Hello, and happy final Friday of the month! I hope April was a good month for you and that you were able to make a lot of progress towards achieving your goals. I felt like April was a great month overall. I did have some personal stuff that came up and was challenging to deal with, but broadly I felt like I’m getting my feet under me financially again, and making progress on building my business.

Getting lost in Blue Prince

The beginning of my week was less than productive, this time by choice. Last weekend was amazing from start to finish, and I on Monday I decided to extend it by an extra day. I’ve been sucked into Blue Prince lately, and so I took an easy day at work and played a bunch of it. In fact, after a bunch of progress that day, I was able to make it to Room 46 later that evening. I’m still playing it here and there when I get time, trying to wrap up a couple of things, but I plan to watch the rest of it on YT. That game has already taken too much of my time! But I did really enjoy it.

How I’m taking an inventory of myself

I mentioned last week that I would be going back to step 1 on the plan to quit my job. I did indeed do that, focusing my efforts at the start of the week on putting together a template that I could use to perform a self-inventory, which is a core aspect of step 1. Knowing yourself is so important to concretely defining your messaging and core claims of your business, so I wanted to have an easy means to collect all that information in a single place for reference later.

I broke the self-inventory down into a 5-step process itself:

Each section is a collapsible header that contains prompts and tables/lists for thinking critically about and recording different aspects of you.

It’s pretty simple right now, but I wanted to get some basic materials down in a way that is easily changeable. Once I’ve started looping other people into this process, I want to have something I can hand to them, have them fill it out, then collect feedback about what they thought was missing or needed changing so I can refine this part of the plan. It’s fundamental to the rest of the steps in the process, so it’s important to be sure it’s actually valuable to people.

I started to fill it out myself, but haven’t completed it yet. It’s kind of an expanded version of something I already did about a year and a half ago, and things haven’t changed drastically for me since then, but it is nice to test the template out myself, as well as revisit things about myself. I think self-discovery is basically a lifelong process, so I plan to come back to this document often.

Who I decided to start selling to

Even though I made a lot of progress on this template, I still wound up feeling depressed and discouraged again towards the middle of the week. Specifically, I’m having a lot of anxiety about our financial situation still, because things continue to be very tight week after week, and we don’t have much in savings. On top of that, I have been feeling stressed about my job, because I have had a limited number of things to even work on for a while now, and I can increasingly feel the axe hovering over my neck there.

But I REALLY don’t want to get another job! I know, I’ve said this before. So, again, I’ve got to create some monetizable products and start making some money. I mentioned last week that I’m not interested in appearing to be a Ponzi scheme, so I decided that I’m going to proof out one of the aspects of the plan by creating, launching, and marketing products that cater to target audiences outside of the one I talk to via my personal brand (hello!).

I’ve had this thought in my mind for several months, based on the political climate of the country in which I live, that I'd love to be able to target a more affluent audience. I don’t want to name names, but it rhymes with “healthy right preservatives.” This is appealing to me, not only because there is a lot of money in that audience, but also because it feels a little bit like winning points for the other side, but in a sneaky sorta way. Which is what I think a lot of people on that side do anyway.

Anyway! I can’t really broadcast that sort of thing as a part of my marketing strategy for both my personal brand as well as any other products I’m creating and talking about creating, so I decided to focus more on categories of products that I think people of that sort might be more likely to interact with. Religious, political, financial, news, parenting, family, etc.

I’m starting with some stuff in the parenting and family space! Specifically this first project is going to be a sticker chart. I’m planning to allow unauthenticated users access to one simple sticker chart that they can use for free, but authenticated users will get free trial access to a premium version featuring customizable charts, stickers, etc. I’ll then be trying to use steps 3 and 4 of the plan to quit my job to market the app. I’m probably going to keep the pricing very basic and unoffensive to start, but I’ll adjust as needed once I start marketing it.

I’ve been doing some reading of reviews on similar apps, and I think I have a good grasp on the gaps and how I could market something like this, so hopefully it will be a good proof-of-concept. I’ll keep you posted!

That’s it for me for this week! Going to finish out my Friday, then start getting ready for the weekend. We’re celebrating my mom’s birthday this Sunday! Hope you have a great weekend, talk to you next week!