full day of work on Saturday. I got started at 8 am and stuck with it for a full 8 hours.

Week Seven Goals

Having been able to settle in for several days already, I intend to treat this week like a normal work week. I'll work Monday to Friday and try to maximize what I can achieve in a week.

Leaving Canada where I was staying with family and arriving in South East Asia where I'm paying for housing and the clock is very much ticking on how many months I have left before I inevitably run out of money has been incredibly motivating. I felt more driven on Saturday than I think I ever have before and I'm feeling comfortable with pushing myself harder than usual to be extra productive, because I think my motivation is aligned with doing so and that being extra productive is realistic for at this point in time.

I'm very careful not to set goals that aren't reasonably realistic, because that just results in a pattern of failure, which ultimately tends to undermine future motivation, but with the thoughts that I have been having over the last five days about how much I want this, I'm confident that expecting a more of myself than I usually would makes sense at this point in time.

The main thought on my mind since I got on my flight to Malaysia has been "I gotta make some money." Making money (at this point in time for me) requires having a finished product and that isn't going to happen unless I make it happen. Doing more hours of work in a day (even if bored) means that I hit that crucial benchmark sooner. My other goals are essentially on hold until I get that done.

For my MVP, out of 36 Activity Descriptions (and included materials), I've completed 9. Many of the ones that I've completed already were more complex and required a lot of time, but many of the remaining 27 will be less labour intensive. My goal is to finish them all in the next two weeks. So, for this week, my goal is to complete 14 of them.

Productivity Setup

I booked a reasonably affordable airBNB apartment a little bit north of KLCC in Kuala Lumpur for my first month here. The main downside of this particular apartment is that it is in a public transportation deadzone, but it only costs 3 dollars to get a Grab to the closes MRT station.

Otherwise, this location is optimal for productivity. I have everything I need to function in the building I am living in, shops that sell basic cooking essentials, including basic fresh vegetables, a swimming pool and gym for exercise, enough space to walk around a bit, and a few some affordable options.

The apartment I'm in is basic, but well designed with a mostly suitable space to work at each day. The table is a bit high, so I won't want to use it as a desk long term, but it'll be fine for a month if I make a point of using my laptop on the couch periodically.

I will probably going somewhere between Monday to Friday most weeks during the next month that I am staying at this location, but I mainly plan to just be working Monday to Friday and keeping most of my socializing to the weekend. Having that I need within the same building will be good for saving my energy for productivity, so that I can just focus most of my energy on achieving my goals each week.

Settling Into Malaysia

I've had a lovely time in KL so far. Although I just focused on work on Saturday, I used Friday and Sunday to go out and meet some people. Setting up a social circle is pretty important to me, since I am a very social person with very real social needs and I know that I'll be more productive Monday to Friday if I have friends in my life here and can therefore meet those needs.

I had a real nice meet up last night with someone who also works remote currently and may end up being someone that I could work in the same space as once or twice a week to help avoid becoming lonely from spending too much of my time alone in a room. She's got her own work to do, so with a little effort, we won't likely be a distraction to each other, but the company may be valuable, not every day, but just often enough to break up the monotony of working alone most of the time.

I could also hit some coffee shops by myself on work days if I wish, which I probably will, but I don't want to expend too much energy just getting to a coffee shop first thing in the morning (rather than being able to just dive right into work) and having the inconvenience of having to pack up all my stuff every time I want to use the washroom.

Wish me luck!

 

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[Beijing]

Week Seven Progress Report

Last week, I fell very short of my goal of completing 14 Activity Descriptions, completing only 3. However, this wasn't due to a lack of productivity. Two of the Activity Descriptions I was working on just ended up being far more time consuming that estimated. I still put in three very solid full-time days of work Monday through Wednesday.

By Thursday, I hit a task wall. To continue creating Activity Descriptions (and their accompanying materials), I need to finalize the layout pages in Scribus (from where I've been exporting each finished file to PDF format). Some of the accompanying printable activity materials will need to be cut out to prepare them for use in training scenarios. Many of these items are cards (designed to be printed onto cardstock or regular paper and then laminated), so it was important to confirm that the layout format was suitable for easy cutting with scissors.

