Hi, welcome to Sofa Moolah. Sofa Moolah is a blog about dealing with sobriety; a way to force myself to stay accountable so that I don’t relapse. Started in 2012 it has been successful in every conceivable way with the main contributors not having touched addictive substances since inception. Oh wait, no, that doesn’t sound right.
12 Months After Ending My Sobriety
I was sober for a year between August 2016 – August 2017. You can read about that experience by clicking here. It was incredibly tough and yet I learnt nothing from it. Weird, right? Now a year later I look back on that experience and see where I sit 12 months later.
A Quick, Honest Look at Where’s MH370
I find honest reflection something that very few do. Why do we insist on living in the shadows of our truth? I mean, let’s just be honest, put all of our cards on the table and see where we’re at. If you’ve been one of the (very few) people following Dan & I’s progress over the past… 7 years you’ll know that the projects are slow, progress non-existent & blog posts imaginary. But alas, let’s take a peep at one of my larger projects Where’s MH370.
1 Year of Sobriety
I told myself that I will be sober for a year. It was tough, sure, but I got there. It’s done. First Sunday of August. An entire year. Great, now what? I’m not too sure what the point of writing this blog post is. I don’t want to gloat, I don’t want any recognition, I don’t want to be reminded of this “achievement” as its been nothing but counter-productive. When this weight comes off it wont be freeing, it will be a burden.
Embracing the Useless
For years I’ve said that I build products that no-one wants or needs and yet somehow they find an audience. This couldn’t be more true if you take a look back at my past projects and see how they’ve taken off, and been embraced by people all around the world. From How Many Midgets Could You Eat – the first website I created back when I was a teenager that allowed users to take a quiz to figure out a score to an incredibly stupid question – to Ship Your Enemies Glitter and then to the more recent Hardcore Prawn Lawn.
All of these sites share a similar theme which is why it makes sense that Dan and I would eventually come to create UselessWeb.com, an aggregator of all the crazy, useless websites that people like us have created.
Self-Publishing “The Most Offensive Kids Book Ever”
Who would have guessed that self-publishing a full color, illustrated search & find activity book would be so fucking complicated? Not only has it been a semi-expensive lesson in creating a physical product, but it has also led to death threats, legal threats and a shit ton of hate from people online. Listen, I’m not complaining, I’m just making an observation; I guess it was kind of expected when you create a book as controversial as Where’s MH370.
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A Project Update: Random Useful Websites & Discuvver
Back in August last year Dan and I created and launched RandomUsefulWebsites.com to a wave of exposure and traffic. Thousands of upvotes on Reddit, hundreds on Product Hunt and hundreds of thousands of visitors within a few days. By all means it was a successful product launch for something that took us only a couple of hours to build.
A few months later we had the idea of turning it into a fully functional website with a ton of new features and an updated database of useful websites. This is when Random Useful Websites was transitioning to Discuvver. I had an awesome looking website designed however over time the project stalled and it never got properly finished.
Not to dissuade us, we started capturing user email addresses on Random Useful Website’s, signed up for a MailChimp account and watched it grow over time. Today the account has around 2,800 email subscribers.
Continue reading “A Project Update: Random Useful Websites & Discuvver”
My Experience Working With Partners From Different Countries
Throughout the past few years I’ve had the pleasure of being able to work with multi-talented people from all over the world, from the UK to America to Canada to South Africa and beyond. These people from all different walks of life with different skills sets have taught me a lot about business & life in general however what I’ve learnt that I think is the most important is how to manage online projects successfully.
It’s not easy when time zones don’t match up or when an issue arises and the other person isn’t available for a face to face talk. The energy you feel when you’re in a room full of people who are all passionate about an idea is not there and when it comes to motivating yourself to put your head down and get shit done, some of the time it’s tough to do without your partner egging you on which is why I think a lot of remote based partnerships fail. Today I want to talk briefly about my personal experience working with individuals from different countries, what to avoid and how to make the partnership successful.
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What Getting Sober Has Taught Me About Entrepreneurship & Life
Having an addictive personality fucking sucks. Majority of people go through life being able to deal with things in moderation. That’s not me. Whether it’s gambling or drinking, ever since I hit 18 I’ve always had trouble dealing with these addictions. I mean, I’ve even written about it before in a blog post called “How Making Money Online Lost Me to Gambling”; a recount of how I lost tens of thousands of dollars gambling whilst I was still a teenager. You would have thought that would have been a wake up call to get my shit together but in a classic example of history repeating itself, I’m writing about it again. So last month I decided to finally get my shit together.
I had my last drink on Sunday, 7th of August, 2016. I didn’t know beforehand that it was going to be the last, it was just the next morning when I felt completely overwhelmed with everything in my life and knew that in order to get my life together I would need to cut out alcohol. For the past 3 years my life has been a bit of a mess with the last 18 months being the absolute worst in my life. I don’t know exactly how my life went down this road but I do know that I was out of control and needed to make a change. I was destroying my body, my relationships, my projects & my bank account. To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten: Continue reading “What Getting Sober Has Taught Me About Entrepreneurship & Life”
Revenue & Analytics from a #1 Reddit AMA
On the 13th of December at 3am I decided to do a Reddit AMA. An AMA if you’re not familiar is a chance for users on the social platform Reddit to ask questions & get answers from people in unusual professions, celebrities, sports stars, politicians etc.
I had been told earlier this year to do one for Ship Your Enemies Glitter however I thought the timing was off & wanted to first finish Where’s MH370? a project I had been working on for 8 months in order to give it a shout out. Basically, it’s a search and find activity book where readers have to find missing pieces of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in 12 full color, illustrated scenes. To show you how powerful Reddit AMA’s are in terms of marketing, I’ve included below a few statistics from the AMA.