My Journal

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up too early as was my job to get our teenage son out of bed. He is incapable of getting himself up! Then completed my morning routine.

Today is day 50 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and all is still good! 🤞.

Today’s picture is of an ambi rad heaters control unit. Fascinating eh! 😂 We’re looking to be able to trigger this from a smart switch via our booking software. That way we will be able to turn heaters on to warm squash courts just before a person starts their match.

My customer who asked me to do changes to her website yesterday asked me to roll the changes back today as her boss wasn’t happy that things had been removed. I thought it might be a difficult thing to get back, but luckily all went well.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

A beef dish I made for lunch and a pork stir fry for dinner

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 1053 or 42% complete.

My ending point today was location 1102 or 44% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Decide which topics competitors have written about that you also want to add to your site. Pay attention to low-volume keywords because if you get enough of them where you rank quite high it can still drive a lot of traffic to your site.

Your spreadsheet should include the target keyword, search volume, keyword difficulty, and landing page for the keyword.

Landing pages

should start with your companies logo
Then have a header describing precisely what your Saas does in 4 to 6 words and can include your positioning advantage
Subheader to strengthen the pain of the visitor
Conversion step, either a button or a form that will gather clients that want to access the product right away. The button or form should stand out.
Include visuals or videos
The first screen needs to grab their attention.
You need to offer them something to keep their focus. For us, this could be the free mini-league system that we created.
It needs a compelling call to action – write them in the first person. “Get my copy” or “Start my campaign”

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) I:

Updated some of my best-ranking pages on my innovation-creativity website ✅
Set up a new squash mini-league for my local club ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Thursday 12th) are:

Work on the high-level plan
Continue ensuring digital assets are connected to Google Analytics
Update more of my innovation-creativity website to try and improve its ranking.

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Ok, I’m probably cheating a little by calling this a daily journal as I have missed the last few days. I decided to have a bit of an easy, lazy weekend. Got up around 8:30 am, slept just Ok, and then completed my morning routine.

Today is day 49 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and all is still good! 🤞.

Today, I met with a customer regarding some changes that they want to their website, and then I also sold quite a few shares, I need to purchase some new ones soon!

Today’s picture is of me in the new ski outfit that I ordered on Vinted, I’m quite pleased with it too!

In the evening I played a friend of mine at racketball, I’m usually pretty close to him but last night he destroyed me!

Food Diary

Today I ate:

Chicken wings and chicken nuggets as I continue to try and follow a mainly carnivore diet. I’m following a group on Reddit.

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 1011 or 41% complete.

My ending point for today was location 1053 or 42% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Bit of info on using expensive SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, but there’s no way that I’m forking out £100 a month to sue such an app.

Adding the word “online” to keywords can be useful if some of your competitors offer stand-alone solutions instead of the web (I personally can’t imagine there being many of these anymore).

As you are analyzing competitor websites notice if they offer features that you don’t offer and should be.

Also, check out the keywords of the features that your software adds. Your goal is to find keywords that will bring visitors. You need to add to your spreadsheet where the keyword should lead to:

Additional text for your home page
Or a blog article

Note who is number one at the moment.

Maybe make your keywords more specific as more likely to be able to target them.

Add all worthy keywords to a spreadsheet.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Tuesday 10th and perhaps a little of Monday 9th) I:

I applied for a new vehicle registration document for our Volkswagen Golf as we seem to have lost the old one and now want to sell the car ✅
Spent a lot of time at the hospital ✅
My new ski outfit arrived so I was trying that on ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Wednesday 11th) are:

Work on the high-level plan
Continue ensuring digital assets are connected to Google Analytics
Create a new mini-league for a club in our free squash mini-league app
Update a page on my innovation-creativity website to try and improve its ranking.

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Today is day 47 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and all is still good! 🤞.

