lunchbag

AI Agents for SaaS: My Setup with Claude Code and OpenClaw

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last month, I’ve been setting up AI systems to use within Lunch Money. It started with building reusable workflow commands (skills) in Claude Code, and eventually I set up OpenClaw on a separate machine to experiment with running multiple agents autonomously 24/7.

Here’s a snapshot of where I’m at with my AI journey, my learnings so far, and what’s next.

Note: none of this touches user data. These AI workflows are strictly marketing and content operations.

Codifying skills with Claude Code

Using Claude Code, I built a set of marketing-related skills for Lunch Money. Each one is a workflow definition: what role the AI is playing, what inputs it needs, what steps to follow, what the output should look like, and what mistakes to avoid.

I organized them by function:

Content multiplier: repurposing blog posts into platform-specific social content
Social content manager: building Canva assets, uploading to Google Drive, publishing via Buffer, tracking performance analytics
Blog manager: reading and creating Google Docs, generating open graph images, publishing a draft to the CMS

Each skill loads a scoped set of reference files (brand voice guidelines, writing samples, user research data, company history) so the AI knows exactly what it needs to and nothing more.

Skills get better over time. Every time I run a workflow and correct something (“generate the OG image before publishing the draft”, “don’t reuse the blog post title as the hook”, “always upload to the shared Drive folder”), that correction gets encoded back into the skill.

Experimenting with OpenClaw

Two weeks ago, I installed OpenClaw on an old laptop.

My motivations were:

I was intrigued by the idea of agents given autonomy in a tight, secure, and closely defined environment
It would be helpful for my team to be able to access certain skills I have set up
It would be nice to kick off and monitor work when I’m away from my laptop
I wanted continuously running scheduled tasks that were easy to set up

I spawned a different agent for each role in my AI team, gave them names and personalities, and assigned specific LLMs to each depending on their assigned tasks. I talk to them all on Discord and they sometimes talk to each other.

I put a lot on Ziggy's plate

Combining OpenClaw and Claude Code

Because I still wanted a local Claude Code environment and there is a lot of context overlap between Claude Code and OpenClaw, I ended up with three folders synced via Dropbox: dot-openclaw/, dot-claude/, and shared/.

Screenshot of my folder structure within Dropbox

The first two are symlinked to the root .openclaw/ and .claude/ config folders of the respective laptop, inside which are additional symlinks to folders and files within shared/. So when I’m working locally with Claude Code and it updates context, my OpenClaw agents see the change automatically.

Diagram showing how folders are synced and symlinked.

Some additional notes about this:

My local Claude workspace also has access to the workspaces of my OpenClaw agents which can be helpful when handing off work.
I almost never need to access dot-openclaw/ directly since the relevant folders are symlinked. I create all my skills and add context via Claude Code. OpenClaw is just for executing.
I named folders dot-.../ in my Dropbox because I didn’t want them to be hidden by default.
On my main machine, Claude Code only accesses .claude/. Any changes made to shared context will get synced to Openclaw via the symlinks and Dropbox.
dot-claude/ and dot-openclaw/ also contain their own native config files and folders (not shown in the diagram)

Learnings so far with OpenClaw

Token costs added up fast. Everyone who has been down this route knows how quickly running OpenClaw agents burns through API credits. After experimentation, I ended up with one agent bound to a subscription-based coding agent using acpx and the other two using ollama/minimax-2.7 on the cloud.

Local models were a dead end (for now). I tried running ollama/llama 3.1 locally but my M1 Pro laptop overheated and the thinking time was painfully slow. I tried a lighter model (qwen2.5)– but it was still too slow and the responses were uncomfortably robotic. I gave up on local models entirely and opted to pay $20/month for cloud-hosted Ollama.

There was always something to fix. Sub-agent cron jobs work on schedule but the agent would for some reason report back twice. You get one channel binding working and another one stops. Or you think you’ve defined a task super well and somehow the agent decides not to follow all the instructions and there ends up being inconsistencies.

Inconsistent formatting for our Discord activity notifier

Starting over is the best way. There’s an indie game called Celeste where you die thousands of times but instantly respawn– each death revealing a little more about how the game works. That’s pretty much what my experience with OpenClaw has been like. One part of the config would break when I was trying to update another, or a seemingly innocent restructuring of folders would cascade into a whole mess and I’m running openclaw onboard --install-daemon again.

Screenshot of Celeste (credit). Waiting for OpenClaw to implement a notification like this.

Auth and integration layers are messy. Between OpenClaw’s native integrations, MCP servers used by Claude Code and tooling that calls APIs directly, there are too many layers handling authentication. I don’t have a clean mental model of where each token lives and which agent has access to what through which means.

AI is its own best debugger. OpenClaw’s JSON config file, .openclaw.json seemed to be the typical root of most issues. A misspelled key or malformed entry wouldn’t always fail gracefully. The best debugging tool was, of course, AI itself. Opus 4.6 running inside OpenClaw and ChatGPT on the web were both good at diagnosing OpenClaw issues. Claude on the web had no idea what OpenClaw was.

The takeaway: portability

The tools will keep changing, and new wrappers and alternatives will continue to show up. Between starting this blog post draft and publishing it, Claude Code announced the computer use tool and a new build of OpenClaw was released. What stays constant: the skills I’ve written, the context files I’ve built, and the workflows I’ve refined through dozens of iterations.

I really appreciate the data portability aspect of it all. None of my markdown files are locked into Claude Code or OpenClaw or any specific tool. If something better shows up tomorrow, I can point it at the same files and it should work. My folder structure has changed at least a dozen times since starting out, but simple, modular files and a clean structure make each reorganization quick. It’s actually become one of the more fun parts — iterating on how everything fits together.

What’s next and final thoughts

I’ll continue to audit my agentic setup and move some agents back to their SOUL.md-less selves in Claude Code. OpenClaw will run scheduled jobs and enable team access to certain skills. I’m also looking forward to integrating coding workflows next!

I highly value human-in-the-loop – it’s the difference between using AI to accelerate progress versus just automatically generating slop. I’m not yet at a point where I’d trust an autonomous agent to own entire verticals or projects the way I’m reading others are.

If you’re exploring this space too, I’d love to hear what’s working for you. What tools, what friction, what you’ve given up on, or any blind spots you think I might have. Let’s discuss!

Lunch Money: Why we lowered our pricing near the height of inflation

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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Lunch Money: The New Era – how a divorce redefined my one-person business

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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On new beginnings

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Prologue

This has been both the hardest and most time-consuming post to write to date. I’ve been meaning to get started on this for weeks now, and I’ve only recently begun to find the strength to put my collection of complicated feelings into coherent words.

What proceeds is the final iteration of my attempt to condense the most tumultuous months of my life and introduce what’s next for me in a way that hopefully gets you as excited as I am for the future.