I haven't gotten a printer here in Malaysia yet (as I'm in an Airbnb for a month right now and wanted to wait till I'm in a more long-term living situation), so this necessitated a couple trips to a local print shop.

I'm glad that I took the time to do this, since I did discover a couple issues, which were easy to remedy, but would have been a massive time-stealer if I'd had to do corrections later one-by-one after more print files were created.

Due in part (probably) to jet lag, I did have serious trouble being productive in the afternoon on both Thursday and Friday. I spent my first 9 nights in Malaysia averaging about 6 hours of sleep a night and I think it started to catch up to me. So, I just took the afternoons off both days and worked an additional 5 hours on Saturday to make up for the reduction in productive hours.

This allowed me to achieve my goal of having the layout pages for cards figured out by the time I started work again today (Monday morning).

Week Eight Goals

Despite falling far short of my goal for Week Seven (due to it being unrealistically based on information that I did not have when I set it), I'm actually going to give myself an increased goal this week of 15 Activity Descriptions (and accompanying materials). I believe this to be realistic, because I'm now moving away from creating activities with materials that require a lot of graphic design work and beginning work on card-based activities for which much of the design work is already done.

Work-Life Balance & Overall Healthy Living

My biggest challenge last week was turning my work-brain off when it was time to get some time off from work during the weekend.

I've been so mentally hyper-focused on what I need to work that it was really hard on Saturday evening and sometimes during the day on Sunday to stop thinking about what tasks I need to do next.

During the week, I'd very much prioritized thinking about what needed to be done next and challenging myself to continue working whenever I had enough mental energy available to concentrate well enough to get some more work done during a day.

So, it was really tough to switch gears and give my brain the break that it clearly needed.

Although I did work part of the day on Saturday (something I normally wouldn't do, because I find myself the most productive when I take two days off each week) and then just relaxed in my apartment after I stopped working, I did end up succeeding in giving myself a healthy day off from work on Sunday.

I went to church in the morning, then had a date mid-afternoon, and went indoor bouldering afterwards (I got myself a 3-month membership at a local chain of climbing gyms). I got home about 7:30 and cooked myself dinner. Having a day like this (doing social and active things completed unrelated to my work) left me feeling relaxed and energized.

Getting this break is definitely needed. By Saturday last week, I being overwhelmed by thoughts about work tasks and was frequently in an overly hyper anxious mental state as a reasult and it was definitely more of a distraction than something that was helpful for productivity.

I'm going to set a further goal of being intentional about having a similarly relaxing weekend next weekend (and definitely going to make it a two day weekend regardless of how much or how little I get done from today [Monday] until Friday).

 

[Beijing]

Week Eight Progress Report

Last week did not go as expected. I ended up needing to rethink some functional aspects of the layout architecture for all of my printable activity materials. So, instead of getting to my goal of 15 activities completed, I did 5 before running into some issues that led to me just focusing some layout redesign from Wednesday to Friday.

The good news is that I set myself up to knock out a lot of activities in Week 9.

I had a chance last week to practice the crucial soloproneur skill of switching between my individual contributor and CEO hats. I ended up having to go through the mental exercise of letting go of my weekly goals (and not allowing the pressure to achieve them distract me) so that I could slow down and focus on the important layout design decisions. Locking in those decisions (by taking the time to experiment with different designs and process the available options for a look that would visually appealing and functional) and being 100% satisfied with them was important so that I could hit the gas again in Week 9 without any hesitation or concern that I'd need to come back later and make a bunch of changes to my work.

Week Nine Goals

I'm going to take another shot at last week's goal of 15 Activity Descriptions with accompanying materials this week. With the design decisions out of the way, I know that I can definitely hit 15 this week, potentially even by Wednesday.

