Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 7, 2020

WanderJest

Formed a partnership with local improv theater
- Added 20 of their upcoming shows to WanderJest
- Two of their shows now have an affiliate deal with WanderJest
- Made some tweaks to the website to more flexibly support affiliate shows
- Updated filters to include improv shows
Added basic admin web UIs for adding performers and performances
- Edit performance UI
- Edit performer UI
- Previously, I was doing it all via mini Go apps and had no way of editing except to delete and re-add an item
- These will eventually turn into user interfaces for performers and show organizers to add their shows
Got accepted to pitch at Valley Venture Mentors next week
- Created a short pitch deck
Attended two comedy shows
Had a call with another developer who created a similar website years ago but has since lost interest
Posted about WanderJest on a local Facebook group and got a positive response
Got approval to run Google Ads
- Anyone website that lists paid events needs special permissions
- Created my first set of ads a few minutes ago, so we’ll see what happens
Did exploratory testing of Google Auth on UserKit
- Requires getting a Google client ID, which I’m having trouble doing (Google’s fault, not UserKit’s)
Ran into a cookie issue that I think was because I accidentally logged in over plaintext HTTP
- Updated WanderJest’s AppEngine config to force all requests over HTTPS

Published my January retrospective
Continued working on my post about digitizing all of my home videos
Investigated alternatives to MailChimp because I’m approaching the 2,000 subscriber limit
- Sendy looks nice in that it’s a one-time licensing fee, but I don’t want to have to run my own LAMP server
- I’m liking the looks of BigMailer.

Added a “More Entries” button to the bottom of the Recent page
Added target="_blank" to the link on “You can use Markdown” because a user reported that clicking the link caused them to lose their entry for the week

I wanted to get some more work done here to accomodate the influx of new users, but I got slammed with other stuff this week

Talked to the owner of Saasify about possibly testing out that platform as an alternative to RapidAPI
Reached out to the owner of a new cooking app about integrating Zestful, but they weren’t interested

Applied to MediaVine
- From what I’ve read, they pay 1.5-2.5x as much as AdSense
- I’d looked at them in the past, but I didn’t meet their traffic requirements (25k monthly users)
- Is It Keto reached their minimums a few months ago, so it’s worth another try
Cleaned up some stale Amazon Affiliate links

Booked travel for PyCon
Tried adjusting my Sia Docker image to run Sia as a non-root user within the container, but I ran into too many issues with permissions on the mounted volumes
Watched Jason Cohen’s 2013 MicroConf presentation
- patio11 had recommended it to me as the way to bootstrap a business the smart way
- I thought Cohen has lots of good ideas, and the video is certainly worth a watch, but the problem I’ve had is in convincing medium-to-large companies to spend the time bringing me into their business enough to see what problems I could solve for them at the $10k/month price point. The video doesn’t really answer that.
Scheduled the February Indie Founders Meetup