With every iteration, this post always came out a little bit brighter. In fact, the original titles of this post were “On failure”, “On failure and solopreneurship” and then “On failure and new beginnings”. Finally, we’re here now just focusing on the new beginnings. I hope you enjoy.

Since the genesis of this blog, I’ve prided myself in being transparent and an open book. I’ve shared intimate thoughts and feelings during my sabbatical, the financials behind my solo travels, and the mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur with Lunch Money.

Transparency leads to demystifying the unknown in taking risks and I’ve always been passionate about that, especially when I receive feedback from readers and peers that it’s been inspirational to them. Historically, this has always made the risk of vulnerability nothing short of rewarding for me.

However, this time, the vulnerability in sharing this post hits differently. It has nothing to do with my business or solopreneurship, and it isn’t related to stories of temporary travel or digital nomadism. It has to do with my personal life.

The intertwining of work and life in solopreneurship

It wasn’t until everything went down that I realized how intertwined my work and life are. In many ways, this seems like a bad thing. If you don’t have a work-life balance, the assumption is you never know when to stop working and you don’t take time to enjoy life.

But there’s a different interpretation with solopreneurship. At least for me, solopreneurship is a good fit because I want “work” to be a part of my life. It’s one of my hobbies and something I choose to do because I derive a lot of satisfaction from it and I find meaningful purpose in it. Working on Lunch Money, that is, developing new features, fixing bugs and interacting with users, was my major source of joy during the pandemic.

So when my personal life took an unexpected sharp turn, it brought everything down with it, including my work in solopreneurship, my online presence, and overall, my joie de vivre.

It’s important to me to convey that my sudden and recent absence is not out of neglect for what I’ve always been passionate about, but out of necessity for the recovery of my mental health so I can come out of this a better version of myself.

I’m going through a divorce.

(This is as close as I’m going to get to shouting on a rooftop at the top of my lungs as a form of acceptance.)

Sooo, long story short, almost overnight in September, I went from being what I thought was happily and securely married to starting divorce arrangements.

Heartbreak, shock, worthlessness, confusion. Just a small roster of feelings accompanying the roller coaster I haven’t been able to get off for the last 4 months.

All the interviews I did last summer where I was asked about my self-care routine or how I work efficiently as a company of one are all suddenly from a past life– one that I will probably never get back to. I’ve unwillingly and unexpectedly entered a new phase of life at a time when I felt more-or-less satisfied.

I have been (and am still) in extreme flux. It’s like I’ve been thrown off my trajectory and I’m now rocketing through space. I don’t know what debris I’ll hit along the way or which orbit I’ll eventually land in. My experiences in the last few months have been largely superlative– it’s been the most trying time of my life, the loneliest I’ve ever felt, the most purposeless, among just a few.

However, it’s not all bad! In seeking comfort and support from my friends as well as hearing from strangers on the internet and Lunch Money users who noticed my absence, honestly, it’s also the most loved and seen I’ve felt in a long time.

Reflections on my healing journey

To be clear, I’m not ashamed of my divorce and I am not going to let it define me. I am sharing my story for other people to understand who I am and to encourage others to do the same. Sharing our personal journeys and struggles brings us closer together and strengthens the shared human experience, which we need so badly in today’s climate. No one should have to go through the tough times alone.

None of what happened to me was under my control nor was it solely my fault, but it is on me how I choose to react and move on from it. I firmly believe in learning and growing from all of life’s experiences and despite the ways I’ve been knocked down, I am always going to choose to proceed with kindness and compassion, and continue to make a positive impact where I can.

So, what’s next?

One of the hardest parts with divorce is that 100% of future plans you made or envisioned for yourself and your (future) family dissolve immediately. Suddenly, my life is an empty and open field. Exciting? Sure, maybe eventually when I’m in a different headspace. Terrifying? Definitely. It’s got me asking fundamental and mind-bending questions, like, what do I want out of my time on this Earth? What should my purpose be? What parts of my previous life served me well and do I want to carry forward into my new life? What the hell do I do now?!

Most people have at least an anchor. A job that keeps them in a certain place. Family that keeps them within a radius. Property or a lease in a particular city. Pets with environmental needs.

As for me, I am totally unanchored, thanks to my already nomadic lifestyle and the freedom Lunch Money has afforded me. It’s both exciting and scary at the same time. I could literally do anything! I could move to Iceland, buy a van, and live in it for a year if I wanted to. But, well, despite living spontaneously and nomadically for the last few years, I’ve come to realize I’m ready to close that chapter of my life.

I moved to Los Angeles.

I haven’t lived somewhere for more than 1.5 years in the last 6 years. In fact, the last two places I lived in (Toronto and Taipei), I thought I would be for at least 3+ years. In 2020, the pandemic kept me from going back to Toronto after a planned 4-month trip to Taiwan. After staying a year and a half later, a rushed decision to head back to the US to get vaccinated meant I had to quickly leave an established life behind in Taipei, one that I had full intention to get back to. Needless to say, I no longer have a desire to return to Taipei for the foreseeable future.

There is a certain degree of trauma that comes with having the security of your home base being constantly withdrawn. Upon reflection, I am now craving permanence and control. Permanence to me means living somewhere for at least a few years and taking the time to deliberately put down roots to build a new life. Control means I solely get to decide where and when, and I no longer have to live with the fear of potentially not returning. I am creating my own security through self-reliance.

Moving to Los Angeles was the easiest decision to make. I knew right away I wanted to start my new life here, where I have a solid group of friends, year-round nice weather, a new city to explore and a bevy of foods to try. I see myself thriving here and I’m excited for everything else that comes along with that!

I am building a team around Lunch Money.

I’ve been feeling at a crossroads for the last few weeks. My whole dream for Lunch Money previously was to build a stream of passive income that I’d still work on as a hobby while pursuing other goals in my personal life, such as buying a house, settling down, having kids, etc. It was part of a grand plan to retire early and enjoy family life. Obviously, that’s out the window now.

The truth of the matter is that my personal motivation, while still there, has changed from the days of being excited to work on it 24-7. I have the financial resources and renewed passion to pursue other endeavors and I have a reinvigorated sense of purpose beyond Lunch Money.

That being said, Lunch Money has positively affected thousands of users so far and I have no intention of turning my back on them. In fact, it makes me more motivated than ever to continue pushing Lunch Money to its fullest potential by making it accessible and available to more people worldwide.

I am going to be building out a team around Lunch Money[1]. The first few hires will be engineers to help me with the backlog of bug reports and feature requests. I’m committed to finding a group of technical folks that work well together, believe in the product and genuinely want to see it grow.

So don’t worry, Lunch Money is here to stay. But what else is next for me?

Edited to add: I ultimately decided not to do this. I am excited to continue working on Lunch Money as a company of one and feel this is the best route for me to keep my lifestyle sustainable while keeping the quality of the product high!