Today, I’ve not really been doing what I should be doing! Naughty me!! I’ve been working on building an old-fashioned space invaders game in c#. So the picture today is the space invader sprite that I got the AI bot to draw for me.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

A load of meat for lunch as I’m trying to semi-follow the carnivore diet. I’m following a group on Reddit and they all claim that it does wonders for your health.

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 939 or 38% complete.

My ending point for today was location 1011 or 41% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Importance of specifying the correct page language that you are serving. The importance of Google PageSpeed being 80+

Keyword Research

Identify 3 to 5 competitors – they don’t have to offer identical solutions

Divide into subcategories

Large competitors – lots of landing pages and history

Direct competitors – similar products e.g. a squash court booking system

Not a similar business model but still match Google for the queries you want to rank for.

What keywords are they ranking for? Note the look and structure of the page or site and the type of content that works best

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Wednesday 8th) I:

Not much really except for cooking a lot of beef and other meat products on my green-egg BBQ ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Monday 9th) are:

Work on the high-level plan
Continue ensuring digital assets are connected to Google Analytics
Apply for a new vehicle registration document as we have lost the one for our Volkswagen Golf

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up around 8:30 am, after a great night’s sleep, I was awake once, but managed to get back to sleep. I completed my morning routine.

Today is day 43 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and all is still good! 🤞.

I’m having problems with my online banking so today’s picture is the device they require you to use when transferring money. I ended up having to call them and a very nice lady kindly explained that the advice they gave me the last time I called was a load of rubbish!

Food Diary

Today I ate:

Plan for lunch is sausages, not sure yet about dinner

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 868 or 35% complete.

My ending point for today was location 939 or 38% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Don’t cheat Google, although I already knew that.

Make the website appealing and provide the necessary information to satisfy the search intent. This is key in my opinion to all SEO! How will it satisfy customer needs, how will it help them?

Doing SEO well should provide you with free visitors from Google.

Screaming Frog is great for analyzing a website for free with 500 pages or less and strangely enough, I downloaded this and had a quick play with this software only yesterday!

Strive to only have 200 response codes on your website.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Wednesday 4th) I:

Listed more of my digital assets. ✅
Began ensuring my digital assets were correctly linked to Google Analytics ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Wednesday 4th) are:

Work on the high-level plan
Continue listing my digital assets
And continue to ensure they are connected correctly to Google Analytics
Return my unrequired fridge fittings
Contact my friend about holiday flights
Resolve my online banking issues

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Well, after a short break for Christmas and New Year, I’m back with my daily journal entries. I got up very late this morning as I spent most of the evening arguing with my teenage son trying to get him to go to bed. When I eventually got up I completed my morning routine.

Today is day 42 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and we found out yesterday that his blood numbers had increased even further! 🤞.

Today’s picture is me about to read my Kindle.

I installed the screaming frog software and had a little play with it.

I also signed up for the Asana project management software and had a really quick play with that too.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

1 cheese and ham omelet

5 chicken wings, 2 sausages

Chicken breast in a tomato sauce with melted mozzarella cheese and ham

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 852 or 34% complete.

My ending point for today was location 868 or 35% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

When your product is ready, which mine is, it is time to attract your first customers. If you have a budget then you can test various paid campaigns but you need to make sure you measure the results. Results should include where users drop off in the app purchase process.

A cheaper way is to focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Tip: is to focus on how to generate target traffic to your specific product, not the keywords we have to rank to be number one.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Tuesday 3rd) I:

I created a program to call a weather API that returns the current weather. Might be useful if we decide to link our booking system to a squash club’s heating system. ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Wednesday 4th) are:

Start work on a high-level plan.
Continue listing my digital assets
Ensure they are connected correctly to Google Analytics

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up a little late and completed my morning routine.

My brother contacted me to say he’d caught a cold, which means Christmas at my brother’s is canceled tomorrow as my son hasn’t enough lymphocytes in his blood to fight off a virus yet.

Decided to cook some burgers on my mini-egg barbeque, it’s taking a while as haven’t used it for ages so needed cleaning out and a bit of getting going.

