Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 23, 2020

TinyPilot

• Conducted a customer interview with an MSP I found on Reddit.
• Sent out 8 cold requests for customer interviews with MSPs / IT techs
  • One person responded to say they prefer responding over email
  • Another said they’d pass along the message
• Reached out to a blogger about reviewing TinyPilot
  • They seem interested
• Worked with 3D printer on TinyPilot case
• Worked with EE firm on power connector v2
• Promoted blog post about TinyPilot on Twitter
• Promoted podcast about TinyPilot on Twitter
• Tried chaining together a non-networked KVM with a TinyPilot
  • Sort of works, but the KVM’s hotkeys don’t seem to work, even when I connect a real keyboard.
• Added support on the website for multiple product images
• Added support on the website for “add-on” product of a VGA to HDMI adaptor
  • I frequently get emails asking if TinyPilot works with VGA, so I’m experimenting with just allowing users to add it on to their order.
• Worked with an external developer on adding mass storage support to TinyPilot Pro.
• Tested the new beta of vdesktop
• Refactored my main.py file
  • Moved API route handlers, view handlers, and websocket handlers each in their own files.
• Integrated my Shopify account with eBay
  • No sales yet, but I might be getting sales from people who choose to buy on the website to avoid the markup I added to eBay
• Negotiated wholesale pricing for TinyPilot cases (50% cheaper than what I was paying).
• Finally set up an Amazon Business account.
  • Should have done it sooner because it allows native support for negotiating bulk orders.
• Experimented with Reddit ads again
  • Still 0 sales, gave up.

mtlynch.io

• Re-submitted to Hacker News
  • It reached a high of #3!
• Submitted TinyPilot blog post to /r/HomeServer
• Continued working on code reviews blog post.

Writing course / book

• Continuing to think about how I want to do an info product.
  • Current thinking is to start with a video course on Hacker News, then write an edook about writing for developers
• Purchased Writing for Developers by Philip Kiely to compare his approach to what I want to do.

Misc

• Started experimenting with a switch from Gmail to Fastmail.
  • After 16 years as a happy Gmail user, this thread finally scared me into reducing my dependence on Google.
  • Impressions so far
    • Interface is a little worse than Gmail, but I’m not totally sure if that’s real or just perception because I’m used to Gmail
    • Customer support: Emailed customer support with a question, and got a response back from a human in 2 hours
    • Multi-domains is way better on Fastmail. On Gmail, to email from an alternate domain, you have to do this clunky process for each address you ever want to send from, but with fastmail, setup is really fast and you can instantly send mail from any address in your domain.
    • Most of the other functionality I use is pretty much the same.
    • Importing all my Gmail archives was surprisingly easy (just OAuth).
• Voted in state and federal elections.
  • Go Kucinich!