I am starting a new company!

Over the last few months, I’ve come to truly appreciate the impact that Lunch Money has had on my life. By Silicon Valley standards, it’s barely a success story. It doesn’t make millions of dollars a year and there are no ambitions to take it that far.

Instead, it has reached a sustained level of stability and profitability appropriate for supporting my personal lifestyle. Along with that came a host of intangibles–it taught me grit, perseverance, and initiative. It helped my self-confidence immensely by dampening my imposter syndrome. It showed me what I was able to achieve on my own, and the influence that I, as a singular person, can have on a community of other builders, entrepreneurs and people interested in tracking their personal finance.

Having gotten to this point while enjoying the journey, working at my own pace and without the pressure of outside investors, would make me choose this path a million times over a traditional Silicon Valley career, joining an accelerator, or taking investment money to build out a business. In fact, those were exactly the paths I went down before pursuing Lunch Money.

What I realized while building Lunch Money in public and meeting other folks on the same path is that there is a gap in the industry to encourage and support more founders to stay bootstrapped and put their own needs and goals first. It should come as no surprise because in this case, only the founder wins.

Make the money, don't let the money make you. Change the game, don't let the game change you.
– Macklemore

Lifestyle business = an underrated path to entrepreneurship

First, it’s important we get on the same page about what a lifestyle business is, since there is opportunity to modernize the term.

According to Wikipedia, a lifestyle business is “a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle”.

This is inherently a different path from raising money or joining an accelerator meant to prep you for investors. Instead, a lifestyle business can help you reach financial freedom without venture investment and excessive administrative overhead that comes with running a traditional business. Staying independent (that is, not accepting investments and not giving up equity in your company) affords you the ultimate freedom of autonomy in all aspects of your business.

Ideally, a lifestyle business is set up to eventually run sustainably with minimal intervention. For all intents and purposes, we’re going to be focusing on tech-forward businesses, including but not limited to SaaS (software-as-a-service).

Introducing: Picnic Collective, Inc

Picnic Collective’s mission is to help and support solopreneurs and bootstrapped founders to stay independent while building their lifestyle businesses.

Picnic Collective is what makes the journey less lonely, while keeping it fun and meaningful. You, your aspirations and your business are the priority; investors aren’t even part of the equation. We care about sustainable growth and preserving independence.

How is Picnic Collective different?

Below are just a few ways that differentiate the Picnic Collective path to a lifestyle business over traditional means of raising money to build a business:

Sustainable growth over hyper-growth through investment money
Sufficiency over abundance
Preserving independence and autonomy over answering to someone else’s expectations
Maximizing free time and experiences over maximizing profits
See those who help us on our journey as peers rather than subordinates
Taking your time and enjoying the journey over racing against the clock to get to the next milestone
Collaboration and knowledge sharing should be meaningful and rewarding, not transactional

How can Picnic Collective help me?

Nobody has all the skills needed to run a business, and as solopreneurs and bootstrapped founders, we’re further disadvantaged by being limited in our time and resources. Identifying areas of need outside your experience is daunting and evaluating the caliber of a potential hire with a disjoint skillset as you is full of risks. Oftentimes, this is when one might feel like they need to give up equity in exchange for investors’ guidance, expertise and network.

Few people talk about the alternative, and I found that by sharing my own experiences with hiring as a solopreneur, it opened a lot of my readers’ eyes to what might be helpful to their own business (as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know!). What was obvious to my marketing hire to tackle first would have never landed on my engineering brain’s radar. And now that I was sharing this experience more widely, I saw that many other founders were inspired to start noticing their own blind spots.

The benefits of knowledge sharing are undeniable but can be elusive if, as a company of one, we’re not reading the right blogs, asking the right questions, or chatting with the right people.

I received a lot of help from within my network because I wasn’t shy to pick at my friends’ brains or ask endless questions when it was well-received. However, not everyone has the personality, the time or the network for this.

I envision a community of exceptional individuals, such as industry experts, subject matter experts, solopreneurs and bootstrapped founders, who are connected by a shared drive to redefine what work, retirement, freedom and financial independence means to them.

This will be a collective of highly-vetted folks forming a trusted community that can provide a host of resources to each other’s lifestyle businesses. It is where folks come for community and support on their individual paths to freedom.

What if I don’t have a business yet or I’m not sure if entrepreneurship is for me?

Picnic Collective doesn’t have a requirement of being a current business owner. If you resonate with our mission and you’re exceptional at what you do, we want you to join our picnic.

Since starting to build Lunch Money in public 2.5 years ago, I’ve sought help, support and advice from various friends and peers who were working in more traditional roles for an employer, but who were always happy to help as they got to glean the inner workings of my solo business. Understandably, they may be curious to learn more about the lifestyle to evaluate if it’s right for them.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it– entrepreneurship is not easy and it’s not for everybody. The leap it takes to leave the security of a job with benefits and a steady paycheck to pursue an unproven business idea backed by passion requires preparation. Being exposed in a variety of ways to the challenges, rewards and daily life of solopreneurship over time helps grease the knees.

If you’re an subject matter expert with working experience in a vertical such as, but not limited to, marketing, finance or engineering, and you’re curious about solopreneurship, one of the best ways to explore this path is by working closely with a bootstrapped founder who was in your position probably not too long ago.

Being connected to a pool of highly-vetted bootstrapped founders who like to move fast and who may be in need of your skillsets for a particular project or task will be an excellent way to try freelancing and help refine what your ideal work and lifestyle situations are!

Current status

Think of this as a manifesto. Details pertaining to specific services & offerings, pricing structure, and inner workings of Picnic Collective are currently being worked out and timely updates will be shared via the @picnic_inc Twitter account.

We’re all in on our mission and in the beginning stages of formation, so there may be opportunities to participate in discussions and share your ideas on how Picnic Collective is run!

Get involved

Sound interesting to you? Let us know through this Typeform, follow us on Twitter (@picnic_inc), or subscribe to stay updated on Picnic Collective.

Final thoughts

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.
– Seneca

In life, we have two choices: run on autopilot and let life happen to you. Or, take the amazing and unique opportunities available to you only in this exact moment in time in our entire universe’s existence. I am choosing to actively find my meaning and do something that I can be proud of that makes every day worth living because despite life being difficult, it’s still pretty amazing.

i can't believe we get to exist
— DK ✌🏽 (@dk_the_human) January 20, 2022

If you made it this far, thank you for your readership and continued support and for allowing me to be open and vulnerable.

To the number of you who reached out, who barely know me on a personal level but noticed my absence with Lunch Money and cared enough to ask me how I’m doing, I truly appreciate you.

I’m still slowly getting back into the swing of things and clearly have a lot on my plate, but I am committed to getting through it all, slowly but surely. I apologize if there have been unanswered emails or calls– please feel free to follow up as necessary. I appreciate your patience!