Today’s picture is making my morning latte using my coffee-making machine.

Today is day 31 post bone marrow transplant for my son, all is still good! 🤞.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

Too much again…

2 home made cheeseburgers

2 packets of crisps

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 820 or 33% complete.

My ending point for today was location 852 or 34% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Testing – vital to devote time to the quality assurance of your SaaS product.

When starting, focus on the release of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Which is to get the minimum amount of features out into the market as quickly as possible. Only focus on the core features at first, that way you can get a feel for what people think about your product.

Drive early traffic either through Google or Facebook ads or SEO.

The first offering just needs to work and satisfy the main needs of your customer.

Get inital users to run Beta tests for you, this is wher you get general feedback on how well the product works. A stable, reliable product is essential. Possibly use:

BetaList is a community of makers and early adopters showcasing their startups and exchanging feedback or BetaPage to find testers for your product. They can charge fees for placements or you might have to wait a few months for testers. MVP is testing validity, Beta testing is testing for bugs and use cases that fail.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Friday 23rd) I:

I eventually ordered some Skis and Boots, ready for my skiing trip in January. ✅
Got the fridge ready to be replaced only to find out the effort was pointless due to not having the right fittings for the new fridge. ✅
Put some more investment buy orders in place. ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Saturday 24th) are:

Start work on a high-level plan ready to put into practice next year.

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up early as was expecting our new integrated replacement fridge to be delivered. Only partially completed my morning routine. Had to spend most of the morning emptying the fridge so that it was ready to be replaced.

The new fridge arrived but apparently, I also need to order some door fitting extras, which were not clear when booking the damn thing. Anyway, the problem is now solved the new fridge is sitting in our garage, the fitting equipment is due to arrive on Wednesday and our fridge is going to get re-installed on Friday.

Today is day 30 post bone marrow transplant for my son, all is still good! 🤞.

Bought and sold a few shares in my investment account today.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

Too much again…

3 Packets of crisps

A load of shortbread biscuits out of my wife’s Christmas hamper gift

One leftover chicken curry with rice

3 small chocolates

3 small wine gums

2 crumpets with melted cheese and HP sauce

and a load of noodles with spicy Costco flaming-chicken tenders.

Sirloin steak, peppercorn sauce, baked potato, and roasted parsnips

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 762 or 31% complete.

My ending point for today was location 820 or 33% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Integrate into your product a:

payment system
- Part of this was covered in previous journal entries
email automation
- Part of this was also included in previous journal entries.
- Start with a welcome email – an explanation email with a call to action. Either with your company logo or just plain text. Emails with images apparently have an increased chance of being marked as promotional. Plain text has more probability of avoiding the spam folder.
- Send marketing emails “to your customers or potential customers with the purpose to see or upsell, persuade to perform an action or inform.” Unlike trigger emails, marketing emails are not expected so open-rate is generally twice as low as transactional. Marketing emails include newsletters, retention emails, surveys, or re-engagement emails.
- All emails should have a clear structure and be understandable. The subject should be consistent with the intent. Address people by their name given at subscription. Email delivery services allow you to run A/B testing to compare open rates based on location, time/date, and check link clicks.
- Sign transactional messages on behalf of the team
- Sign marketing emails from one person.
- Always provide an unsubscribe option.
- Sign up process
  - Happy day as a potential new customer
  - Welcome them onboard and inform of the next step. Show that you care
    - Include contacts for correspondence and feedback
    - An intro in the form of a video or an article
    - Links to your most engaging blog posts
    - A direct Call To Action
    - If you offer a trial or freemium model then the welcome email should validate the user. You need confirmation so that people don’t get free access using multiple account emails. Two or three-step verification processes are popular for pre-screening potential customers. Use Captcha codes to prevent bots from signing up.
    - Offer access only after they confirm the email.
    - Disposable email lists exist on GitHub, use these lists to block or detect temporary accounts in the sign-up process.
    - Ease sign-up by offering Google or Facebook sign-up, consider:
      - normal sign-up but later switching to a social sign-in account
      - social sign-up but wants to log in with a password and email
      - sign-up with one profile but then wants to use another say corporate profile within the app
customer messaging platform.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Thursday 22nd) I:

Sorted out my MasterCard login as was unable to log into online banking. ✅
Caught up with my personal banking accounts. ✅
Updated the Christmas opening times for one of my customers ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Friday 23rd) are:

Still need to order some Skis and Boots, ready for my skiing trip in January. ✅
Get the fridge ready for being replaced ✅
Sort out my investments accounts, maybe schedule some new orders ✅
Start work on a high-level plan ready to put into practice next year.

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up relatively late and completed my morning routine.

Today is day 29 post bone marrow transplant for my son, all is still good! 🤞.

My wife and I are crawling up the walls having to isolate ourselves while the rest of the world post covid are not, so last night we decided to walk to a local wine bar. The bar was quite busy so we sat outside in the cold, in our coats, and had a few drinks. Turned out to be quite an enjoyable night, was great to get out of the house. I felt a little rough today though.

Due to the beer and wine last night we needed to feed our hangover, so we did a trip to McDonald’s drive-through, which always seems like a great idea until you’ve actually finished the meal and feel like crap afterward. So today’s picture is an AI-generated big burger to depict all the Mcdonald’s crap I ate for lunch!

Played racketball in the evening, and my fitness is slowly coming back as I beat the friend that beat me last week.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

One packet of crisps, one Big Mac, one double cheeseburger, and a load of fries.

For dinner, I had two lovely, decent-sized pieces of pork pie at my squash club. I’m guessing Pork Pie is a UK thing, I doubt that you get them in the US. They are excellent though. If you’re from the US and you visit the UK make sure to get yourself a pork pie from a decent butcher while you’re over here! You will need lashings of HP sauce to go on top!

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 750 or 30% complete.

My ending point for today was location 762 or 31% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Integrate into your product a:

payment system
- Part of this was covered in previous journal entries
email automation
- Part of this was also included in previous journal entries.
- Set up emails for various user interactions and inactivity, for example not using the product for a certain amount of time. Maybe send a coupon or ideas on how to use certain features. Trigger emails need to offer solutions.
- Create use cases for emails that customers should get immediately after sign-up. Ask for the email on sign-up. Get further information in the second step. So you can still contact them if they abandon the sign-up.
- Popular email offerings are SendGrid, MailChimp, and Active Kit. They all cover transactional and marketing emails.
- When developing your blog think of ways to gather your visitor’s emails for future email marketing.
- You need to create the email sequence that guides them through the setup process.
customer messaging platform.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Wednesday 21st) I:

Spent most of the day completing some complicated government form related to benefits due to caring for my sick son. ✅

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Thursday 22nd) are:

Still need to order some Skis and Boots, ready for my skiing trip in January.
Sort out my MasterCard login as I seem to be unable to log into online banking. ✅
Catch up with my personal banking accounts, I still use Microsoft Money for this purpose ✅
Update the Christmas opening times for one of my customers ✅

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

Got up quite late again, I think I need to start going to bed a little earlier. My morning routine had to be stopped in its tracks as I noticed a support request from one of my customers. The survey tool had been reported by someone to be causing an error. I tested it though and all seems to be fine. I really need more information as to how the person got the error – so I requested that they find more info for me.

Today’s post picture is of our Christmas tree.

Today is day 28 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and all still looking good. 🤞.

Feel much better about things today, so hopefully, I can complete some productive work.

Ended up spending a good chunk of today completing a government benefits form related to us caring for our sick son.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

A ham and cheese omelet, a packet of crisps, and a chunk of left over beef brisket.

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 733 or 29% complete.

