I made this using Rotato.xyz. The mac apps makes it a breeze to create 4d screen animations like those you see on Apple commercials. This is a great tool for indie mobile devs — no need to find a graphic designer just to pull this off.
The best part — the software was a one-time purchase. No subscriptions— exactly how it should be for a tool like this.
Thanks rotato.xyz ❤
Three years ago, when I began my first and only full-time job as a computer programmer, I remember complaining about sitting for too long. Minus bathroom breaks, and lunch, my peers had no problem sitting in comfy rolling chairs from 10-6pm. It was the norm.
Since that day up until … now, I accepted the norm and forgot why I even removed my chair and squatted the rest of that day at work.
I mentioned in my last post, I’m set on getting back in shape and working out. It’s hard claiming you were once a “strength coach”, and can’t even squat 250 on the bar anymore. (I’m current 178lbs; best shape was at 170, worst shape was 190+).
The only hesitation I have with coding or any computer work in general while standing, is that after fifteen minutes, it gets hard to concentrate. Yeah — that sounds pretty lame and unathletic, but I assure you, it’s real and for me at least, intentional coding and hard hard thought-processing happen best when I’m sitting. Not standing, not lying down— sitting with two monitors and a good cup of coffee.
The best middle ground I found was kneeling on a mat. My working desk happens to be the perfect height when I kneel on my thick Amazon Basics yoga mat, assuming I kneel with upright ergonomic posture.
Yeah, kneeling gets tiring too, but at least it feels like a stretch / workout. I alternate between half and full kneeling, and squeeze my glutes to get some psoas major / front hip stretching happening.
Why squeeze the glutes to relax the anterior hips? In exercise science, we call this reciprocal inhibition.
Reciprocal inhibition describes the process of muscles on one side of a joint relaxing to accommodate contraction on the other side of that joint.
wikipedia
I’ll see how this goes, but I’m already loving the glute burn.
2020. The theme to start this new decade is: less code, more moving. This year is about getting back in shape, playing more basketball and coaching fitness again.
Like any scrappy entrepreneur, you need to eat your own dog food. In this case, I’m using my own coaching platform to kickstart my remote personal training business.
I’m hoping to create plenty of free workouts anyone can follow, while offering a premium for private remote coaching for certain programs. I’d love to know what you think!
It’s the originality, the melodies, the aura of a young pop star — no, it’s got to be the fact the loves The Office.
I learned about Billy Eilish early last year. She was already kind of big, but she did this YouTube video with Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight.
Her new album didn’t even release yet, so I just looked up her other hits and albums. Instantly, I was digging her music. I don’t know why but I kept listening— because all her songs were catchy. and just lyrically witty and mature for a 16-17 year old.
https://open.spotify.com/album/7fRrTyKvE4Skh93v97gtcU?si=ycIeNBtlS0GE66N_ITdEeg
Embarrassingly, I find out her fanbase is in the same 15-18 yo age group (surprise). I would ask all my friends if they knew who Billie Eilish was, and responses were either ‘never heard of her’ or lukewarm at best.
I mean, at this point, I don’t think anyone can possibly think it’s uncool to like Billie Eilish, Her album ‘when we sleep, we do we go?’ exploded in 2019. It’s just madness how fast she ascended the mainstream music charts. She deserves it. I would not be surprised if she won album of the year in the coming Grammys.
Anyways, my girlfriend Nicole knew how much I loved her, so she got me tickets to see her this coming March. YEEEEE boi.
Sales is pretty fun once when your heart stops beating so hard.
Me after my first cold call.
I started a sales course for tech founders last month, and one of my early assignments is to find people who are in fitness that are willing to talk to me. Ask them about their work, their jobs and things that really bother them— seemed simple enough.
It’s really not so bad, at least not at the moment. Most of the people I’ve contacted are friends or loose acquaintances, so it’s like calling an old friend and explaining why I forgot to wish them a happy birthday for the last 3 years (kidding).
This week, I’ve gotten with calls with about 10 people, so I’m off to a great start. Now if I can get back on the social media grind and start posting more content on SuperFit and @imleokwan. So many things to do, but just one of me.
Another thing I learned about doing sales and scheduling calls— way more people than I imagined are willing to give their insight and perspective as help. Phrasing a chat in that context makes everything seem much more natural, and we all almost forget the sales intent of my call.