Last but not least, a very special shoutout to my friends who took the time to read the various iterations of this post and gave me support along the way. You are all greatly appreciated: Jen, Helen, Richard, Bryan, Vrinda, Yannie, Jordan, DK, John, Mandy, Christina.

[1] Email jobs@lunchmoney.app if you’re interested. Otherwise, watch https://lunchmoney.app/hiring for job details in the coming days.

Weekly #4 - 1000 paying users!

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 04:00:00 +0000

Alright, I’m one day late, but I have a good excuse. I was waiting to hit a certain milestone so my goal of writing weekly retrospectives for the month of February would end on a high note.

Lunch Money just hit 1000 paying subscribers and $80,000 ARR.

Woohoo!

To celebrate, today I went on an engineering spree and shipped 7 feature requests from our Canny, and now I’m writing to all my internet friends about it while drinking a beer.

Growth since launch has been pretty steady. I ran some numbers to see how many weeks it took to get each subsequent 100 users. From my Hacker News launch in August 2019, I got my first 100 paying users (from just over 1000 signups). From there, it took an uncertain 12 weeks to get to 200. This is most likely due to the 45 day trial I was offering in the beginning (which I wrote about in The biggest mistakes I’ve made with Lunch Money (so far)).

Afterwards, 200 to 300 users was the quickest run at 4 and a half weeks. I would attribute this to my Indie Hackers podcast and this iconic tweet from a Dutch tech influencer which brought many fine folks from the Netherlands to Lunch Money.

500 to 600 users took the second longest at 10 weeks, from July 2020 to October 2020. This was a painful time. The organic growth I was enjoying the few months prior came to a halt. Lunch Money was getting single digit signups every day. The novelty of a new personal finance app had died down, leading me to realize I needed to put some tangible effort into marketing especially with Black Friday, Christmas and New Year’s around the corner. Around this time, I sought help from a friend with digital marketing experience and I started running Facebook ads.

My friend helped me draw up a marketing plan but wasn’t available for execution. Facebook ads were ultimately not worth it– I ended up sinking close to a thousand dollars for an abysmal number of conversions. The worst part is once you turn off the ads, all trace of your product is gone.

On average, it took about 7 weeks to get every 100 new paid users. That’s about every 6th app update (includes minor improvements and bug fixes), every 2nd major feature release and every 3rd newsletter campaign. Not bad!

I’m pretty happy with where I’m at. The last few weeks I was on the cusp of being overwhelmed, but luckily Ann (new customer support at Lunch Money!) has been doing a great job and I was able to achieve my goal of getting back to engineering this week.

So what’s next? With this major milestone, I feel like I can get back to coding on a more regular basis without feeling guilty about neglecting marketing needs or customer support. Bottom line is, I have so many plans for improving Lunch Money that I’m more than ready to execute on!

Email marketing

One of the (many) tasks I want to tackle is making better use of email marketing for existing users. I don’t know if I botched that term (I’m a beer in, please be nice), but basically utilize automated email campaigns more to improve in-app engagement.

The hardest part about my business is our reliance on Plaid. Bank connections often need to be re-linked and up until this week, there hasn’t been a mechanism that lets the user know. It’s only when they log in and discover their account hasn’t been syncing that they realize they need to fix their connection (bad!).

So sometime this week, I’ll be sending off a one-time campaign to tell everyone with expired connections to relink. Going forward, I have also set up a new email notification system for when a connection strays from a healthy state. Admittedly, I had been holding off on this because I was worried about an influx of support tickets along the lines of “I can’t connect to my bank!”. Thankfully, I have Ann now to help with any increase in emails!

I’m also going to be sending out a brand new weekly digest that rolls up all of a user’s unreviewed transactions for the week. Transactions that get automatically imported come in an “unreviewed” state. This is a big differentiator from Mint, where new imported transactions are indistinguishable and it becomes easy to overlook an expense. Budgeting and expense tracking then becomes a passive action and you’re not really sure what to look at once you’re logged in– but not with Lunch Money! Hopefully this new digest will get more users checking in more often.

This all brings me to my weird dilemma of the month. I have too many emails I need to send out and I ended up putting half of them on hold. To recap–

Canny sends an email to everyone who voted on the features that I shipped today (I closed out 7 today)
New weekly email digest roll-up for unreviewed transactions (scheduled to go on Thursday)
An email to my personal newsletter to announce the release of this weekly retrospective (sent with a feeling of guilt)
A feature newsletter to announce my Twitter giveaway (scheduled to go mid-day tomorrow)
One-off email campaign to let users know to relink their accounts (ready to go, on hold)
New email notification that lets users know whenever they need to relink their account (ready to go, on hold)
An existing monthly Trends email that sends out at the beginning of every month which summarizes the previous month’s spending (was supposed to go out today, delayed it by a few days)
A feature newsletter to announce the new features I released today (haven’t even bothered preparing this yet)

Gah, this is email overload! I’m literally worried about burdening people with the amount of work I’ve done today.

What went well

Lunch Money

Reached both a user and revenue milestone!
Got down to Inbox Zero for, like, a second
I received the final deliverables for the rewrite of our marketing site! I’m hoping it won’t take more than a day to launch the new copy (hah!).

Personal life

I reached my goal of writing a retrospective every week for the month of February! Thank you to everyone who sent in their feedback, shared their thoughts or simply let me know that they enjoyed reading these. I chose a short-term, attainable goal to best set myself up for success and I was propelled to the finish line by everyone’s support. I’ll likely continue writing these casual retrospectives but perhaps on a less regular or strict cadence– I was a bit stressed out come Sunday when I realized how quickly this last week had gone by!
We celebrated my parents’ birthday in person for the first time in over 2 years! They have the same birthdate, four years apart. We were able to enjoy a nice walk around Taipei Botanical Garden and a seafood dinner together.
Justin and I went to the local flower market and bought some nice plants to brighten up our apartment! As a result, we have a huge monstera in our living room that I’m hoping makes it to the end of the year. Historically, I have been pretty awful at taking care of plants.
I’m in Benzinga’s Women in Fintech feature for Women’s History Month! Also I think this counts as my first TV feature, but I’m going to be on YouTube live on March 2nd if anyone wants to tune in!

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

This was a really good week so I’m trying to think of something to write here. Although I got extremely behind on emails, I was able to catch up by the weekend. I want to continue to be transparent about the journey and write about the difficult parts, but I’m starting to realize that the “bad days” are more rare these days. I would attribute this to taking a lot more breaks in between work. If something isn’t going well or I’m feeling stuck or unmotivated, I’ll take a few hours or the whole day off. This week, I only worked 27 hours but I feel satisfied with my output. The number of hours clocked doesn’t matter– you’ve got to be efficient!

