Hey Makers! 👋

Welcome to Digest 007 of the newsletter. Our featured maker, Antonio, started with an idea to build a new year resolutions web app to scratch his own itch. 🏆

For many of us, nine months spent quarantining at home has completely erased the elaborate routines and habits we had carefully constructed in the pre pandemic. So it’s unsurprising that as we turn to 2021, many people are seeking ways to develop new habits and bring some structure and routine back into their largely confined lives.

A new survey from CIT Bank found that 43 percent of Americans are setting new year resolutions for 2021, compared with 35 percent who did the same for 2020. Resolutions focused on habits such as exercise and self-care are especially popular.

While we all start a new year with good intentions that we’ll reach our goals, however, few of us stick to these resolutions past January. A study by the University of Scranton found that just 40 percent of resolution makers are still keeping their resolutions six months in.

That’s where habit tracking apps want to help you. Unlike logging apps, habit formation apps are a slightly different breed. They’re aspirational. Habit apps are less about distilling your life into a series of data points and more about becoming your ideal self.

A habit tracker can make goals feel more attainable, boosts your confidence, keeps you focused and helps you stay motivated. theLifeBoard app does all these and more by following a simple methodology: plan, execute, analyze, improve, repeat.

After all who can give a better testimonial of theLifeboard app than the author himself. Antonio has been following this methodology for almost four years now with great results. ⭐️

What I’ve Been Reading 📖

• ⭐️ Lessons learned after one year indie making: from $125K to $164: Twelve months ago I quit my job as a senior software engineer to become a full-time indie maker. In my previous job I was making around 125K/year and during this year working on my projects I’ve made $164.

• 12 Learnings from 12 Months of Working from Home: Like many of you, for the last 12 months I’ve been working at home, waiting out the pandemic. During this period of time, YCharts has flourished, growing by ~45%, while also being acquired.

• How I almost gave up on Lastform: In 2011 I started selling themes for WordPress. It was the first time I managed to make money on the internet. While I was still single, the money was great. But in 2013 I got married, and in 2014 my first daughter was born.

• Foam: Six Months Later: Hello. It’s me, Artist Formerly Known As Lead Maintainer of Foam. You may remember me from such hits as feverishly astroturfing a community around an early-stage open source project and then disappearing into the thin air without any kind of acknowledgement that anything had ever happened.

• Things I Made That Sucked: We live in an industry that celebrates and demands success. From posts that proudly show metrics that are up and to the right, to App Store feature tweets - we love to see others hitting on their current ventures. And why not? It’s fun!

• I sold Pingr. Lessons learned.: That’s it. I sold Pingr, and it doesn’t belong to me from now. After more than a year of working on Pingr, I got an offer from a random person who wanted to acquire it.

Maker Focus 🏆

Featuring one or more makers per digest. Want to be featured as a maker? Fill in this form. ✍️

Antonio Ufano

Antonio is skilled in nodejs, vuejs, docker, mongodb. 📦

He is currently learning Typescript. 📚

Product Focus 📦

theLIFEBOARD ⭐️

The weekly planner that helps you organise your weeks, track your goals and habits, and analyse your progress.

theLIFEBOARD is a weekly planner that helps you achieve your Goals and create new Habits. Organising your weeks and tracking them is one of the best ways to achieve your Goals and stick to new Habits.

It is currently on early access and is free to use while we finish developing all its features. Once it’s oficially launched, it will require a subscription but we’ll offer early access users a free period and special discount. ✌️

BeeWare

Write once. Deploy everywhere.

BeeWare allows you to write your apps in Python and release them on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web, and tvOS using rich, native user interfaces. Multiple apps, one codebase, with a fully native user experience on every platform.

Flameshot

Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software. 🖥️ 📸

Cut down on time and effort by generating easy to use in-app screenshot for marketing materials, social media posts, illustrations & customizable appearance

Tweet Focus

Education 📚 & Resources 🧩

• Kumiko creator: A Japanese woodcraft inspired generator that turns any image into a pattern - you choose the shapes.

An Interview with Antonio of theLIFEBOARD

Hey Antonio! Let’s start out with your background. 📝

I’m a full-stack developer with over 10 years of corporate experience working on a wide variety of projects: from small personal websites to full-fledge web applications or complex projects built with microservices and REST APIs. I quit my job a year ago to focus on building my own products.

What is the purpose of your blog, and what resources do you use to get your ideas, if any? 🧩

I write technical articles mostly about Node.js, Vue.js or deployments to different platforms. In addition, I share milestones of my projects and lessons learned.

What is an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with? ✒️

Doing the bare minimum just to justify myself that I’ve given it a try, that it’s alright if I haven’t succeeded cause I did my part. Sounds familiar? Do you know what this really means? It means you’re not taking responsibility for your failures nor learning from them nor committing to what you wanted to achieve. It means you’re lying to yourself. Realizing that is not easy and worst still, it sucks.

Why was theLIFEBOARD started and is there a roadmap? 🎯

I created it to scratch my own itch. It’s a weekly planner to help people create new habits and achieve life goals.

It follows a simple methodology:

• plan: define tasks related to your goals to work on them during the week
• execute: work on those tasks
• analyse: at the end of the week, review your progress and analyse your wins and how can you do better
• improve: learn from your actions, create better routines based on what works for you
• repeat

I’ve been following this methodoligy for almost four years with great results so I’m sure people will find it helpful.

What is the most challenging problem that’s been solved in theLIFEBOARD so far? 🚧

Definitely marketing/sales. As a technical person I focus too much on building new features, improving performance and things like that instead of trying to find new users or get feedback to decide what to work on next.

What is one feature, which you’re most proud of, that differentiates theLIFEBOARD from other products? 🦄

The weekly review exercise. It allows users to check their habits for the whole week, review all their tasks and ask them specific questions that helps them analyze their progress.

What is one product that you can’t live without that you think others should know about? 💡

MakerLog

If I gave you $1 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it? 🚀

I’d pay debts from friends and family, then put most of it on considered safe investments like bonds, dividend stocks or index funds. Oh, and some crypto. 🤑

Thank you Antonio.

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