@jnoh

Started a ShipScout changelog here. Just a no frills notion doc to make it effortless to log. Will move to a permanent home later. notion.so/shipscout/Ship… #buildinpublic #indiehackers

@kinngh Just went through this struggle this week. I thought it was going to be 1d of work. Ended up being 3d to get all the UX right.

ugh creating theme extensions is so exhausting 😮‍💨

4 words added to the cart. $10k added to the top line.

@heysandy801 Thanks @heysandy801 🙏 it seems like their guidelines are getting stricter and more rigorous

@jnoh more guidelines than i remember seeing when we got through last year 😅 but this is a short list to burn down! nice work

I got review comments back for my Built for Shopify application. Fewer then I expected. The journey continues!

Damn I’m so unproductive today. Going for a bike ride…

Today on a customer call, a growth marketer called ShipScout "slick" and asked if I'm the designer. Damn, that felt good. Had me blushing...

I think about this tweet a lot. So much of the minutiae of my day and how my life feels has been influenced by how I've made these decisions.

@MattiSchroder I make two cups of pour over everyday. Just bought the fellow ode grinder used for 1/3 of the cost.

Any fellow coffee nerds? 🤓 I don't post about it often, but I’m a huge coffee nerd—so much so that I mix my own water. Today, I'm dialing in a delicious bean from Costa Rica for my Moka pot. One of my biggest regrets is not owning a proper espresso machine - yet 👀 What are you brewing today?

For the home we bought, we decided to just match the highest bid since our offer included a faster closing and the seller seemed like they had no attachments to the house. However, in one of the bidding wars that we lost, ours was the highest bid yet we lost. The owner wanted the home to go to someone who really needed it and would cherish the home as they did. In another case, the owner specifically wanted a simple sale (no bidding war) and took the highest offer with no chance to counter-bid. Our offer (based on our RE's advice) was a tad lower than the highest so we lost. My biggest learning in this process is that a home (especially in older neighborhoods) may mean a lot more to people than just $$$. As for all this knowledge. There's a lot of data already available. With Zillow, you get all the specs of the home. And many sellers do pre-inspections these days and you can ask for them upfront. With google maps, you can see an aerial view of the lot. You can look up permits in the city. There's also Zillow estimates. But things are much messier than that especially in older neighborhoods. (1) Records only go so far back. A lot of people do unpermitted work. (2) In an older neighborhood, home prices can range drastically based on style of the home even with the same sq footage. A simple ranch home vs a tudor-style vs a mid century modern home all will sell in different price ranges. (3) Even if you hold sq footage and style constant, the quality/taste of renovations/maintenance are important to consider not just for the price of the home but for livability. There are so many weirdly renovated homes out there that seem great on paper but are just gross and terribly unergonomic. (4) If you're thinking about doing a mid/large renovation, you need to think about what's pragmatically possible with the home you're purchasing and what kind of work is allowed. Deciding to buy a home that you want to live in and raise your kids in requires judgment on a lot of "soft" things that are frankly illegible to first-time or even second-time (my wife and I) home buyers. Not only that, it takes a lot of time, research and viewing homes to really get a handle on all of this. Hard to juggle in with other responsibilities for some folks. Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible to find a home and buy it all by yourself and get it all right. But man, for some people, it may be the biggest purchase of their life. It's nice to increase the odds of making the best decision possible for you and your family. Good REs can bring structure to the chaos of buying a home and increase the chances that you get there. Maybe tech can fill this gap, but I wouldn't bet on it. At least in the short/medium term.

damn. A bidding war with 15 bids seems wild. Did the highest bid not just win? Or was there a more sophisticated strategy? I’m actually curious from your pov- do you think all the knowledge she shared with you should be knowledge accessible to everyone looking to buy? Do you think tech can improve this process in the future?

There were roughly 72,000 fewer full-time real estate agents and brokers in 2023 than the year before, per Axios.

My wife and I bought a house in march with a RE that came highly recommended through one of our friends. When we met this RE, we’d been looking for a home for 2.5y during which time we spent countless hours on Zillow, physically saw 30 homes in 10 different neighborhoods, lost out on 4 highly competitive bidding wars and cycled through three different REs. With this agent, she gave us a comprehensive 2h tour of the neighborhoods she operated in, st by st she knew so much about the history of individual houses, what work had been done, what they sold for, what she thinks they’re valued for now. Learned so much about the characteristics of each neighborhood. But really we realized that the tour was her way of really honing in on what we liked and what were looking for. Within a month we had a new focused strategy on a two neighborhoods that we loved. We saw three houses. Put an offer on one. RE guided our bid strategy based on multiple conversations with seller side. We won a bidding war of 15 bids. We’re now renovating a home using an architect she recommended and who has designed over 1000 homes in the neighborhoods that we like. Her landscaper cleared out a large semi in ground vinyl pool free of charge. She’s our starting point for references for contractors now. If we sell or buy in the future, there’s no doubt we’d use her again. Bad REs are beyond worthless. The good ones make all the difference IMO.

@unusual_whales Do we really need real estate agents? Someone please explain

I've been working on ShipScout onboarding the last few days. I decided to invest a little extra time to make sure we make the transition as smooth as possible for existing merchants. Change is annoying and hard. Hopefully this helps.

Maybe this is just a healthy sign of a platform maturing. The iOS platform is vast and complex and it requires a lot of platform specific knowledge to get started - I don't blink twice at that.

Building quality Shopify apps is serious web engineering work. This is coming from someone who's been building web apps for nearly 15y.

I love the direction Shopify is headed with their developer platform but man it's a lot to familiarize yourself with. 😫

5. I designed and now use focus modes to eliminate distractions as I go about my day. x.com/jnoh/status/18…

4. As soon as I feel the afternoon slump, I jump on my bike and do a 30+ minute bike ride. I feel energized when I sit back down at my desk.

Things I started in August to help bring deep focus to my coding work: 1. Morning run 2. 10m analog hand written day planning 3. 25m work, 5m breaks on loop 4. Afternoon bike ride 5. Heavy use of focus modes Feeling the most productive building apps and coding that I have in years.