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JesseAldridge / 04_07_2019.md
Last active April 8, 2019 02:34
04_07_2019.md

My freelancing adventures are continuing. I've been focusing on WooCommerce related work. WooCommerce is the main WordPress plugin for doing eCommerce stuff. Things are going well. It turns out people selling stuff online have money and need developers. Who knew?

One think that's helped increase revenue a lot is spending a lot more time doing sales. Previously I was spending around 10% of my time on it. I mentioned this in passing to a friend who works in finance and he was scandalized. He pointed out that financial consultants will generally spend half their time doing sales related work. Because in finance there's basically only one variable that matters: the AUM (assets under management). As a consultant, you're going to get some cut of that, and it varies by a huge amount between companies, so it makes sense to spend a lot of time finding and pitching the clients with the biggest AUM. It's the same with technical freelancing. It does suck to spend a lot of time on sales rather than "real work" (meaning t

Summary

Over the last month I've continued exploring the wonderful world of freelance WordPress development. Since I started in January I've made $2685.34 in revenue from four clients. I spent 350 hours doing either sales or development work in a freelance capacity. This yields an effective rate of $7.67/hour.

The Numbers

@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / 31_01_2019.md
Last active February 1, 2019 08:10
Coding AI Update; Jan 31, 2019

Hey guys. I've talked to a lot of you about what I'm working on and don't really have time to update each of you individually. So I thought I'd just send one email to update everyone at once. Let's call this the first edition of the Coding AI weekly and/or monthly newsletter. If you're not interested in this sort of thing, just let me know and I'll take you off the mailing list.

Ok, down to business: Between finding new clients, doing work, and finding ways of speeding up my work I'm basically out of time. I'm not actually sure what the exact allocation of my time is, but for the last couple of days it's probably been like 50/40/10 between working on pages, pitching clients, and building tooling for myself. I'd like to bring people on to help me with the first two.

Right now my conversion rate for pitches is something like 30 to 50 pitches to get one job. This isn't great, but I think it should improve as I figure out how to pitch clients better, accumulate good reviews on my profile, build out my portfolio

@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / cofounder_pitch.md
Last active January 17, 2019 04:28
Cofounder pitch

Hi [person], I'm Jesse. [How I found you] [What I like about you] I'm wondering if you'd be interested in getting to know each other a bit more?

A bit about me: I'm a full-stack web developer with fifteen years of experience. I live San Francisco. I left Airbnb six months ago to start a startup. I'm looking to grow my personal network with the goal of eventually finding a great cofounder. You can learn more about me on my personal webpage: http://jessealdridge.com/resume

Here's my current plan:

  1. Learn to develop WordPress webpages
  2. Work as a contract developer on Upwork
  3. Become more efficient and grow revenue over time
  4. Use the knowledge gained in this process to build a better web development platform
Summary:
I want a nice looking website built in WordPress or SquareSpace
With some custom Javascript
And I want maintenance
I want a Shopify or WooCommerce store
with support for bookings/appointments/reservations
I want an ios app
@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / nanoparse.md
Last active October 23, 2018 01:45
NanoParser - Oct 18, 2018

I've decided to focus on data extraction for now.

I talked to Luke from ModelOptic a lot and we agreed that I would develop a parsing service for him that will take Excel spreadsheets containing financial modelling information and spit out json formatted according to a specification he will provide. We agreed that he would pay me an hourly fee to write the code and that we would co-license the code I write. This means he can do whatever he wants with my code and I can use it as a basis for a more generalized data processing service.

I've also been talking to Anuraag from Manifest and he has expressed interest in setting up a similar deal. So out of the seven or so companies in my Startup School group two of them are willing to pay for a document parsing service. This is pretty exciting and suggests that there is

@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / excel_neural_productivity.md
Last active October 11, 2018 21:24
Weekly Update: Oct 11, 2018

I had detailed talks with two guys from my Statup School Group. They both gave me some Excel sheets they are interested in processing. I was able to write a script to do something potentially useful in both cases. I'm still in discussions with both of them to figure out where to go from here. I will probably reach out to a broader audience this week to see if I can identify a cluster of use-cases here.

I also spent some time looking into neural networks. A lot of research in the field of automatic coding type stuff appears to be focused there. Here are some articles I've been wading through:

@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / data_analysis.md
Last active October 6, 2018 20:26
Data Analysis

I spent the last week working on two side projects.

I have an interest in developer productivity. A few years ago I wrote a tool called Task Ranger to track how I spend my time: TaskRanger.com The problem with the tool is you have to manually write down and tag what you did every twenty minutes or so. This is annoying and introduces bias into the data.

It would be cool if I could figure out what I was working on automatically by analyzing objective metrics instead. That’s what metal-detector is all about: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/metal-detector

KPM Gif

Metal-detector is a keylogger combined with analysis code that magically figures out how you spent your time. (The analysis part is still a wip though 😅 Maybe a Hidden Markov Model will work?)

@JesseAldridge
JesseAldridge / gist:b68d313682e30ea0c987
Created April 26, 2015 00:53
chrome notification bug reproduction
<p> Note: You need to open via an http server for notifications to work. </p>
<input id='the-input'>
<div id='timer'>timer</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
start_time = new Date()
setInterval(function() {
document.getElementById('timer').textContent = Math.floor(