Personal life

I’ve been sleeping very poorly these last few days. I recently bought a fitness tracker which has a sleep tracker built in and I’m consistently getting less than an hour of deep sleep every night. Admittedly, I’m on my phone up to the minute I fall asleep– I just find it so hard to shut off my brain. Let me know if you have any tips on getting the highest quality sleep!

Weekly #3 - Major milestones in hiring and marketing

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 16:00:00 +0000

This has been a crazy week. I’ve always been shy about calling Lunch Money “a real company” but in the last 7 days, Lunch Money has surely graduated from just being an app to being a full-blown business.

Hiring

It’s funny that just a few weeks ago, I was pretty happy and set on the leisurely path of staying a company of one. By last Wednesday, I had effectively hired 3 people: a marketing manager, a writer and a part-time customer support agent.

Marketing

The marketing team of 2, originally mentioned in last week’s retrospective, have gotten straight to work since I sent over the project brief.

To quickly recap, I hired them on a project-basis to rewrite Lunch Money’s marketing site, in particular, the feature-specific pages. For reference, the current marketing site was 100% written by me. I didn’t have much of a strategy beyond “well, this sounds right to me so it should be okay”.

Hiring is very humbling. I stand by what I said in an earlier article, Optimizations as a Company of One:

[..] doing a job yourself before hiring someone– it’s always better to grok the requirements first to some degree so you can understand how to best utilize who you’ve brought on (and appreciate them more!).

For anyone out there who thinks content marketing and copywriting is just laboriously stringing together words in an eloquent manner– I was right there with you until a few days ago. Let me tell you: it’s the amalgamation of research, critical analysis and user psychology that goes beyond simply an artform or a wordsmith’s craft.

To my surprise, some of what I was requesting was not strategically sound. For example, I thought it would be cool to have an entire page that explains why someone should support independent developers. Why not further solidify my narrative as a bootstrapped founder and show my support for the community, right?

How I thought it would go down:

Me: Let’s have a page that explains why someone should support independent developers.

Marketing Manager: Ok!

A day later

Writer: Here’s the copy!

Me: Great!

🎆 5,000 pageviews per day ✨

What actually happened:

Me: Let’s have a page that explains why someone should support independent developers.

A day later

Marketing Manager: Well, actually, while research shows that people love a good founder story, the type of content on this page is not expected to rank higher than any of the existing “build in public”-type articles since search intent is more geared towards long-form content as opposed to a page on a marketing landing site. Instead you should add snippets to your About page and/or pricing page since there’s more value there as supporting content and it can help boost their existing rank.

Me: 🤯

I am honestly amazed at the depth of content marketing. For each of my features, my marketing manager conducted thorough research into competing pages and in the end presented a solid strategy for Lunch Money’s SEO.

I realized that my prior content plan was no different than throwing darts in the dark. It worked well for me in the beginning to simply have a landing page but as Lunch Money matures as a business, I now see the value in a well-thought-out content marketing strategy.

The pieces from the writer so far have been superb and it looks like he’s running his text through a set of tools to measure readability and rankability. So far I’m impressed and I’m excited to see the long-term effects of these changes. The new content for our landing page should hopefully be up within the next two weeks.

Customer support

I hired a lovely lady from the Phillipines via Upwork to be my part-time customer support agent. At the moment, she’s helping me with Plaid support tickets.

I spent a ton of time preparing for this– over 10 hours writing a guide in Notion on how to handle Plaid accounts and another 10 hours on an admin portal for gathering debugging information. It was probably more than I would have liked to spend but my attitude is always to do it right the first time because I want the foundation to be strong. Since the customer care team has the potential to expand in the future, I want to invest in quality tools and wikis that will ultimately save me time in the future.

My hire has been great so far (look out for an email from Ann if you’re having issues with your synced accounts!) and I love that we’re in the same timezone since this role requires a bit more back-and-forth communication during the training period.

Affiliate Program

Early last week, the director of advertising for an online FinTech media company reached out and said they were interested in featuring Lunch Money in their “top X crypto portfolios trackers” listicle which gets 45,000+ page views per month.

Of course, they were looking for an affiliate deal. I’d been very cold on affiliate programs for some time. The main hesitation stems from this fantasy idea that I should continue growing organically and that if my product was good enough, word of mouth would naturally continue to drive up my signups for free.

I could theoretically stop all marketing efforts and still grow at a slow and steady rate, but since I’ve been presented with opportunities to accelerate growth, I’ve been taking them. It’s not so much a question of why, but more so, why not. After all, one of my new year’s resolutions with regards to Lunch Money is to put more money back into the business.

When I first started contemplating affiliate marketing, I consulted with a friend of mine who is an accomplished digital marketer. He gave me some tips on how to structure the deal– mainly, don’t go for recurring commission and don’t go into it with a long-term mindset.

The affiliate programs of my biggest competitors are very alluring– some pay out for every trial signup and some pay out a commission on every single recurring invoice.

I ended up suggesting a three-month affiliate deal for a 15% commission on the first invoice. This protects me since I only pay if I get a conversion (which is way better than paying for Facebook ads).

I was really excited that they accepted the deal and ended up including Lunch Money in several more of their listicles (best X budget apps, best X budget apps for couples). On top of that, they want to feature me in their Women History Month events which will include a panel of females in the FinTech space! Feels good to gain a champion of their calibre and I’m excited to see how many new users this brings in over the next 3 months.

What went well

Lunch Money

Nearly everything. Lunch Money levelled up this week.

Personal life

Justin and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary! We had a wonderful dinner where we had deep conversations about all aspects of our life. We’re both super busy with our current endeavours and we both have high aspirations. I feel lucky to have a supportive partner.

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

I didn’t end up doing any engineering work at all! My hope with hiring and outsourcing work was that it would free up my time to do more coding & writing. While I’m still finding time to write, preparing for the new hires took quite a bit of time this week.

Personal life

I considered getting Lasik surgery and went in for a consultation. Ultimately, I shied away from the idea. I don’t think I want or need Lasik bad enough to justify the risks, side effects and post-op procedures and healing.

Next goals

Get back to engineering! I have a ton of backlogged tasks and bugs to fix.

Weekly #2 - Prioritization, (more) hiring and a case study!

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Wow, where did the week go?

Luckily I can answer that question since I use the Daily Time Tracking app!

In the last 7 days, I put in roughly 40 hours of work. Let’s use this time breakdown as a template for this week’s retrospective.

Engineering (New feature): 17 hours, 9 minutes

I often get asked how I prioritize features or decide what to work on next. In the beginning, I worked tirelessly to get Lunch Money to feature parity with other personal financial apps. Now we’re past that and it’s no longer obvious what the next big feature should be.

Recently I set up a feature request board so I (and other users) can see what the top requested features are. While it’s been useful and insightful, the most requested features are not necessarily what’s next on the docket.