I put together a list on Friday of the first 15 Activity Descriptions I want to finish this week. The list was helpful to me over the weekend. I'd look at it every so often and doing so was helpful for simplying my focus for the coming week and reducing the pressure to be overwhelmed by all of the things that I still needed to do to finish my MVP.

The activities on the list the easiest, which means my speed of Activity completion will slow down in Week Ten, but I think that hitting some good completion numbers this week will be good for creating a sense of momentum.

 

[Beijing]

Week Nine Progress Report

I achieved 70% of my goal of completing 15 Activity Descriptions and accompanying materials. I'm pretty happy with that, because as usual, pretty much task took longer than anticipated. I put in my best every day, have a bunch of important components of my product finished that didn't exist at the beginning of the last work week, and I really like how everything turned out. Beautiful graphic design with a consistent style that I'm very proud of when I look at it. I shared some of the things I was working on with some people in the target customer group and the feedback on the overall appearance was very encouraging.

Week Ten Goals

I'm going to shift focus for a couple days this week to my marketing strategy. I'll be basing the product website entirely on my marketing strategy, so getting the marketing strategy completed is an important task that will be necessary to being read to secure my first organic sale.

From Monday to Wednesday, I'm going to give myself free reign to further develop the amount of detail in the Excel document that hosts my marketing strategy.

On Thursday and Friday, I'll dive back into the Activity Descriptions, as I don't want to go a whole week without further progress on that. My goal for that will be to put in at least 12 hours into finishing up some of the half-finished Activity Descriptions.

Marketing Strategy & Website Design Methodology Update

If there are two term that best sum up my approach to designing my product website, they are "landing pages" and "customer pain-points."

I've challenged myself to not think of each page on my Product Website as just one component of a complete website, but rather to see as many pages as possible as the first page a first time website visitor who knows nothing about my company or my product could land on -- and to design them to be able to properly receive that first time visit without confusing the visitor and causing them to leave before understanding what the product is.

Customer Pain-Points

My product solves 12 common pain-points that a member of the target customer group could have, so I want every feature page of the product website to have SEO built in to specifically bring in visitors looking to solve one of those 12 problems. I therefore also want the content of each of those pages (especially the content above the fold) to very specifically target potential customers who are looking for a solution to that one problem.

My plan for my business' web presence is for there to be at least one website page designed to be a landing page for each of the 12 pain-points potential customers may be seeking a solution for.

The 12 pain-points are:

• Too much training materials preparation time required to make sufficient high quality materials
• Hard to motivate trainees to actively participate in training sessions
• No long term organizational professional development plan for employees
• Limited time for HR professional training opportunities
• Too much time for HR professional training opportunities -- time is being wasted and trainees are being bored
• Difficult to demonstrate value of providing employees professional training opportunities to the managers who decide whether employees are allowed to spend work time attending training events
• Low employee engagement level in professional development training sessions
• Can't afford cost of available high end products
• Difficult to track individual trainee performance improvements from HR professional development training
• No measurable organizational improvements from team-building activities
• PPT presentation/workbook based HR training super boring for employees
• Training facilitator very inexperienced at leading training and needs a high level of support from supervisor/manager -- unable to plan and execute training sessions and events independently

Product Website Pages

My Product Website has 10 pages. These are all accessible in the links in the website's banner.

1. There's a Home page that describes the product as simply and clearly as possible above the fold and provides some basic information about the product's key features below the fold, with links to the Feature pages about each of these features for visitors who wish to learn more about the specifics of a particular component.

The Home page is where the domain name itself will land and will be designed to give someone looking for this type of product a quick overview of what the product offers in under five seconds, with links to the relevant feature pages for anyone who wants to dig into what the product features a bit deeper.

I see the Home page as something that needs to be the perfect Landing Page for anyone who knows nothing about my company, but is looking for materials for HR training activities.

2. The second page is the Membership page. This page lists and provides details of the three (price/content) tiers of the product, Essentials, Versatility, and Ultimate. The page features Buy Now buttons and some FAQs at the bottom designed to respond to any "last minute" customer concerns.

