This past week I spent a lot of time diving into the legal side of setting up my own business.
It's been moderately annoying. Payment processors, copyrights, privacy policies, terms of service, cookies, and country/state specific data laws. There's a lot of things to juggle to do the most basic task of running software services.
One of the main hurdles I faced was that I needed a public-facing business address and contact, but I don't want to paste my name, phone number, and address all over the public internet. This is exactly the type of thing that setting up an LLC is good for.
And thus, MeKnowFlow LLC has been established.
It cost around $350 to get all the paperwork filed and to setup a 'virtual office' that gets me a phone number and business address. Neat!
As for the name, I wanted to create something that could be an umbrella for both my software experiments but potentially any consulting/counseling services I may offer in the future. I like puns and my last name has always been turned into jokes. When people ask me for my last name I usually say, "Me? No." I'm not sure whether the blank-face awkward confusion that follows helps them remember me or not.
Flame Journaling is Live!
You can try it now at: www.flamejournaling.com
There's still plenty of polish, but the main features are there. You can step through the journaling experience, which includes AI suggestions if you get stuck. There's a community tab for anonymously published journals, although there's not much there yet.
Next up will be getting a bank account and payment processor connected so I can actually monetize it and see if what I've built brings enough value to people that they are willing to pay. I'll be learning a lot in the next couple of weeks!
Mindful Money
My attitude towards money has always been, "Make enough to not care." And that's exactly what I did right out of college. I made enough to cover all of my necessities, a few luxuries, and put the rest into savings. As long as the numbers kept going up, I didn't want to think about it.
I always considered my spending to be pretty minimal. I don't eat at restaurants. I don't drink. I rarely ever drive. I buy simple ingredients mostly in bulk from Costco.
But when I decided to leave my last job 2 months ago, I started paying very close attention to how much I had been spending. I started a tracking spreadsheet titled "Mindful Money" where every single transaction I make is recorded and sorted as "Required", "Unnecessary", "Could Reduce", "One Time Expense".
After combing through everything I found over $2k in expenses that I could reduce or remove entirely. It was just a lot of little things: Subscriptions, snacks, sparkling water, books, gadgets, clothing, electronics, etc. It's amazing how quickly it all adds up. Even more amazing is how much money goes into the "required" section like garbage bags, cleaning products, and toiletries.
Being sick is also very expensive. I live with type 1 diabetes and hashimotos, so there's a whole chunk of money that gets eaten by thyroid meds, blood test strips, finger lancets, fast acting insulin, long acting insulin, insulin pen needles, continuous glucose monitor, alcohol swabs.
I'll never forget meeting some other type 1 diabetics from Uganda that were volunteers for Sonia Nabeta Diabetes Foundation. They told me about how most diabetics in Africa only get to check their blood sugar once a month, and often could only inject insulin once a day or sometimes only once a week. Of course, many die. They told me that in Africa, type 1 diabetes is "A rich man's disease" because only the rich can survive it.
So... after minimizing my savings down to the minimum I could squeeze, I have around 5 months of savings in the bank. On one hand, I wish I had saved more, but on the other hand I love the thrill of tight deadlines and the pressure that it puts on me to stay focused on making it work.
Inspiration
I've been getting a lot of inspiration from a YouTube channel called Starter Story. I love these kinds of channels that focus on people's success and show how they did it. It's the same kind of spirit that I want to embody with my Flame Journaling system.
There's a few trends in these stories that stick out to me:
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Making money easier than you would expect. Or at least that's the messages being sent by these kinds of channels that get you to click on them. Even the most basic ideas can succeed. This is what shocks me the most. Many of the problems these people are solving are already solved. In fact many of the founders talk about how trying to create a 'new market' is a bad idea and it is far easier for you to just tap into an existing market because you already know there are paying customers there. Some literally just create clones of other popular apps and it works.
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Growth is slow. Once you launch, there's a lot of time spent just building very slow momentum, figuring out how to get more customers, and continuously iterating on marketing. It seems like for most apps, this takes between 6-24 months to start becoming self-sufficient, but once it does take off, it is often sudden. This is the reality that I am having to accept right now. I don't have that much in savings, so I might not make it. There are stories of people who were in my position and had to take on another job for a while, but eventually saved up enough and quit again once their business took off.