One of the ways I exercise my freedom as a solopreneur is that I generally work on whatever I want. This, for me, keeps things fun, interesting and most importantly, sustainable. Of course, whatever I want usually aligns with what my users want because I want my users to be happy!

If I force myself to keep coding when I don’t feel like it, I’d probably lose interest and that would be fatal to my SaaS business. I never want to get to a point where I dread working on Lunch Money.

Being a Lunch Money user myself and chatting with users on a daily basis, I have a really good idea of what features will continue to differentiate my app from the rest, and what feature updates will improve the experience for existing users. These two principles are always top of mind when it comes to prioritization.

The other factor is how large of a task I feel like working on– maybe it’s been a while since I shipped a major feature and I’m feeling up for it again (these typically take 1+ week and are really draining!). Or maybe I want to knock something out in a day or two. Based on the bandwidth I’m willing to commit for the next task, I scan our Canny to see what feature matches my criteria.

All that being said, the latest new feature for Lunch Money is manual crypto tracking! If users don’t want to connect to their wallets or exchanges directly, they can choose from over 300 cryptocurrencies to track manually. We pull in the latest exchange rates every 15 minutes. As far as I know, none of the top personal finance apps out there offer this!

Support: 6 hours, 28 minutes

I don’t love that I am spending so many hours on customer support every week. This is something I need to actively work on reducing more. I’ve written before on how I optimize my customer support flows as a company of one but I guess Lunch Money has since levelled up and this is one of those scaling problems that are good to have.

Technically, I could still keep going and spend time on support, but it’s getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense. I would rather have 6 extra hours a week to code, chill or do whatever else I want.

Issues related to Plaid come up the most frequently, cost me the most time all the while being the most tedious yet straightforward to handle. It usually involves grabbing some debug logs, opening up a support ticket with Plaid and proceeding to play middleman between my user and Plaid for the next few days.

I’ve started the process of setting up a shared inbox and writing down common support workflows on how to handle Plaid-related support tickets. I’ve also posted a position for a part-time customer support agent on Upwork and already I’m seeing some very promising candidates!

It’s super important to me that whoever I hire to interact with our users can maintain Lunch Money’s brand voice as friendly, helpful and delightful. I’ll likely start them off on just Plaid-related issues as I think it’s still important for me to interact directly with users when it comes to bug reports. (Side note– since setting up our Canny, I’ve gotten close to 0 feature requests in my support inbox!)

Engineering (General): 6 hours, 10 minutes

“Minor” bug fixes and “minor” feature improvements don’t seem so minor anymore after I realize I spent over 6 hours on them. This is mostly from revamping the visual filter for the Accounts page and supporting multiple file uploads for our CSV importing tool (see our latest changelog entry here). Time really flies when you’re coding.

EU Pilot Program: 3 hours, 50 minutes

After nearly 2 years of back and forth with Plaid, I finally received word that we’re officially able to expand to Europe by supporting GDPR-compliant bank syncing for our European users!

This week, I started a pilot program to have a slow and controlled onboarding of users.

I first reached out to churned users who specifically noted they wanted to wait until EU bank syncing was available. Next, I reached out to existing users. Finally, I sent out a newsletter to all our subscribers with an open call to join the pilot. Over 65 people have shown interest so far and nearly 50% of them are not yet paying Lunch Money users. So far, I am pretty excited about these numbers.

Contractor prep: 3 hours, 33 minutes

To recap from last week’s retrospective, I hit a bit of a snag while trying to hire for an apprentice. I realized instead that I need to hire a marketing assistant who could execute.

A Lunch Money user reached out to me and proposed that she and a colleague come onboard as a team of two to help me with my marketing needs on a project basis. It was almost exactly what I wanted to hear and we spent some time going back and forth on expectations. Finally, we jumped on a call to meet face-to-face and even ended up finding out that we were practically neighbours growing up in the suburbs of Toronto!

I spent time this week writing out a project brief to outline exactly what needs to be done. I’ll essentially have her and her colleague rewrite the copy for our marketing site, specifically the feature-specific pages. Deadline should be the end of the month, so we’ll see how that goes!

Did it really take me 2 and a half hours to prepare and send out our latest feature newsletter? :facepalm:

Miscellaneous: 47 minutes

Other random small tasks like replying to emails can really add up!

What went well

Lunch Money

Netlify published their case study on the engineering behind Lunch Money! For a long time, I’ve been wanting to write about our architecture so when Netlify proposed spotlighting Lunch Money as a web app on the Jamstack, I was ecstatic! I’m still in shock that a huge and successful company like Netlify put the time and effort into writing a case study on my little app!
Launched two major features this week– manual crypto tracking and bank syncing support for some EU banks! Both of these features help further differentiate Lunch Money from the other personal finance and budgeting apps out there.
Got unstuck on the hiring front– excited to see how the project-based work goes for rewriting our landing page and also I’m fantasizing about the extra time I will gain when I hire someone to help with support.

Personal life

Having the week “off” for Lunar New Year was great! It felt nice to wake up every day and have a more-or-less free schedule. The streets were very empty and barely any restaurants were open so I ended up cooking a lot (which I enjoy and don’t do enough of!).

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

I wasn’t able to get done any of the onboarding/walkthrough material that I set out to do. I get 1 or 2 cancellation requests every week with the reason “the product is too difficult to use” and a few requests for tutorials on how to get started so it really sucks to feel like the “delightfully simple” part of our tagline is slowly starting to not ring true anymore.

Personal life

My brand new running shoes broke! Something came loose inside the fabric and now it chafes against the back of my foot. I went back to the Nike store and they told me that they will start the return process which would likely take 3 (!!) weeks.

Next goals

Make moves on outsourcing tasks so I can reclaim my time and focus on what I enjoy most– engineering & writing.
Plan out what effective onboarding tutorials and walkthrough guides would look like.

Weekly #1 - Pricing, (not) hiring and my first hate mail!

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote down on a piece of paper all the tasks I do for Lunch Money. Then I organized them into two columns:

Column A: what I wish I had time to do more of
Column B: what I rather not be doing

At the top of Column A was engineering and blogging.

Writing blog posts like Preparing for solopreneurship and Optimizations as a company of one takes me days because I pore over the content and every little word. While I’d still like to write longform posts, I’m also interested in journaling regularly and casually in an effort to document the rollercoaster that is solopreneurship. I’ve always been in awe of my fellow retrospective-writing Indie Hackers¹ so this is me finally joining in!

Because I am a fan of small attainable goals, this is the first of 4 weekly retrospectives I plan to write for the month of February. We’ll see how things go beyond then!

On pricing strategy

In January, I raised Lunch Money’s pricing to $10 month and $100 per year (prices in USD).

