I’ve been totally sucking at the Snip reports lately. I apologize to the eight or so people who have been following my progress.

Shit has been pretty interesting lately. As I mentioned before, I’ve redone my website, now with the low-commitment CTA of “View Demo.” I have this View Demo form wired up to a MailChimp autoresponder, and as of this writing I have 5 subscribers to my autoresponder list. I believe there are something like 14 people who have provided their name and email address so far, but some of those people are from before I had the autoresponder set up.

By the way, I’m pretty fried right now so this post is going to be a total stream-of-consciousness thing. Pretty much all of my Snip posts are like that anyway but this one will especially be.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, one of my very biggest challenges with Snip is the fact that it’s tough to make time to work on Snip due to the fact that it’s not earning very much profit yet (about $85/mo as of this writing) and so there’s a bunch of time I have to spend earning an income. I also have a wife and two kids, and that of course is a slice of the time pie as well. (“Mmm…pie” – Homer Simpson)

So I’ve been working a lot of extra hours lately with the goal of putting away as much money as possible. We’ve had some large unexpected medical expenses come up recently, and so I’d like to take care of that as well as build up a nice safety net as well. I of course don’t have direct control over how much billable client work I can do, but I decided that it would be a good idea to work as much as possible anyway, doing as much billable client work as I have and then pouring the rest of my time into marketing Ben Franklin Labs, and then of course a certain minimum amount of work on Snip. It was pointed out to me that I’m probably not going to make a whole shitload of progress on 2-3 hours a week working on Snip, so I decided to instate a rule of a minimum of 1 hour on Snip per weekday (5 hours a week). That’s been going pretty well so far. I’ve also been getting what I feel like is a healthy amount of leads for BFL, too, which feels good. My goal is to eventually have a marketing system that constantly delivers leads to me whether I’m actively “doing marketing” or not.

That brings me to another thing I’m working on. I read an email from Brennan Dunn about a guy named Ari Lerner, who I know of because I’ve bought one or two of his AngularJS books. My understanding, based on what Brennan wrote, is that Ari basically decided he wanted to be seen as an AngularJS expert, so Ari wrote some books and put some other educational resources out there, and now Ari is insanely booked and making shitloads of money and all that.

The “world’s foremost AngularJS expert” title is probably already taken (well, I guess by somebody has to the world’s foremost AngularJS expert, so it’s definitely taken), and I think “world’s foremost AngularJS expert” is probably a pretty high bar, but I thought that maybe I can define a narrower niche and dominate that niche. So I set a goal (an admittedly nebulous goal) to become the world’s foremost expert on the AngularJS + Ruby on Rails combo. This is actually an idea I had months ago. I thought it was a great idea back then, and then I decided it was a stupid idea, and now I think it’s a really good idea again. I even bought AngularOnRails.com some months ago and put a tiny bit of content on it.

So I guess what I’m doing is putting even more effort into both my businesses. I sure hope I have the right idea with the Angular + Rails thing. I guess the worst case scenario is that I become a total expert but nobody cares. That seems unlikely.

I’m really loving this opt-in form on my website that keeps collecting email addresses. The feeling that my business is accumulating something valuable for me without my active involvement is a really encouraging one.

I blocked off the next hour to be my hour of the day I work on Snip, so I’m gonna go do that. See you next FRIDAY.