Thanks friends and others for speaking with me. I appreciate you and every bit of guidance helps.
2019 might have been the most difficult year in my life. It shouldn’t have been, but it couldn’t have felt any worse. I’m aware that I’m raised in a privileged country, and that I’m just privileged, I have a set of AirPods Pro, they work well.
Starting a business is hard. I never learned what it truly meant, despite working for many companies before.
The issue is that I’m a pretty stubborn and contrarian person. These traits sound negative, but they’ve steered me pretty far in life. I usually don’t settle with how good something is because I’m always considering how it can be better; for example, my jumpshot, company dogma, coding skills— you know, this type of stuff. It’s a little hypercompetitive, and it definitely rubs some people the wrong way.
This approach screwed me up big time with my bootstrapped business. I didn’t listen to others. Better yet, I didn’t even ask. I assumed I knew it all and that people who did not understand my idea were not my target population. This thought might have been true for some occasions, but I really wish I tried asking for more feedback before writing code like a maniac.
I always told myself, if someone does something stupid — you need to tell them. It is your duty to let them know, ‘this is wrong’. This year I learned that this mentality is driving a lot of my temper issues. I get angry a lot about stupid things that other people are doing, so much to the point that it all came boiling down one night in December where I came down hard and was just in a bad place, details not important.
Even at that point, I still didn’t get it. I just told myself to chill out more.
It was when I started a sales course last week in hopes to reach profitability in 2020, that I realized — being upset at people’s tendencies and behaviors are not traits to be mad about, they are opportunities to profit from.
This sounds disgustingly salesy, but through the context of growing my business, I learned that people are often who they are and don’t have a weird inkling like me to never settle and continually improve at everything. They often just want to pay to fix a problem if it’s painful enough. I wish I had a more profound experience that taught me to “leave people be”, but it’s only typical I learned a personal lesson while working on the job. I need to get out more.
Create something that solves a real pain, not just a problem.
Continuing from my last point, this learning was the most important for me personally despite the business context. There are a lot of things people want and find problems with, but just aren’t willing to pay to fix. When I built my fitness app, I thought a lot of people would want to use it— they didn’t. There are many others reasons why it didn’t work— didn’t market well, niche audience, etc.
One thing was very clear though, no one came banging on the door for it. That’s the product market fit I did not have.
I’m pretty weird.
I don’t use QWERTY, rather in Colemak. I track a lot of things because I lack long term memory; I definitely have OCD and I even think I possess some level of ADD, (even before the social media age).
I’m also not a fast learner, so I’m the type of person to spend the extra time to understand and adopt something, even if it’s very unintuitive. As you might imagine, this mindset is terrible for a solo-run business because I think athletes might actually care enough to navigate my app and even come back often.
Aside finished, I learned the hard way that your focus and intent as a business is at the mercy of your selected customers, not you — no matter how fitting you believe you are to them. As a result the untethered motivation and excitement is no longer there with building my business, but I don’t intend on quitting. I’m not sure if it’s ‘right’ for founders to feel this way about their business. Shouldn’t one be waking up with a bright-orange sunshine in frame of her, hitting the morning coffee and zealous to growing something awesome?
—
but I’ll finish with what I think are positives to my hard learnings. My customer voice and my actual customer’s voice are now separate. I don’t assume what’s not fulfilling my interests is what’s best for my business. Because I’m not as emotionally invested, I wholeheartedly feel more steady, mentally, since 2020 began. (random: I also started taking multi-vitamins so that helps.)
I also give less shits about putting in the daily hours working because though I will never downplay the need for hard work, I’ll always prefer losing sleep working for my personal interests over that of others— contextualize this positively, please. I hope this mindset continues to help me work with a more balance attitude and schedule. More time to do random things, and more time to cook with my girlfriend.
I started running not too long ago— 8 months ago to be exact, and I was in your shoes. I never liked running and I never played sports for endurance. In swimming, I always swam the 100m freestyle; in basketball, all I always sprinted down the court. Running for distance was never my element.
Earlier this year, my friend texts me urging me to sign up for the Brooklyn Half Marathon 2019. I did, and my running journey began! I was excited, but mainly really intimidated by the idea of running 13.1 miles. I had never even run a 5k, not to mention a half. I trained and ran 3x a week for 10 weeks until a week before race day.