The last time I raised prices was back in March 2020 when our base pricing went from $60 per year to $80 per year. My general strategy has been to raise cautiously and pair with discounts.

For example, the raise to $80 was aligned with our Product Hunt launch and a 25% first-year discount. From there, I ran a few other promotions offering the same deal.

I like doing this because the user understands that they’re getting a special limited-time offer. It also gives me roughly 1 year to get the product to a point where they feel it’s worth paying 25% more to continue using the second year and beyond. With Lunch Money, my goal is to retain long-term users and the motivation to get there is baked into my pricing strategy.

Raising the price to $100 per year was a ballsy move. This puts us at a higher annual cost than YNAB (but still cheaper at the monthly rate). It also further positions Lunch Money as a premium product. This aligns nicely with my goal of having fewer users who are willing to pay a higher price rather than (unsustainably) lots of users paying a lower price.

I felt if I was going to make a big move like this, it would be best to do it during our “peak” season, which lasts the immediate months following new years when people are most motivated to start new habits.

The paired discount I went with was 50% off the first year. I did a few marketing pushes to promote this including sending an email to churned users (that is, users who previously signed up but never converted to paid) and running a marketing campaign with @IndieAppSanta.

Today is the last day to get 50% off your first year. Hurry, deal expires in 24 hours!

All you need to do is sign up within the next 24 hours to lock in the discount. No credit card required to trial!

👉 https://t.co/jopPIApDqi https://t.co/4PCcKoBcBU
— Lunch Money - Get 40% off your first year! (@lunchmoney_app) February 1, 2021

Overall the results were great– we had 665 signups in total which was a 60% increase from December! Of those 665, so far, we are seeing a 12% conversion rate which is slightly above normal.

For February, I lowered the discount to 40% off the first year. I’ll likely run this until March when it’ll dwindle down to 30% and so on.

The real test is going to come in 12 months when we’ll see how many of our users continue their subscription at the base rate of $100 per year. I’m confident though; I’ve got lots of exciting new features on the docket for next year that will continue to set Lunch Money apart from the rest.

On (not?) hiring

About a week and a half ago, I posted a job description for an apprenticeship at Lunch Money.

Aspiring #IndieHackers or solopreneur? Want hands-on experience in the early exciting stages of growth?

I'm looking to bring someone on to assist and apprentice on various aspects of Lunch Money.

You will learn so much. I promise.https://t.co/Ifs9hZqSAL

RT for visibility? 🙏 https://t.co/vdbSeYui7r
— Jen (@lunchbag) January 27, 2021

I’d been thinking about doing something like this for a while. For the last 2 months, I’ve been working with a friend of mine who is an amazing digital marketer and nearly every call ended with him telling me to hire an intern.

The reason? I had this perpetually long list of tasks I knew I should really get through but quite frankly, I had absolutely no interest in doing. Rewriting my landing page? I had just sunk 10 hours redesigning it a few weeks ago and I didn’t feel like spending any more time on a static site. I also get writer’s block trying to think of how to stretch “we help you manage your personal finances!” into 10 pages of unique content that will rank on Google.

I go back and forth a lot on hiring. I feel that I’ve really embodied this whole “solopreneur” thing and made it a big part of my identity in the Indie Hackers space. This has made me resistant to adding more to the team. A part of me feels that I’ve come this far on my own, why shouldn’t I keep going? I also don’t have an urgent need for help. Reasonably, I could go away for a week or two and new users would still come through the door and everything would still be running smoothly (aside from support tickets piling up). The other part of me thinks about how much quicker I could go or how much time I could free up if I had someone helping out.

I also spend a lot of time fantasizing about what I would do if I had 10 to 20 extra hours per week. A recurring idea is that I’d love to encourage the next set of solopreneurs via some sort of mentorship.

Then I got to thinking– what’s the most effective way to help someone? Words and advice can only go so far. Real-world experience is what’s valuable. Perhaps the work I find boring and tedious is exactly what someone wants to add to their resume.

I followed this string of thoughts and eventually came up with the idea of an apprenticeship role. I hesitated to call it an internship because I didn’t want post-college folks to look at the job title and shy away. I wanted to evoke an expectation of learning and growing in the role. I was very excited at the idea of finding someone sharp and ambitious who just needed the right opportunity to shine.

In the spirit of transparency, here’s what’s happened after the job posting:

A lot of going back and forth between excitement and anxiety
Self-doubt and fear that I wouldn’t be able to provide an enriching or interesting enough role for the apprentice
Re-reading every application I received at least 5 times
Finally taking a chance on someone only to have them go radio silent and then back out
3 day trip in nature with my husband and parents to clear my head
Coming back and thinking about what I should do versus what I want to do

Here’s what I want to do: mentor someone and provide them with real world experience to hone or build their skillsets. Like I said, I want to help and encourage the next set of solopreneurs. The problem with this is that it takes time. A lot of it. And with the complexity of living in Taiwan (time zones are hard) and the current speed at which I expect things to be done, I may not be in the right headspace or phase to dedicate extra time to somebody. I realized that I am not quite ready yet to be that mentor for somebody.

Here’s what I should do: find someone to do the work I don’t want to do, but quickly, efficiently, to my standards and without too much supervision from me so I can reclaim that time and spend it on the things under Column A (things I wish I had more time to do). Mostly the tasks under Column B involve include copywriting, content writing, and other marketing tasks. Essentially, I need a marketing assistant/writer.

This was kind of an awful mental round-trip I took but I think it was necessary. It was also a good exercise in turning around the feeling of guilt and being honest with my shortcomings. I’ve since sent a reply to everyone who took the time to apply for my listing explaining the above.

Sometimes I have all the initiative in the world and I deliver beyond my own expectations. At other times, I succumb pretty badly to decision paralysis or I get lost in my own thoughts and I am left feeling like, crap, I have no idea what I’m doing.

The hiring saga… to be continued.

What went well

Lunch Money

I shipped two major features: file attachments for transactions and auto-suggestions for payee names.
The Lunch Money Slack community hit over 200 members!
I started a Canny and it’s been effective in terms of user satisfaction and keeping my inbox clear of feature requests!

Personal life

In early January, I started personal training. I feel great to be prioritizing my health and well-being. It’s also incredibly humbling to absolutely suck at something but have a goal to work towards. I did my one-month check in and have been making great progress so far!
In late December, my parents were able to come to Taiwan on a visa to visit Justin & I. It’s been wonderful to have them around and going on trips together after not seeing them for a year.

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

I got my first hate mail! Well, it was a strongly worded reason for why they were canceling and it ended with “bro, it’s not me, it’s you”. I’m not bothered by it as it seems his complaints are mostly that Lunch Money doesn’t fit exactly how YNAB works. I posted about this on Twitter and received some really supportive and uplifting replies and for that, I’m grateful!