The Memberships page is not intended to be a landing page, but the section above the fold is still designed to give a new website visitor with no knowledge of my company or product a solid understanding of what I am selling in under five seconds, just in case it's the first page that someone finds.

3-8. There are 6 feature pages. These can be accessed in a dropdown in the menu entitled Features. Each of these pages describes one of the six core product components, all actual things that come with the product that can be held and used.

9. I've also included a Samples page that offers free, immediately downloadable samples of different parts of the product. These will be useful enough by themselves that someone could try them out, receive genuine value, and understand the value of the product as a whole, but there won't be enough value provided in the samples that a customer would be able to solve their pain-points without buying the full product itself.

10. Finally, there is an About Us page with four sections, Our Story, Our Design Philosophy, Our Promise, Our Contributors, and Contact Us. The Our Story section will describe the why of the product, the section on Our Design Philosophy, will briefly describe the goals of the product, the Our Promise section will communicate our very flexible satisfaction guaranteed policy, the Contributors section will be intended to differentiate my company from the half dozen competitors out there (with low-quality products created haphazardly by just a single person) by highlighting the number of people who have worked on different parts of my product as freelancers, and the Contact Us section will make it very clear that feedback and questions are welcomed any time and that I'm available to schedule Zoom calls with anyone who wants to talk about the product (or any related needs that they have).


Keeping the Product Website Simple

I systematically went through my list of the 12 problems that my product will solve for users and visually connected it to the feature page (or pages) for the feature(s) that solves that particular problem.

As there are 12 customer pain-points solved by the product and only 6 feature pages, obviously some of the features address more than 1 customer pain-points. 4 of the product features only solve 1 of the 12 problems, while the remaining 2 product features either solve or are part of solving 6 problems each.

Each of the 6 product feature pages will be designed to function as a landing page that specifically speak to a potential customer who has a specific problem.

However, these means that there are 6 additional customer pain-points that won't have a page on my Product Website thatt is specifically written to address them.

I've thought up some options to have additional pages on my Product Website that address the additional 6 customer pain-points. One options that I considered was having another dropdown in the banner menu entitled Benefits that would list 4-6 pages about the overall benefits of the product (such as "Highly Efficient Learning").

After a lot of thought and experimentation with website prototypes, I ultimately reached the conclusion that trying to have a specific landing page on the website for every single one of the 12 customer pain-points would result in an overly complicated, confusion, and fluffy website that would probably lower sales instead of increase them.

So, I devised a solution for off-site landing pages.


Offsite Landing Pages

Since the 6 customer pain-points that do not have their own Landing Page on my Product Website, the other Landing Pages will exist on a blog that create for this purpose. The 6 paint-points not addressed on the Product Website are niche enough that it makes more sense to have one of more blog posts that (in addition to giving advice about the issue) concludes by explaining how my product can address that problem -- and then links to an appropriate page on my Product Website.

I'll also use Youtube videos on my company channel (as well as guest blogging posts and podcast appearances) to explain how my product addresses these more niche customer pain-points before directing viewers/listeners/readers to my website to learn more about the product as a whole.

In my view, this is a much better way to address the nuances of different customer pain-points at a high level of detail than would ever be advisable on my Product Website.

Instead, the Product Website remains straightforward, clean, and easy to navigate and a range of different sources (some owned by me and some on other websites) pulls in very specific traffic and provides a much more specialized approach to explaining to different customers with different needs why my product is the best solution for them.


Progress So Far

I spent today developing 19 topics related to the 12 customer pain-points that would be suitable to base a blog post or Youtube video on. Some topics are very broad and would be something that would interest a large number of the people in my target customer group and others are very niche. I plan to expand that list of 19 topics to about 40 or 50 over the next two days as preparation for finishing the Product Website and beginning work on the first traffic development blog.

 

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[Beijing]

Week Ten Progress Report

I met my goals for Week Ten. Although I'd decided to give myself from Monday to Wednesday to work on updating my marketing strategy Excel document, after putting 9 hours into it on Monday and then finalizing some details on Tuesday, I was ready to jump back into product development on Wednesday, as I had nothing further to add to the marketing plan at the moment.

