Double header: Expert beginners

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

Season 2: Episode 2

It's a Small Efforts Double Header! We were late getting this episode out, so we decided to go ahead and publish two weeks of episodes at once. In this episode Andrew talks about quietly pushing ChartJuice live, and raves about his new favorite podcast. Meanwhile Sean drops some knowledge about the intricacies of swag supply chains, and the guys discuss the trap of being an expert beginner vs a true expert. Finally, Sean talk about a leadership retreat he's going on soon.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• ChartJuice: https://www.chartjuice.com/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.00

Sean Sun

Yeah, hey doing sorry late.

00:00.64

Andrew

All good man I've just been over here sipping on my in Zony Happy as can be.

00:06.41

Sean Sun

Ah, there you good there Good How's your week been. What's you been up to.

00:13.49

Andrew

Um, not a bad week. Um, let's see I haven't been hella productive this week but I've been making steady progress. So um.

00:29.64

Andrew

Think this happened after last week's pod. Um, so I sent out chart juice for feedback to a small group of friends you um, awesome price Greg um, handful of people and.

00:49.48

Andrew

My friends are super generous and so a bunch of people took the time to create an account and give me some feedback and a lot of feedback I got was like hey this is cool. Um, you know Austin understandably spent a bunch time on the ux and was like hey you know you should left a line. Your text anytime you have more than a line or two because it becomes harder to read when it's center aligned and I was like dope didn't know that that's a really helpful rule of thumb. Thanks for telling me um and then like Greg um in very Greg fashion pointed out. Hey on the signup form you should really have a couple of statements about the value props and like what people are going to get out of this to help encourage them to finish the signup process which is very Greg always thinking from the perspective of the user and thinking about like how do we optimize this. Um, so that was super helpful. My friend Kevin who is one of the original partners in crit and a super talented engineer took a very engineer's approach to it and he was like hey just so you know if you put in a ah. Width of greater than a hundred thousand pixels it breaks and I was like cool I don't care and like he obviously knew I wouldn't care but you know took took a very engineer approach to it and.

02:09.31

Sean Sun

Yeah, yeah.

02:19.44

Sean Sun

Um, yeah.

02:21.86

Andrew

Ah, like looked for the edge cases the weird extreme edge cases. The other one was like if you add more than 21 elements to a pie chart then the legend gets really wonky like create. Um, so.

02:39.40

Sean Sun

I think that's a hold on I just want to point out I don't think I think that's a feature not a bug I think no one should be adding 21 elements to a pie chart like a pizza doesn't have 21 slices yeah um

02:41.61

Andrew

Yeah.

02:49.77

Andrew

I Love it? Yeah yeah, yeah, we we intentionally make your chart look like shit past a certain point because like why stop.

02:56.87

Sean Sun

Right? right? Exactly There's a hidden feature that if you make it look like it'll all turn brown and.

03:03.80

Andrew

I mean the good thing to do would be if you use more than 8 elements or something in your pie chart. We just automatically start combining the smallest ones that would be nifty but um, but my favorite piece of advice came from my friend ramy um, who is an indie hacker.

03:13.12

Sean Sun

Um.

03:21.69

Andrew

Um, based out of the Uk and repeat founder has a few successful small products under his belt and his advice was basically good enough ship it and I was like that's you're so fucking right? so.

03:33.50

Sean Sun

Nice.

03:41.60

Andrew

Um, yeah, the first half of this week was shipping it so chart juice is now technically live I'm calling it a soft launch because I haven't really talked about it being live much at all yet I'm not being super public about it. Um I just linked up.

03:46.26

Sean Sun

Um, okay, um.

04:00.70

Andrew

The buttons on the marketing website to the actual app so that you can get to the app from the marketing website and then I made some small updates yesterday to the marketing website adding screenshots and a little bit more information about how it how it works. To try to make it a little bit clear what the product does because I had several people like hit the marketing website and go so is this like chart Js for emails and I was like I mean kind of but it's like a layer above that. Um, so I added some some screenshots and like a little bit more information without. While trying not to change too much because I still want to test kind of that original marketing copy and see how well it works. Um, but yeah, so chart juice is now live I am spending the rest of this week focused on trying to get billing working. Um, so i.

04:45.97

Sean Sun

Um, right.

04:57.83

Andrew

If you go sign up for an account right now it is free until I get billing implemented um and once I get billing implemented I'll I'll find some way to grandfather in any existing accounts with like an extra long free trial Probably um.

05:11.20

Sean Sun

Right? right? So Andrew's giving away lifetime access to anyone who signs up right now.

05:16.66

Andrew

Andrew's giving away short to your mas if your life only you know continues for another three or four weeks then yeah lifetime access.

05:25.31

Sean Sun

If you plan on dying soon. Sign up for George ah, that's the ad there you go is converting ad.

05:31.90

Andrew

Ah, perfect ship it so working on getting billing um, integrated which I've just been dragging my feet a little bit. It's just boring. It's like it's standard. Ah. Stuff I Just got to hook up some webhooks and Yada Yada Um, and then the other thing I need to do that's kind of important is I need to actually test using our embed code in a transactional email which is like somewhat. Hard to do since I don't have an existing Saas product with existing data. Um, So yeah, I'll just I'll probably just fudge the data. But um I need to send out some test emails. Um, and then I want to record a demo video of like the entire end-to-end process.

06:24.35

Sean Sun

Right...