My ending point for today was location 750 or 30% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Integrate into your product a:

payment system
- Part of this was covered in the last 2 days’ journal entries
- SaaS companies tend to use Stripe, PayLane, FastSpring, PayPal, or Paddle – we use Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless
email automation
- Email is vital for onboarding. Need welcoming emails and other emails to communicate with the user outside of the platform. Emails move subscribers through the steps. People should sign up, log in and receive basic emails from the start.
  - Transactional (or trigger) Emails
    - are automatic, based on customer action. They respond to an action on the website. These emails include sign-up confirmations, account creation, billing receipts, password resets, and actions related to the account.
    - Correct, timely emails are essential for converting freemium customers to paid subscriptions.
    - Emails should be personalized, thoughtful, and timely. The subscription process needs to gather enough information to be able to personalize the email.
  - Marketing Emails
customer messaging platforms.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Tuesday 20th) I:

Played another (come back from full isolation) racketball game ✅
Didn’t do much else all day as felt really down, I think all the events related to my son’s bone marrow failure hit me hard yesterday.

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Wednesday 21st) are:

Still need to order some Skis and Boots, ready for my skiing trip in January.

Morning Routine, General Diary, Thoughts, and Ideas

I got up pretty late today and completed most of my morning routine. Not had a great day today, if I’m honest, I think all the issues with my son’s health and bone marrow transplant hit me in the face a little today. I’m not usually one to have any kind of depression but today I felt terrible. Feel sorry for all those people out there that have depression on a regular basis. I did some of my Wim Hoff breathing exercises that helped slightly. The picture is of a depressed man as that’s a bit of how I felt today.

Today is day 27 post bone marrow transplant for my son, and we got some new blood numbers, all are still trending in the right direction, so 🤞.

I did little work today as I felt too “down in the dumps”.

I went to my local squash club and played with one of the fittest guys in the club. I lost 3-0 which was kind of expected. I think it was a bit ambitious playing someone so good when I’ve had almost 2 months off from playing due to my son’s hospital stay.

We did another late-night shopping trip so as to avoid people that could potentially pass something nasty on to us that we subsequently pass on to our son with a limited immune system.

One of our new squash club booking system customers is using Eventbrite for tickets to their pro squash player events. They probably aren’t aware that our booking system has an events system built into it, but that also got me thinking… What if we pulled out the events system as a separate product and went into competition with Eventbrite? I would just need a glammed-up website, better pricing, and a load of advertising budget! Maybe something to add to the projects to consider list.

Food Diary

Today I ate:

A cheese and ham omelet for breakfast and then a load of meat for lunch. I had one pack of crisps as a snack and nothing for dinner.

Today I Am Reading

My goal today is to read some of Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business

My starting point for today is location 681 or 27% complete.

My ending point for today was location 733 or 29% complete.

My Learnings Today

My learnings from reading Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business by Kateryna Myroniuk

Keynotes from the book today were:

Integrate into your product a:

payment system
- Part of this was covered in yesterday’s journal entry
- Need a system that accepts a payment card and returns the result of the transaction to the site. We already have two of these, set up, we have PayPal and we have Stripe. So our customers can choose between the two. For customer payments (recurring billing) we use a third-party direct debit provider which in my opinion is excellent, called GoCardless. It’s important that the payment service works well in the country in which your customers are based.
- Include reviews on the pricing and landing pages
- Include trust badges and logos from reliable companies in a prominent location. Payment certifications boost loyalty, e.g. verification by Mastercard SecureCode.
- Make it a clear customer journey on the way to checkout. The user will be looking for accreditations, social profiles, support, and anything else that can confirm trust in the process
email automation
customer messaging platforms.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What did you achieve yesterday?

Yesterday (Monday 19th) I:

Updated this journal and that was about it

What would make today great?

2 to 3 tasks, see core journal – micro goals

My micro goals for today (Tuesday 20th) are:

Still need to order some Skis and Boots, ready for my skiing trip in January.
Nothing, feeling down, all the shit from the last 2 weeks has hit me hard today! ☹