My goal for this year is simple: build something that someone can buy.
I’ve been wanting to improve my coding skills, and I think giving myself a focus of building a thing that someone can buy would be a good project. I don’t know what that thing is yet, but that’s part of the fun.
I’m going to set myself monthly objectives, and the goal is to make 1 automated sale by the end of 2018. Simple. Clear. It feels like 1962 all over again:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...
Ok, maybe not. Too soon?
I’m going to try to write about my journey; if nothing else, it will be a good excuse to procrastinate.
How did I get here?
Last year my goal was to build a website with a blog from scratch. I did it (see here: erosen.fyi), but it wasn’t that exciting. And I never actually used it, as you can probably tell since I’m now using medium. I think my goal was missing a practical use-case. I also thought I’d get better at coding in the process, which I did. But I feel like I really learned more about template languages — the blog was built using Jekyll — than I learned about actual code.
Some Initial Thoughts
I’m thinking that I’ll want to make a basic site with a checkout process. I’ll probably build the site using some good ol’ javascript, HTML, and CSS. I’ll hook it up to Stripe, and will probably rely heavily on Zapier. That’s the easy part.
The hard part is going to be deciding what to build, how to make the site pretty, and how I’m going to get it out in front of people.
Some current interests / ideas:
Idea #1: Photo Storage & Printing
I’ve been facing a problem recently with photo storage. I have over 40GB of photos on my phone, and my fear is that they’re going to stay there forever. I’m not afraid that I’ll loose the pictures, but more that nobody will ever look at them. I currently back my photos up to both Google photos and Amazon Photos (both free, so why not?), and I also upload all my favorite videos — almost 100% of them of my son — to a folder in Dropbox where I pay $10/month for 1TB of storage. I even created a little workflow app to make the Dropbox uploads even easier.
The best part about pictures is accidentally stumbling on them while cleaning out the closet, or sifting through them with friends/family. When they’re all stored on your phone or in some cloud app, that’s just never going to happen. I’m trying to imagine my kids in 10–15 years trying to watch old home videos — are they’re going to have to poke around in my dropbox folders to find them?
So I’ve been printing out about 100 pictures per month for the past few months using Snapfish, and its been AWESOME. I love having physical pictures. There’s just something about holding them and sorting through them with my wife and son, and showing them to people when they come over. The pictures cost me less than $10 (usually about $.09/photo) and they’re totally worth it.
The thing is, choosing the photos I want to print each month is a bit annoying and time consuming. Also, keeping track of which photos I’ve printed is hard.
I also feel like I’m paying too much for storage. I did some research, and I can store 100GB directly on S3 for like $1.25/mo.
So I think there might be something here with automatically choosing photos for people and shipping them on a monthly basis. Imagine if you had a personal photo curator that looked through your photos each month, decided which ones to print, and an album just showed up at your door. The curator would get to know you and your family, and could help make it more personal. Just a thought. I know I’d pay $10–20 per month for that.
This may be too ambitious since I think it’d require a mobile app. Also I don’t know anything about syncing files. Although I guess I could use Twilio pretty easily to allow someone to email / text a photo and then just print the photos and drop ship them. That’d be cool. And useful.
I’ll share idea #2 in an upcoming post.
