Making is the Drive to Create

With my Tally Count product, a number of people are always asking for features related to competition and leaderboards within the product. 

My idea is to allow for similar functionality to Tally Count, but with a greater emphasis on competition and goals.

Right now I think most of the actions will still be self entered, but there could be potentials for integrations in the future along with data entered by an admin.

As I have been working on my other project focused on pottery studios, I keep thinking that there may be a larger market for class registration software.

The proof is already there, I have a number of studios already using the tool for managing their classes and really loving the software. Why not offer it to more people without all of the pottery specific stuff?

I am starting the process of pulling the class software out of that product and putting it into its own product.

Last year when I had to put together an invite for my 40th birthday party I tried out several of the RSVP websites out there. The first premium one I tried was pretty fancy, and I spent awhile wading through all of their options, but in the end they were going to charge me a boatload to just sent out an invite to 40-some people. 

Then I went to the older website that everyone uses, and it boggled my mind to see that the whole site was overrun with ads and was a drag to use. The whole UI was outdated and pretty bad.

I started working on the project, knowing I couldn't finish it in time for my party, but maybe next time I would have it ready.

I never quite finished the project, but this year for a Christmas party we were putting together I hacked it together enough to send out the invite with my own software. Half of the content was hardcoded because hadn't finished the editing interface yet.

So with the Christmas event a success, I decided to finish it up enough to launch something.

There are a bunch of features I could add, but as it is, it's a nice way to put together an invite and collect RSVP's that I think could work for a ton of people.

Phil and I have worked together for a long time on client projects, but we've never undertaken a startup together before. This will be the first joint venture with Good Gravy and Switchback Interactive. Stay tuned!

The app is coming together and we are onboarding our first Pottery Studio this week! Its exciting to see some of their members start to make use of the app and find it helpful.

Had two people randomly sign up for the app at $30/month each this week. One of them may have come through the ads I was posting over the last few weeks. The other came through a connection with one of my other products. Exciting to see the app start to gain traction.

Simple Estimate was the first Saas I worked on. I thought I would develop it and put it out there and BAM, instant success.

Unfortunately it didn't quite work like that. Even with my feeble attempts at advertising it didn't acquire any paid customers in the first 9 months. After that I decided to make all of the paid features free except one: the ability to have multiple users.

Over the past 7 years it has had some paying customers, but never enough to really make much difference.

The software has languished over the years that made adding things and making updates to it really tricky.

I finally just replaced the website with a brand new version written in Laravel and Vue.js. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. I also got a chance to fix some of the things I did wrong initially like the pricing, adding a free trial, adding some necessary features, and using some of my learnings with SEO.

I'm excited to see how this moves the needle.

Kinda fun since I've been getting a few orders a week now. Still only makes $2-5 per shirt, so its not exactly a huge money maker, but still fun to experiment with.

But I never posted it here. Thought I should try and keep this up to date, so why not? 

I've been working lately on my next idea. It's a sort of simple learning management system (LMS) that does away with a lot of the complexities of those systems, and makes sending a training out to your team as easy as sending out a series of emails.

It will have tracking built in so that you will know who has completed their courses and lessons. In addition reminders will relieve you from the responsibility of following up with delinquent employees that never seem to get around to doing the training.

It has been fun but challenging to work on. I feel like I'm 50% or more done with it, but I probably have a long way to go still!

The Vote's Out is a free phone party game with friends.

It's a web app that uses pusher for real time kind of updates. Anyone can just pull out their phone, create a game, invite some friends, and start playing, as simple as that!

The game works like this: Each player answers zany questions with their most creative, irreverent, and witty responses to win votes from other players. The player with the most questions won is the winner of the whole game.

It's a quick and fun game similar to Jackbox Quiplash. Playing it usually has hilarious results that your group will be laughing about for days.

Was learning about some new tech (Lando, specifically) and I wanted to try it on a small experimental project rather than one of my existing apps. I had been thinking about these kind of counter apps lately and how they are getting used a lot during the pandemic. I think it might be possible to rank for a web-only version of one, so I figured I would try it out. 

Not sure its going to go anywhere, but I would consider adding additional premium features if it ends up getting some traffic to it. 

I got a landing page created and have part of the builder tool working. I'm starting to email out to some of my agency contacts and see if they have feedback about the tool.

Would love any thoughts you have about the landing page, potential pricing model, or features for the tool itself.

http://signature.email/

Met with Andrew about this the other day and he thought this idea had a lot of potential. It's amazing what a short conversation can do to motivate you to work on an idea.

This site has been pretty quiet since launch. Not sure if this is necessary. Let me know if you have feedback.

I feel like the basics of the site are there and working. Waiting to see how it will be used and what features would be valuable to people. Would love to hear ideas and feedback. Here were some thoughts about what else could be added:

• Ability for others to ask questions about projects and have the maker respond.
• Ability for the maker to add polls to discussions (like what feature to build next)
• Ability for maker to add a "next up"/"roadmap" to projects, re-arrange them, and possibly allow people to "like" or "vote" on them.
• Ability to add monthly metrics to projects (such as users, earnings, content added...?) kinda like the "open startup" idea.

I just need to update this so that the WordPress repository says that it is compatible with the latest version of WP. 

I've also been working on adding in the ability to add Advanced Custom Fields to the Archive page, kinda like an options page. Made some progress awhile ago, but need to flesh that out a bit more.