Standup
Yesterday I implemented my marketing site/Markdown driven blog for the product website and styled both of them using Tailwind Plus.
The logo assets were pre-existing, generated by Dall-E 3 last year. The typefaces are from Google Fonts. Styling is by sticking the Tailwind CSS Play CDN into the head of each site. Most of the structure and design is taken directly from Tailwind Plus UI Blocks and just dumping the HTML into the page and tweaking things. The clouds in the company website are WebGL - this clouds shader rendered by ShaderToyLite.js. Most pages just have lorem ipsum content and none of the contact forms are wired up.
Today, I need to replace lorem ipsum with real marketing content, wire up the contact forms to the CSV code, and integrate Stripe's hosted UI. I'll eventually implement webhooks to notify my server of customer purchases and perform account setup actions, but that's definitely something that can be punted to the prototype. I also need to convert the Tailwind CDN hook to a production Tailwind build. If I have time, I'd like to set up a Github workflow that will SSH into a server and sighup my FastAPI server.
This will give me something that I can deploy live and direct traffic to and somewhere to share articles from on places like LinkedIn, BlueSky, etc.
I have to admit I paused for a few minutes before pulling the trigger on purchasing Tailwind Plus. $299 USD is a lot for someone who has no income. I'm a pretty good developer but I am not a designer, nor a CSS guru. I will never pretend to be. Instead of comparing purchasing Plus with not purchasing Plus, I compared purchasing Plus with contracting a UX person to do that work for me. Through that lens, $299 USD is a bargain.
The days of being able to throw up a plain HTML page and expect to get funded are gone, unless you’re Andrej Karpathy. The bar for the anonymous like myself is much higher, and today’s internet user’s are more sophisticated because they literally grew up with it. I’ve been building and designing sites since at least 2008 (as far back as I have screenshots) and there’s always been this… wall to my designs.
We get into creative work because we have good taste. But there's this gap. For the first couple of years, the work is just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. - Ira Glass
These are not good designs.
Before now, it didn’t matter! I was just noodling on a personal blog that I wasn’t promoting, writing because I enjoy it and because I enjoy doing odd things that are sometimes interesting enough to talk about. I talked about starting apps and businesses but didn’t believe in myself enough to outsource the things I’m not good at. I had the luxury of time to learn and grow.
The stakes this time around are different. I am promoting this blog, I am starting to actually build and market apps now. It matters if someone visits my sites and thinks they were made by an amateur who is still learning. I’m a one person show and I’ll never hide that fact, but I should look like a one professional show, not a one fresh-out-of-college-grad show.
Beyond the instant appeal to the design brought by the pre-designed and constructed HTML code, it unblocked me on something that I find to be the slowest part of my process, which is all the marketing work required to actually properly launch a product. Being able to go from a single rather naked looking site with bare-bones pages and no visual appeal to two fully designed and implemented (arguably) attractive marketing sites in a single day's work is astounding. The speed in development alone is well worth the monetary cost.
As I tried to stress in my kick off post to this whole thing, time is my ruthless taskmaster and its demands must be listened to. Spending $299 to gain days of productivity is a smart investment of money and time.
The intro call with AICo went well, and I'm expecting to move on through their funnel. I also made calendar appointments for intro calls with InsuranceCo and HealthCo. Hopefully I'll be entering the interview and take home stages with these 3 companies next week, and wrapping those up the week after.
I don’t know how well this generalizes, and the social stigma against talking about being unemployed1 has prevented me from hearing other people’s stories. For me, though, my general experience with job searching in a tough economy is that these contacts come in cohorts.
In the boom days as I’m sure many of you have experienced, it was a rare week to receive fewer than 3 recruiter emails asking you if you were exploring a change. There was a constant flow of opportunities through my LinkedIn and email that I was often tempted to ignore them. In lean times the emails still come, but they’re a lot slower. Between general role/skillset mismatches, roles for industries I’m not interested in working in2 and sketchy fly-by-night recruiters who don’t show up to scheduled calls, I find I don’t have many viable options at any given time.
They accumulate, though. The hard times mean companies move slower and are more careful to hire. The interview process is fast to start, but once you start dealing with multiple people and scheduling things start to slow down. It’s not uncommon for these interviewing pipelines to “bunch up” into a cohort, where I’m doing anywhere from 1-3 interviews per week, each for multiple companies. I think I hit 7 interviews in one week back in 2023.
I try to keep my cohorts to 3-5 companies at a time, just because I can't manage much more simultaneous interviewing. I'll interview with companies in a cohort and hopefully get at least one offer. While interviewing, I'm also evaluating the companies and disqualifying them based on my own 'good workplace' rubric. At the end, if there's an offer from a company I haven't disqualified, I'm done. Otherwise, wait for the next cohort and start again.
Not getting an offer for a cohort is very stressful - fortunately for me, it’s only happened once. It puts immense and immediate pressure on finding a job, as if there already wasn’t immense pressure. Interviewing takes time and now, not only are you starting from zero again essentially, but you also have been told by multiple companies that they don’t want you. It’s very easy to allow these knocks to affect your confidence which can cause an interview performance spiral which makes it even harder to find work.
In that situation, the only thing you can do is take a deep breath, remind yourself that you are in fact a profession and you do in fact have valuable skills, and start again.
Like you’re somehow tainted because nobody is currently paying you, as if the worst performing employed worker is more valuable than you are.
Anything marketing analytics, anything social, anything that kills or oppresses people.