I was crushing the first 7 miles. By mile 9-10 though… game over. I started feeling exhausted, and the heat shining down the open Ocean Parkway boulevard did not help. I was gassed out and I essentially had to hobble run to the finish. 13.1 miles might have been too much for my 10 week training window.
I was truly happy to check “run half marathon” off my bucket list, but I still wish I performed better in the end. On the flip side— sometimes I get so caught up on my last two miles, I forget that my 10 weeks of training made my first 7 miles feel like a breeze! There was a point earlier this year when I was intimidated by running 3 miles! I made significant progress on my standards, and that’s all that matter.
Two days after the race and somewhat recovered, I confirmed to myself, “running is actually fun. I’m signing up for more races.”
And I did. I signed up for the Queens 10K, 5 Mile Pride Run, the Bronx 10 mile, and Staten Island Half Marathon. I continued to consistently run and began to enjoy the workouts because I no longer feel exhausted 3 miles in my workout!
My next race is the Staten Island Half Marathon in two weeks. I’m hoping I average under a 9:30 pace, 🤞, I’ll keep you posted 🏃🏻♂️.
Last year, my company SuperFit was selected to Y Combinators’ online startup school program. If you don’t know, Y Combinator is a popular tech incubator in Mountain View, California that, in exchange for 7% of your company for a 130k seed investment~, provides support, mentorship and the most popular platform for showcasing your startup’s purpose to investors and the world.
What I really like about Y Combinator if we look past its venture motives, is their efforts to democratize the science of entrepreneurship, mainly with respect to technology. For one thing, most of their tips and nuggets of wisdom are posted on their youtube channel.
The largest tangible benefit I got out of Startup School’s was their long list of freebies in partnership with many other companies and services like AWS, Digital Ocean, and Stripe Atlas. (Digital Ocean offered 30k in credits to all their services!). Let’s talk about Stripe Atlas.
Okay, my gripe isn’t necessarily with Stripe as it really should be with one piece of advice from one of Y Combinator’s video lectures on business formation.
Based on Y Combinator’s suggestion, C Corp was a no brained. My business SuperFit is already incorporated in NY as an LLC— I thought to myself, “gahh, I should have done a C Corp in the first place!”
I did not plan on doing anything about my decision until I found out Stripe launched a program called Stripe Atlas, which aimed at making the filing for C Corps super easy, and if you were accepted into Y Combinator’s startup school program, you were eligible for the Atlas program at half the price the package would normally cost!
So I did it— Stripe is an amazing company, I trusted the advice from Y Combinator in partnership with Stripe Atlas without hesitation.
Annnnnd then the fees came.
I signed up for a C Corp late in the year, October, and now I’ve got to pay about 50+ dollars on Delaware franchise taxes.
Preface: I am not a lawyer. Y Combinator will often preach that start up companies undoubtedly start C-Corp formations. That may be sound advice for companies lined up for YC’s winter and summer pipelines, but for its Startup School program, which is their equivalent of an online MOOC with office hours, that advice does not hold up with as much certainly, especially for my case. If I had to make an educated guess, I would imagine that got to be at least a quarter of companies in Startup School (~1500) that plan on bootstrapping their business long term as indie hackers.
With that said, there is still a resounding case for forming a C-Corp over an LLC.
For me personally, I’ve decided with an accountant that I should hold off on dissolution of my Stripe Atlas C Corp until the end of 2019, in case I decide that it’s worth going that direction over my current LLC.
To give some credit to LLCs, Facebook started as an LLC and became a C Corp years after— Basecamp and Wildbit are very successful companies building software on an LLC formation.
If I learned anything on this path to the right business formation, it’s that my interests and long term motivation lean closer to the http://www.indiehackers.com community than YC. YC is great— their podcast series is terrific and they are without question a thought leader in startup culture and tech, but I’ve found that people and companies list on Indie Hackers are more relatable to my daily challenges.
I’m a coding boot camp grad.
I should be proud to be one— but I’m not. I’m aware that becoming a software developer has opened so many opportunities, experiences and friendships for me over the last 4 years— but still, I’m not proud to be a boot camp grad.
I think it has to do with my perception the typical boot camp grads only know what’s needed to get an entry level software developer job. As someone who’s been around boot camp grads as peers and mentors, it sure feels that way many times.