I also read Will Coombe's 3 Months To No.1 (On Google), and found it not only authentic and very well written, but also extremely helpful in quickly getting a basic grasp of SEO principles. I made a few changes to my marketing strategy as a result.

I spent Wednesday to Friday making progress on product development. On Friday, I took the time to make a list of all my completed tasks and all the remaining tasks and found it really helpful for making my progress so far visual (even though all of the tasks are full memorized in my head and I always know what I need to do next).

I've started checking off each task as I complete it, which actually feels really good to do.

Week Eleven Goals

I have four Activity Instructions & Material kits (I've been calling them "Activity Descriptions," but I'm going to start calling them Activity Instructions instead) that I want to complete this week. I finished the first one on Monday and got most of the second done today (Tuesday).

Just for a change of pace, since my AirBNB booking in a Kuala Lumpur suburb ended on Sunday, I booked six nights at a hotel in downtown KL this week. It's been really nice to be back in the core of the city, re-exploring a neighborhood where I spend a lot of time back prior to COVID.

I've stayed in this particular hotel before and I like it because the rooms come with a suitable desk for working. There's also lots of cafés that are nice to work at for a morning or afternoon in this area. The only thing that annoys me is the thimble full of coffee that many of them call a latte and charge $4 USD for. This equates to about 1.5 mouthfuls. Very annoying. I don't mind paying Starbucks prices for coffee or even a little more, but I want something that takes at least ten minutes to drink.

 

[23Infinity]

Informative blog posts on landing pages that I found helpful: The Ultimate Guide To Landing Pages That Convert In 2022

I'm not an expert on SEO but I heard good things about a (somewhat of a "guru" course) course called Brian Dean's SEO that works. Not sure if you care to go through it or have the time to, but if you are interested in it and DM me, I know the optimal method to get access to it. There's also a pretty good facebook group called SEO Signals Lab that is helpful and well moderated with high signal to noise.

 

[Beijing]

Week Eleven Progress Report

I completed three-&-a-half of the four Activity Instructions and Material kits I wanted to finish last week.

Week Twelve Goals

I figured out a way to substitute one group activity (that will take about 3-4 days to complete the materials) for in place of three activities (that would in combination) take at least two weeks to finish. This should be able to bump up my product release date one to three weeks sooner.

So my goal for this week is to finish that substituted activity by Friday. I already finished another Activity Instructions and Materials kit on Monday (the one that I didn't completely finish last week).

Digital Nomad Life Updates

I've been in Malaysia since the beginning of August. I started in one AirBNB a little to the east of the city centre for a month, then spent last week in hotel in the downtown and now I'm in a suburb for two weeks. A friend from Beijing is going to visit for 10 days at the end of the month, so since she's willing to foot the bill for our hotel stays as we do a little travel in Malaysia, I'm still going to do some work, but will aim at just doing an average of about 2-3 hours per day, just to leave plenty of time to spend with her while she's here.

At the end of October, I'll head to Bangkok for a month and after that maybe Cambodia for another month.

After that, I'll probably loop back to Kuala Lumpur for another three months.

 

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[Beijing]

Hi all,

I got so sucked in to working on my product that I completely forgot about this thread for a month and a half.

Each Monday I've been jumping straight into work and my productivity level has remained high and steady. I probably won't restart the weekly goals/progress reports, as I clearly don't need them to make progress, they're more of a distraction than a aid for motivation, and I'm not providing enough detail on my product (and what I'm doing to finish/sell it) for the updates to be helpful to other people.

I'll continue to post about key milestones, however.

The work continues, but I have scaled down what I plan to launch as my MVP. Just really wanna get something out ASAP so that I can start interacting more authentically with my target customer group and begin experimenting with marketing. I think I'm about 2 months from launching it, depending on how long some of the final tasks take.