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Marketing is about finding the right people. Many of these founders market directly to people by engaging directly with people in communities specifically related to their products. However, there's a careful balance you have to play since most people don't want you shoving your product down their throats, and most mods will delete obvious self-promotional advertising. You can also pay-to-maybe-win, but direct engagement seems to be an effective method and way to get feedback.
Nutrition
This past week I watched this great video by Lillie Kane
I really love it when nutrition-focused people show off exactly what they eat, why, and explain all the blood work involved.
She uses one of my favorite apps, Cronometer to build a meal plan that fills as many of the macro and micronutrient boxes as possible. I think this approach is pretty rad, and so it inspired me to do the same this past week.
So here's what I was eating every day last week:
My Cronometer Meal Plan
As Lillie mentions in her video, it's actually quite difficult to get many of the nutrients purely through diet. So I'm likely going to do what she does soon and add a few supplements in.
I did this early last week but I'm already wanting to tweak some things. First of all... I am officially sick of canned sardines. It's fascinating what foods your body gets sick of and what you can eat every day and never tire of it. Also Kefir + Berries in the evening bloats the heck outta me and the carbs just made me feel like grade-a garbágiò.
Over the last few months I've also been leaning towards lighter and lighter evening meals. The less I eat after noon the better my blood sugars, the better I feel, and the better I sleep. So starting today I've moved to eating before noon. Funny enough this is exactly what the Buddha recommends and is part of the monastic code that most Buddhist monks follow. So that's a double win in my book.
Sleep
I've been tracking my sleep for years using an Oura ring. However, similar to diabetes, it's easy to just wake up every day, stare at the numbers, and think "Huh... it's higher/lower/same" but you don't really connect it to actual changes I'm making in my life. Also, just because the numbers are high doesn't usually reflect how I feel. So I started tracking MY personal grade on how rested I feel in the morning and how much energy I end up having that day. It's been very helpful.
There's a thousand guides out there on what levers you can pull on your sleep routine to improve things, but here are a few things that I've found quickly matter for me:
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End-of-day brain pressure release. It's good to have a place to dump out worries and concerns of the day. So just free writing whatever my brain wants to dump out of itself is fine. That really makes it easier for me to leave my day stress behind.
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Hydration - I use to avoid drinking water before bed so I avoid waking up in the middle of the night to pee, but this really seems to improve my quality of rest, even with the pee break.
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Pitch black room - I bought some blackout film to put up on my window. There's always some dim light coming into my room, but making it so that it is pitch black really deepened my sleep.
I've got a big list of experiments I'm trying over the coming weeks to iterate on this. The next thing I think I will try is sound. I live in an apartment with thin walls and there's always traffic noise, so I'll be getting some silicone earplugs soon.
Sleep is also one of those things that has a goldilocks zone of worry. I've definitely had periods where perfectionistically chasing after control had the opposite effect.
Thus, one of my favorite quotes:
“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
— W. H. Auden
As I've learned with juggling things like diet, sleep, meditation, and diabetes - it's all about applying and sustaining the right amount of effort. Not too tight, not too loose. Expect that you have to fail a lot to figure out what works, and when you do, don't expect that what worked once will always work. It's a lot like playing 4D chess where the rules of the game change as you play it.
Song of the Week
One thing that no one prepared me for while living in the Pacific Northwest was Spider Season.
During the summer months I see a lot of tiny little Zebra Jumping Spiders that are extremely cute. I love them. But once late August/September hits, the orb weavers come out for mating season and they freak me out. Something about the way they look triggers all the right danger signals in my brain.
A couple years ago a small Crosshatch Orbweaver had made its web on the other side of my window next to my desk. The web was massive and beautiful, taking up a large center section of the window, with the spider always resting in the very center. At first I would get the heebie jeebies just looking at it, but curiosity would get me closer and I began to appreciate this spider up close every day.
It started off fairly small but as the weeks passed it grew quite large. Every day I would look out the window there would always be that brown dot in the middle of the web. It survived a few months through all sorts of wild weather, wildfire smoke, and rains. I was proud of it for making it so long. Eventually a cold snap hit and I woke up one morning to see an empty web.
So here's a song that often reminds me of the spider friend.
Thanks for reading :)
-Jason