Simple Life

Stuff we did together in 2018 and what is cooking for 2019🎊

Hey there 👋 Happy New Year of 2019. Thank you for reading our blog — Your appreciations, suggestions and love shoot through the roof this year, and I can’t even find words to thank you enough.

Like it is becoming a tradition, Here is a highlight of 2018 accomplishments and shortcomings, as well as 2019 agenda, hope you enjoy new year head 🙏🏻

2018

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• Elon Musk’s BFR had a successful maiden launch and Aretha Franklin passed away, Bito O’ Rourke succumbed to Tedd! A roller coster of mixed emotions ~ that is how I will remember this year.

• As promised, “Angularjs migration to Angular” and “The Productive Solopreneur” content is complete. Next year will be for making sure it gets updated and reaches larger audiences compared to previous years ~ I added trends for the last month below.

• Future iterations of the application are heavily user centered(customer centered) — in making upgrades include a streamlined feed, ability to book from the application as well as participant’s website providers — using a widget running on those websites.

• On product side though, I failed to finalize the front-end migration. The reasons and how I do it is documented in the new series — “The Deep Dive”. In case you need inspirations to learn React, how to do migration from Angular to React, that is can help you as well!

• To make more products become available on the platform — the need to involve those who are already making a difference and integrate their their inventory into our product has been started — more on this below

• In addition to existing features, only being able to configure and integrate HooGy with your existing site has been added. Existing features will not change.

• Minimalism became the goto strategy — from product development to business strategy. This gives time to ship few features, fix issues faster and obsession with the customer experience over quick growth.

• In that spirit — there is no marketing trickery, I share only things I learn on our blogs + Quora. There is enough referrals coming from those two sources, and that costs no money to do that.

• Personal side — I failed to run my half marathon, but I read a whole bunch of books and watched movies (I discovered Vikings and medieval series: The Last Kingdom and Vikings ~ other titles included Knightfall)— couch-potato-ing and sleeping 8hours minimum.

2019

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The realization of who read the blog didn’t change. The technical blogs saw a big surge in 2018 — that will not change, but made better.

Minimalism

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• To reduce friction — one *zero-maintenance *platform is going to support my personal website and company blogs. More efforts will be put into Medium Publication and Quora. Those two outlets helps to identify questions of users, and communicate updates as soon as possible.
• Simple Engineering will host content for technical audience, whereas Simple Blog hosts content from our audience and rants about everything living a greener life — both blogs are running on write.as ~ I will update why these soon!

Objectives

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A couple of objectives —

• To make better content, recruiting part time Writers and Editors will be in my mind.

• Since running a blog professionally is a whole new business on its own, having writers and other business people wanting to promote environmental friendly businesses and practices will help achieve better results, while spending less time on the writing side.

• Funding good quality content is a quite a feat! But finding content sponsors or advertisers may help cover server spending, and paying writers. You can refer me writer, editor or illustrator!

• Medium Publication brings in ~21 leads a month per ~1100 views. The clickthrough rate(clicks per impression) is 1.9% on Medium. Better visibility can improve these numbers: better syndication(rss feeds, integration with readers, and republishing to third party publications).

• Quora brings in ~ 100 leads a month per ~4000 views. It feeds both Medium Publications and The website. Answering more questions relating to simple living will be stressed, to better serve our community and increase referral numbers.

• Target is reaching 400 Answers or more. Those questions are related to Collaborative Consumption, technical stuff and life at large!

• On average 100 people visits the website per month. Which is 12k visitors a year. If we increased the Conversion Rate up to 10%, or 10 signups a month ~ The end of 2019 would add 1200 people on the site. *The question to increase that signup rate will be the target throughout the year*.

• From the previous argument, A landing page with better copy righting ~ and offering(widget and integrations) from our providers will be the focus in 2019.

Projects

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• Upgrade the web application and launching the Widget is on top list — The widget will be used to help rental companies increase reservations. We hope this will increase inventory on HooGy as well.

• There is enough content on “The Productive Solopreneur” series enought to put in an ebook. The content was designed to help Solopreneurs to automate most daily tasks.

• Even though series on “The Deep Dive”, not yet published ***“AppEconomy” ***have enough technical content, there is little hope that those will be bundled into an ebook, unless time allows. But they will be constantly updated to make learning react, testing react components and migration from Angularjs to React JS accessible to anyone having an internet connection.

• Better Content — Publishing existing text as soon as possible. Limit new content to one feature per month. That will be professional writing — the budget is set to $200 ~ half goes to Author the other half goes to Editor.

• The Content project should be able to cover its costs — to increase visibility, author and editors will be willing to share their content to their respective social media. A convention should be established, just in case some content endup in an ebook/textbook.

Sneak Peek

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The dashboard under development is modelled after these sketches. Most of less-useful features have been either merged or removed.

Resources —

• Online advertising — a Smashing Magazine feature. Smashing Magazine documents a workable business model for content editing in this article.

I can’t do this without people who keep motivating me, and 300+ members currently using Hoo.gy. 🙏 Happy New Year of 2019, 2018 was a heck of ride, and can’t wait to see you all in 2019. Much Blessings.