SparkleWise

I’ve recently read about “interviewing yourself” (read in mind performance hacks. Pretty good BTW, I might write an entry about it). So I just took a plunge and played the interviewer and interviewee part, to reflect on my recent professional development. It’s actually quite fun and it really forces you to think through what’s in [...]

“I need to do more preparation before I start”. Is it something holding you back? Are you spending way too much time on getting ready instead of getting started? I know that’s something holding me back. Watch out for preparation as procrastination When people ask me about my personal projects these days, I usually answer [...]

A cofounder left not too long ago. At his farewell dinner, he said something about minimal products that stuck with me: “We have made many mistakes, one of which was to build a full-featured product to solve a need that we thought was important. Instead we could have done a small manual prototype, and verify [...]

Have you ever had “THE IDEA”? It suddenly hit you, THAT WAS IT. You knew what to do. All you had to do now was to execute THE IDEA, and success would follow. You’re not crazy though, so you made sure to validate this idea. Talk to your friends, even potential customers, survey them, listen [...]

Most of what you read on the web or in the magazines about the software business are the incredible successes, the outliers, the Facebooks and Instagrams of this world. We rarely read about failures because they’re not glamorous. And still, there’s so much to learn about failures of others! This is mostly intended to other [...]

“Write a blog post”. This line sits on my todo-list most days, because I believe I should blog more. There’s a problem with this todo item though. I’d suggest the problem is not what you think it is. I’d argue it’s not exactly about motivation. I do write 750 words a day, most days, on [...]

There’s debate whether it’s more effective to build on our strengths or fix our weaknesses. I have my fair share of weaknesses, of course! I wanted to introspect a little and explore a few of my weaknesses. Today: planning. The symptom I’m not very good at planning. So I periodically think “man, I should get [...]

After more than a year of hearing glowing reviews from my peers, I’ve taken the leap to join the 30×500 class. What is 30×500? It’s an online class designed to take you from “zero to hero for your very first paying product”. It’s mostly geared towards web developers, web designers and other technical types for [...]

I haven’t written in a while. Actually, I abruptly stopped writing on this blog 5 months ago. Today, I’d like to psychoanalyze my lack of writing, no less! Since I’ve started this blog, there have been highs and lows. A few blog posts resonated with a lot of people, several posts were showing on Hacker [...]

Following my post about the state of my first passive income website, several people wanted to know specifics about my SEO strategy, or how I get traffic to this website. Most traffic comes from search (Google). It boils down to creating content targeted to user intent. More specifically, it means doing research to discover what [...]