I’m being mean. Back when I was learning to code in 2015, I was not the smart whiz who completed every code module first. I was the complete opposite- the slow poke. I was the student who needed a lot of help and just took a bit longer to understand the difference between an array and a dictionary. Did I mention my first real structured experience in learning to program was iOS programming? I feel that it’s crucial that we learn to code beyond our isolated environments and mobile frameworks. For me, that means going beyond Swift, Objective-C and Xcode.
As a mobile-first developer, I’m one of few boot camp grads who did not enter a “traditional” boot camp path. And yes, I think we are at the point where natural selection has chosen its winning boot camp structure and curriculum through nearly a decade of trial and error. Nowadays, most boot camps’ flagship course is a 3 month full-time intensive full stack developer program. When I was applying for coding camps, a full-stack web curriculum was actually what I wanted to pursue, but Full-Stack Academy in NY rejected me, and as an alternative I luckily got accepted into an iOS bootcamp at the Flatiron School.
I don’t know many for-profit coding camps with a dedicated mobile development curriculum anymore. Last year, The Flatiron School actually discontinued their mobile program, probably because its careers team simply could not source the growing list of graduating mobile developers into substantial full time work in the New York City area. (Thank you Plated for believing in me)
I do not believe native mobile programming is dying anytime soon. On the android side, new operating systems and technologies like project Fuschia and Android Q are in the works; on iOS land, iOS may soon extend to MacOS development natively, allowing iOS apps to possibly run on Macs.
We’re going to be okay, and if you’re really good with build custom UI on either platforms, you’ll be even more okay.
My plead to mobile-first developers is only aimed at the “mobile-only” mindset of developers. Make time to go beyond our dedicated IDEs and push yourself to learn something new. The most complementary skillset for mobile devs in my opinion to getting your feet web in web server + API development. After all, if there is no data provided to our apps, we don’t have much of an app.
Or, you can also stay on the frontend and learn how to leverage popular web frameworks like React and Angular. This will expose you to writing good old HTML, CSS and Javascript with some magic annotations sprinkled in between.
Or, if you’re interested in scaling applications and improving server resiliency, play around with populate infrastructure services like AWS or Digital Ocean and try launching a simple web application.
The point I’m trying to make is: create really good reasons for mobile bootcamp grads to be respected. Most companies that have mobile apps are not solely based on mobile. Besides the hand few that come to mind like Tinder, Day One, Lyft, Uber, most engineering teams allocate most of its horsepower on building and maintaing backend systems and integrity of those systems. In a smaller to midsized engineering team, I am almost certain you can be a greater helping hand if you have some full stack experience or just the interest in it.
When building the MVP of SuperFit, I made a hard stance that I was not going to use Firebase, but instead use the junior experience I had with node.js and stand up my own backend on Heroku. This was just one year after starting my bootcamp at Flatiron. Even with Express & Heroku, there was still a steep learning curve to writing and deploying a web server on my own.
If I only thought about taking my side-project to the moon back in 2016, I might have just stuck with Firebase. It turns out the best business decision vs. the best career advancing decision almost always clash.
But selfishly, my stance back then was about challenging myself to learn more on improving my resume and overall programming experience. Many other bootcamp grads can attest to this—
Even when you land your first job, you still feel absolutely unsure if you can even last in the industry beyond a year, at least I did.
Do it. Take a course, expand your skillset and try something new. I promise, it’ll make you a better mobile developer by tying concepts, big or small that you never expect to benefit you.
I started running a bit more regularly a year ago when a coworkers from my past job started a running club for all running enthusiasts in the office. I was definitely interested.
A year later, that same person who who started the running club convinced me recently to do the Brooklyn Half marathon this May.
I’ve got some training to do; I’ve never ran a 5k before, let alone 12 miles ever in an entire day. I’ve been running occasionally in Flushing, Queens— where I’m currently living, but it’s hard to run in the neighborhood with all the stop signs, crazy drivers— as well as some crazy people.
Fortunately I found that a long commute out to Central Park is well worth the effort because the park is surrounded with runners and people just enjoying the far-reaching spaces of foliage, smack center in a city where dedicated space for anything else is less than achievable.
Best part about the run is you can stop by the MET afterwards if you’re on the Upper East Side.
