Intro
This week was about building LuminaLog.com, hosting a VR Meetup and contemplating what is the future of this startup.
Table of Contents
Look back on journals from 2019
Building something that changes the world
Hosted a VR Dev Hack Night meetup
On what LuminaLog.com is about
Look back on journals from 2019
Looking back at old journals. How things have changed. What are the blind spots? What lessons do you see?
Looking back on journals from early 2019. I was focused on finding a new job, moving from a smaller web development company to something that paid better and ideally was located in downtown Chicago. I was already almost two years to learning to code and working in the field. It was interesting that I managed to achieve those goals. By the end of the year I was living in the West Loop, going to work every day at a company that was exactly what I wanted to find. It was not really all perfect though, there was a lot of complexity here that I will not go into. In the beginning of 2019 I was writing things that were similar to what I am experiencing how, about how to build a startup, how to build an app that gets regular users. What I wrote then, is still valid. It is still something that I was making progress, yet looking back on it now, I can see that the big mistake I was making was that I was too isolated. I did not post about my projects publicly anywhere, I didn’t tweet, I didn’t engage in reddit conversations, I wasn’t part of any IRL communities. I wasn’t going to meetups, I wasn’t attending hackathons. I was really building things on my own and then it felt like there was this big gap from where I was to a state where someone would be using my app and would be willing to pay for it.
After five years, I can look back and see that I have made the steps necessary to get to the point where I see the right path to take to get to an app that has business success. Currently I am part of IRL communities, I go to meetups, hackathons and publish online about my work. I have implemented these things that I identified as being critical. What is next is needed is that I continue on this path of building, putting things out there, talking to users and iterating on the design and development. What is required is that I keep building, believing in the product, to keep using it myself, to keep getting feedback and improving it. I can look back and say that I have implemented the changes that I needed to make.
Building something that changes the world
We have right now the open window of opportunity to build something that changes the world. For example allowing one billion people to get ahead in life by education, by connection, by entrepreneurship by the use of a well designed AI tool. Being motivated by a vision of what the future can be like.
How being a developer is an art and building products is an art. To get better at this you need to keep exploring, to keep learning, to meet other developers that are ahead of you and learning from them. To keep improving your products. To keep pitching things and talking to VC’s and customers. To keep growing. To keep the eye on the metrics, the KPI’s and to keep taking massive action to accomplish those things that help you to get to the next stage.
When building products, you can get to the stage where you just created something out of thin air, a new social custom, a new practice, like for example people staying in AirBnB’s or driving Uber’s, this was not a normal thing before the founders came and build them. They created this new social reality and a new way for people to make a living. It required a degree of courage to go through all of the difficulties, all the challenges, all the doubt from others, all of the hard work without knowing if it will lead to anything.
When building a business you are really building a new life for yourself and for others. You are creating a new world. You are creating the future. It is value generation when you are using your intelligence, to create something new that creates value for people.
Hosted a VR Dev Hack Night meetup
This is a nice service to the community. People really like that someone organizes this thing where people can come together and work or study on the same subject. They can have the opportunity to exchange ideas, to share what they’re working on, and it is a space where they can be motivated and keep each other accountable to get things done. They can be inspired by other people’s work, ideas or approaches. It is very important to have this kind of community. I feel very strongly that organizing this kind of space does a lot of good for the world. It is motivating me to keep going even though it is a lot of work, to organize it, you have to block off a part of your time, you have to be there and do this work of setting up the space, of mediating it, of being there the whole time and being responsible. The benefits are really significant on the other hand. You make a lot of connections, you build a community, you build credibility and you discover a lot of new things.
On what LuminaLog.com is about
On having a clear mission statement, a brand, values, a clear target user and keep reiterating them. For me the target user is someone like me, that is a person that is curious about the world, that is feeling urgency to turn his potentiality into reality, that grows, that keeps learning, that travels, that discovers distant lands, that connects with a variety of people, that builds communities, that studies, that does martial arts, that practices meditation, prayer and conversations. Picture this kind of ideal customer persona, a person in their 20’s - 30’s that is determined to grow and to learn. I am building this product for this kind of person. LuminaLog.com is the product for the kind of person that loves the Whole Earth Catalog. That is excited about AI, that is interested in meditation, that travels, that is a digital nomad, that is curious about the world, that is hopeful for the future and is motivated to actualize their potential. This is the user persona.
I had a meeting with a VC this Friday morning and I got a lot of good insights into what is key questions to answer in the startup journey. It is critical to have a clear picture about who the target audience is. It is also critical to know clearly what problem you are solving. For LuminaLog.com the problem is that there is no way to create with AI, that is writings, art, video, and to have it in one place. There is no way to write your thoughts, your journals, and then have the AI get to know you, and over time be able to provide personalized recommendations, to give you insights, to give you feedback on your thoughts, to find the right information for you. Journaling is one of the critical components of living an examined life. Journaling becomes an extension of our minds.
The key benefits of journaling is that it is like an external memory that doesn’t fail. Adding an AI here makes it possible to make connections with other areas that you previously were not aware of. It is able to make associations when you’re thinking or talking about something related. It makes connections you were not aware of before. This really becomes a second brain. This really becomes a way for you to organize your thinking, to get to know yourself better, to get to know your past. To find out what lessons exist in your experiences. Truly it is analogous to the ancient Greek myth of Theseus making his escape out of the maze of the minotaur. It is a tool to live an examined life. It is a tool to communicate yourself to the world. It is a tool to express yourself. It is a tool to develop your ideas. It is a tool to discover what is inside of you, to discover yourself, and to create yourself through time, through reflections, through talking, through conversations with the AI.
LuminaLog.com has an enormous opportunity. The key aspects to this app is that it can build a community. The key to the success here is that it can help people actualize their potential. This is the mission that I am excited about. What LuminaLog allows you to do is to share with the world more of yourself, to share your journals, those that you choose to make public, so that the world can get to know you more, to see what makes you tick. Then it can find you the people that will make you grow, that will help you get ahead by bringing to you the content that is most valuable to you and allows you to learn more faster.
Building something that you use every day is a key component to success. If you get a lot of joy out of your products, your apps, and you’re using them every day, then you will improve them, you will be able to authentically promote them.
Conclusion
This week was about making incremental progress on LuminaLog, discovering that I need to refine the mission statement, the target audience and the problem that I am solving. Looking back on 2019 I see things that are repeating and things that I have made a much progress in. Next week I will keep improving the app, doing social media marketing. Here is a song that I played a lot this week to close the week out on: