Small wins, Echo Room & pace

It's the first day of the month, and today I couldn't for the life of me get out of bed. So I procrastinated on the spot, slept in, and only started working late in the afternoon. That's okay.

It's the aftershock of moving, and I'm still surrounded by a gazillion boxes I haven't unpacked. Day one of October at the new "headquarters", which right now is mostly cardboard.

Read also: Settled in, but schedule still messed up

But I can't just do nothing all day, so I reread my last three blog posts. The one about my intention to just survive the week, the longer one with all my October goals, and the one from last night where I realized my schedule is a mess.

Reading them back to back was strange. Three versions of me in a few days: one trying to get through the week, one with big plans for a whole month, and one admitting those plans don't fit into the days I have. None of them were wrong. They just didn't give me a place to start.

So I went looking for smaller wins I could finish first, to get myself back in the driver's seat. And small wins are what I found today.

Study Brew tweaks and a waitlist

My initial plan was to record a few bedtime stories for Story Brew and a general episode for the Study Brew podcast. Then I realized I should do something else first.

Looking at my Story Brew numbers, it's clear the audience is proven. It's there. The number of plays and downloads tells me people are really listening.

That changes how I need to think about it. The dry run worked. Now I need to get more serious about my approach and keep building the language app.

Read also: Study Brew: planning, deconstructing, and thinking ahead

The problem was that I didn't have a proper email list or waitlist set up yet. Every listener who found a story and liked it had nowhere to go next. If the app launches one day and I have no way to reach the people who were already listening, that's my own stupidity.

So I decided to fix that before recording and uploading anything new. As much as I love doing everything as a content creator and builder, I also need to build that audience for future growth and revenue, even if that's not my primary goal.

So I opened Claude, dropped my TWO Docs repo into it, and told him to check the config so we could avoid the mistakes we made last time.

Read also: Building the BETA invite and losing a round to Claude

Then I had him build the form on the Study Brew homepage. It's live and working now. The domain was verified in Resend a long time ago, but I never added a proper form to the site. I think mostly because I was too deep into finishing the MVP for TWO Docs.

With that done, I can start recording like a maniac. On top of that, I made a few tweaks, like adding avatars for the recurring characters and optimizing the site for mobile, because apparently I ignored that too.

Echo Room went live

I was supposed to launch Echo Room in September, and I couldn't. A day late is still late, but I'm not gonna cry about it.

Read also: Echo Room: I can't launch in September (probably)

I sat down, wrote the intro, pressed record, and pushed it to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's officially live, and you can follow the podcast here.

Just the intro for now, but I plan to record a long episode this week and start with a bi-weekly release until I have enough of a buffer to pick up the pace.

From recording to publishing, plugging it into Apple Podcasts and making the artwork, it took me about two hours. That's much faster than before. Part of it is that Claude knows me better now, and Opus 5.5 is just 100x better at reasoning and at designing thumbnails and artwork.

The other part is the workflow itself. Recording, uploading, converting. I've done it enough times with my other shows that it stopped being a project and turned into a simple routine.

Read also: I mapped out my podcast workflow. Turns out it's not that complicated

After I finish this post, I'll publish the intro on YouTube as well, and we're officially kicking it off before midnight.

For the next two days, I'll work on the website and make the final basic tweaks so it looks better before the first real episode airs.

Rebuilding the TWO website, one page at a time

Earlier this week I mentioned I was designing a new website for TWO Docs, my flagship SaaS. The design is finalized, and some of the pages are live, but now it's time to go over each page one by one so everything matches.

I think the STUDIO page on two.so is the best page we have so far.

It became my benchmark for the whole redesign, both for the messaging and for how I want to represent the product. Every other page now gets held up against it. If a page doesn't feel like STUDIO, it's not done.

Another win booked. I plan to do three to five pages a day this week until I'm done.

I think the biggest win here is that I finally know how to build the DNA of the brand. For a long time I was designing pages without a clear reference for what TWO is supposed to feel like.

Now there's one page that already gets it right, and the rest just has to catch up.

What else?

I sorted out my Story Brew content and prepared four stories to record later. Nothing big, just enough to get back into a normal pace.

I also added all my podcasts to Apple Podcasts, including Story Valley and Echo Room.

And I wrote and published my October post for my other personal blog, the one about my life in Taiwan. This one's about learning Chinese.

Back in it

I think it's been a great, productive day, and a good start to October.

What I keep coming back to is the word pace. Last night I was looking at a schedule that didn't work. Today I didn't fix the schedule. I just did a handful of things small enough to finish.

A waitlist form. An intro episode. A few pages. Four stories prepped. None of it is impressive on its own, but together it moved me from staring at boxes to feeling like I'm back in it.

The boxes are still here. Most of them aren't unpacked. Tomorrow I'll probably open a few more, do another three pages on two.so, and maybe that's the pace for now. Not catching up on everything I planned for September. Just picking things I can finish, finishing them, and doing it again the next day.

Day one done. Thirty to go.