I'm planning to just offer a $20 a year subscription for access to (and a license to use) the product initially for the MVP, with the option to get a subscription at that annual fee for up to five years (a maximum of $100 into my business' bank account). This will provide an opportunity to test the market and also offer the chance for those who just wanna support the continued development of the product by giving me up to $100 just to be supportive (with the added benefit of receiving access to the best version of the product at just $20 per year for the next five years, which is gonna be way cheaper than subscribing to the best version later, once more content is finished and there's more value immediately available).

After almost half a year from when I quit my day job, I'm just about out of savings, so even having 10 customers support me with $100 will help a lot here in South-east Asia, where my monthly expenses sit at about $2000 per month.

After nearly four years of working jobs that were enjoyable on some levels, but didn't align with my values/passionates, it's been really, really special to spend the last 5+ months just focusing every week on something I really care about doing/building. I wake up every day Monday-Friday eager to work, even when my body is tired and I'd rather not get started. I get started anyway and I don't have to convince myself to get started.

I've found a 4-day work week most productive. The type of creative work that finishing this product requires really drains my brain. I was finding that while working a 5-day work week, although I'd be very focused and productive Monday-Wednesdays, I'd be far less effective on Thursdays and Fridays. I'd originally underestimated how exhausting using my brain this much would be, but having discovered the reality of how draining it is, I've made adjustments accordingly.

So now I've started spreading a 4-day work week over five days, usually taking a couple afternoons off when I can feel that my brain is tired and I know that pushing through it will just mean being less effective the next day. When I feel that way, I just stop work around noon or 2 pm or whenever I'm feeling past a comfortable threshold of ease of productive focus and get a good rest doing things I like for the rest of the day and get a great start the next more well rested and fully ready to bang out some more work.

 

[Beijing]

I finally launched my product website last weekend. Creating the website did not take a lot of time (I'd already done some experimenting over the last few years prior to quitting my day job and had already worked out a lot of the design aspects), but it took a long time to get it live, because I wanted to finish the graphic design of certain key product components.

I already had prototype versions of them, but nothing visually appealing enough to go on a website.

With the website live now and I'm focused on finishing the first few units of training materials (need one more week to get the first 2-3 units prepared for customers) and marketing.

I sent messages to 9 Youtube influencers on Monday and got responses so far from 3 of them. One is only willing to participate in promotion for an upfront fee, and her rate for videos is outside of my current budget, so I'm planning on paying $300 for her to do a blog post about one aspect of my product, since her pageview count is pretty strong and I have a call that I feel optimistic about planned next week with another one of the Youtubers who responded. The third sent me a tentative response, so we'll see if I hear further from him.

I've experimented with dropping some free content in several Facebook groups. I've been following the groups for about a year and shared content in a very similar way to how I've seen others doing it. I did so on Wednesday in four groups and am still waiting for all four posts to be approved, so we'll see how that turns out.

With my website up, I also applied for a Stripe account, which was immediately approved, but then 20 minutes later, my account was placed on hold for identity verification. I submitted a copy of my ID and am waiting to see if my account will become usable for processing payments again. It would really suck to have an issue with that after seven months of grinding and being right around the corner from a product launch.

So, basically, I've been holding my breath a lot this week. At this point, I have so much anxiety about something essential to my plan going wrong that I can't even enjoy the journey. Just gonna push through the next two weeks and hope for the best.

 

[Beijing]

My Stripe account got approved after 36 hours and my stress level immediately plummeted accordingly.

Next week is going to be all about grinding through some finally file exporting to get the first three units of training content uploaded and ready to go.

I've chosen Subhub.com as my members' area platform. It offers the right mix of features needed for my product and delivery strategy.

Once I have the first three units uploaded to the members' area and Stripe payments configured, I'm going to send a message to (just about) everyone I used to work with at my last job who could potentially make use of the product offering them a free membership and asking them to share the website link with anyone they think might find the product useful.

Hopefully will have a video call this week with the Youtuber who expressed the most eagerness to explore cooperating together.

 

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