Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 24, 2020

TinyPilot

• 26 new orders! Huge week.
• Published the blog post TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under $100, which attracted a surge of interest in TinyPilot.
• End of week stats:
  • Sales revenue: $4,814.49
    • Profit margin: 30-40%
  • New customers: 26
  • Blog post readers: 38,327
  • Sales page visitors: 2,678
  • Amazon Affiliate Earnings: $39.99 (at one point, I considered monetizing entirely through affiliate links - whew!)
• Recorded a video demo of TinyPilot.
• Worked with a designer to finalize the logo.
• Shipped out 9 TinyPilot kits.
• Ordered more supplies so I can fill backorders.
• Ran into lots of “things that don’t scale” in this process:
  • Writing microSD cards: I should be able to have one image I just dd onto every SD card, but whenever I try it fails, so I end up with this very manual process of writing a stock Raspberry Pi OS image, booting it, then installing everything on the live system.
  • Printing address labels from Stripe orders - strangely, Stripe doesn’t seem to offer support for exporting a list of shipping addresses.
  • Sending tracking notifications to customers.
  • Managing inventory: I have this doofy spreadsheet, but I need a better way of keeping track of which parts I have in stock, how many kits that translates to, and how many parts are in transit to me.
• Did lots of responding on social media:
  • Hacker News
  • /r/homelab
  • /r/RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS
  • /r/raspberryDIY
• Added support for rebooting directly from the web interface.
• Fixed a bug where I was assuming every TinyPilot device used the hostname tinypilot.
• Started experimenting with a different installation mechanism for nginx, because the one I’m using now just pulls from the Debian repository, and it’s a version of nginx that’s 8 years old.
  • I suspect the old version is to blame for issues I’m running into with proxying.

Is It Keto

• Got rid of affiliate ads I was experimenting with on category pages (they were generating zero revenue) and replaced them with generic AdSense ads.

mtlynch.io

• Published the TinyPilot blog post.

Gridsome

In an effort to help Gridsome improve dev velocity, I’ve been volunteering a few hours a week to help manage their documentation.

• Reviewed and merged 6 PRs.
• Did more Markdown lint cleanup
  • https://github.com/gridsome/gridsome.org/pull/492
  • https://github.com/gridsome/gridsome.org/pull/493

Beekeeping

• My hives are ready for their first honey harvest of 2020!
  • Put an escape board (basically a one-way maze that leads the bees out of the honey boxes) in preparation of harvesting this weekend.
• Ordered more bottles and honey labels.

Misc

• Realized I accidentally configured most of my homelab VMs to use my NAS as local disk instead of SSD.
  • I was so confused why my new server wasn’t blowing away every benchmark on my old server, so that’s why.
  • Reconfigured my VM server and rebuilt a bunch of VMs.