Personal life

I got sick earlier this month (not COVID!) and it sucked. Last time I got sick was exactly one year ago as well, about a week after we landed in Taiwan.

Next goals

This week is Chinese New Years in Taiwan which means the country essentially shuts down. For one, my Mandarin classes are canceled so that frees up my afternoons. I’m actually pretty excited about this because I plan on getting a lot done for Lunch Money, mostly around the “first-hour experience”. We are in dire need of some new product walkthroughs– both written and visual.

I finally set up Lunch Money for Lunch Money which sounds a bit silly and late, like why didn’t I do this earlier? I encountered a number of bugs (which I ended up shipping fixes for this morning) and I plan to go through the setup over and over again until the onboarding is perfect. I also think it would be neat to then record a video of this setup. We’ll see what gets done.

This was nice and therapeutic for me. Let me know if you liked it. Otherwise, see you next week!

¹ - Shoutout to Michael Lynch, Cory Zue, Allison Seboldt, and DK!

Preparing for solopreneurship

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Hello! 👋 My name is Jen and I’m the founder, engineer, designer and customer support at Lunch Money, a personal finance and budgeting web app.

It was never part of my life goals to start my own company, let alone a company of one. In fact, if you had asked me before I actually took the leap if this was within the realm of possibility, I would have said hell freakin’ no.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it even after I started working on Lunch Money. It was only after I saw success during launch that I decided to quit my freelancing jobs to pursue this endeavour full-time.

So why the 180-degree change? Upon reflection, I realized that the aggregate of my life and work experience made this a sensible decision and allowed me to transition easily into the role. I feel that I was ready for something like this for some time, but I had learned to be picky with what I spend my effort on and the right project never came up until Lunch Money. In this article, I will go into 4 specific life and career decisions that I consider foundational to my solopreneurship journey.

Joining the right companies

I had never given much thought to how important transferrable skills were until I realized that simply being a software engineer at any tech company in the Bay Area did not result in more-or-less the same set of experiences and skills.

A friend told me a story of how working at [unnamed large software company] simplified a lot of processes for the sake of moving quickly. For instance, databases could be spun up via one-click deploy coupled with homegrown configuration files for adjustments. They’d later on realize as they were job hunting that setting up a data store was not so straight forward, but all the difficult parts had been abstracted out and they never got the chance to peek under the hood.

Consider two internships I had during my college years. The first was at Qualcomm– a large well-known international company with decades of proven engineering expertise. The second was a small seed-funded start-up of 3 founders, another intern and myself that had recently pivoted and hadn’t found their product market fit yet.

Granted that Qualcomm is in a totally different field of embedded software and hardware engineering, a lot of the tech I worked with was proprietary. I learned virtually no transferrable hard skills during my double-term internship at Qualcomm.

At the smaller (now defunct) start-up, I learned how to use Github. I worked with open source projects for the first time. I learned how to communicate with clients as I was building apps for them. I learned how to think about web versus mobile design. I learned a ton of Javascript. These are all skillsets I am still tapping into today.

The bottom line is, you need to be strategic with the company you choose to join. Your time is valuable!

Optimizing experience breadth-to-depth ratio

I feel strongly that working on three different teams at Twitter helped me gain experience critical to running Lunch Money on my own today. I stayed on each team for roughly 1 year, having made significant impact before moving onto the next.

I started on Observability which was responsible for building a monitoring tool for internal use. I was specifically hired to work on the front-end side of things so I had full autonomy over the UI and UX of these dashboards.

sourceI designed and implemented data visualization and monitoring systems using Ruby on Rails and backbone.js at Twitter

I would have probably stayed on longer if it weren’t for my manager and another team that was looking to “borrow” an engineer for some high priority growth initiatives. My manager volunteered me and I was excited to work on a public-facing project for once. Little did I know there was a breakdown in communication and the receiving team, hearing that I was coming from “Platform Engineering”, assumed that I was a backend and Scala wiz.

Despite my initial uneasiness, I tapped into my “fake it til you make it” mentality and I learned Scala on the job. It wasn’t easy going from Javascript to a strongly-typed language but with a few late nights and the help of some very patient engineers, I was able to ship a couple of high impact features. I also ended up being the sole backend engineer supporting the new user onboarding process during the World Cup.

I later switched to the messaging team (working on SMS, push notifications and email) where I rewrote from scratch the entire infrastructure that interpreted text messages.

All in all, I left Twitter with an incredible breadth and depth of experience– having worked up and down the stack, in both existing codebases and greenfield projects, on my own and under the watchful eye of staff engineers. I gained an unreal amount of confidence in my engineering skills and more importantly, my ability to learn a new technology quickly.

Building something from scratch

In my early 20s, I got really into electronic dance music (EDM). I found myself going out dancing most Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Since San Francisco was home to numerous clubs, it became a chore to discover events. You basically had to go to each individual venue’s (often janky) website and navigate their calendars to find what was coming up. From there, specific event details were either on Facebook or ticketing platforms like Eventbrite, Ticketfly, etc.

I later found out from a friend that there used to be a popular site that aggregated all EDM events in the Bay Area until it eventually shut down. I thought this was a fantastic idea and well within my technical scope so I got to work.

I hammered out a minimal viable product (MVP) with Ruby on Rails (thanks to having learned this on the job at Twitter). The MVP was basically a one-pager with a list of manually-inserted events for the next 2 weeks. I started to tell my friends about the site and it quickly proved invaluable.

The first iteration of futuraretro

Fuelled by passion, I poured hours of effort every week into growing my site. I learned to incorporate the Gracenote API which would label each event with the specific genre of EDM. The Eventbrite and Ticketfly APIs helped automate adding new event details. I implemented a form where promoters could suggest upcoming shows. I started a Facebook page which grew to hundreds of followers. I sent out weekly emails via Mailchimp and made a few bucks every month with affiliate ads.

Over the course of several months, word of mouth continued to spread and my site ultimately peaked at 1000 weekly active users.

The second and last redesign of futuraretro

The coolest part (which I’ve yet to re-experience with Lunch Money) was when I met someone at a show. I asked them if they had heard of my site and they pulled up their phone to show me it was the last site they had visited. That blew my mind!

The eventual fade of my interest in EDM also meant the end of futuraretro. While it didn’t get anywhere significant, I strengthened my muscle of “learning by doing”. Since then, I’ve started a number of other micro-sites spawned from short-lived curiosities and interests. My first few projects did not end up being the breakthrough ones but they helped me get used to putting myself out there and launching things.

Hitting the reset button

Moving out of San Francisco permanently and subsequently taking a sabbatical helped strip away the biases that were stemming from my environment. If you were to ask me when I was living in San Francisco my motivations for wanting to start a company, my honest answer would probably be related to boosting my ego, gaining clout among my Silicon Valley peers, or making a ton of money so I could afford a little condo in the Mission.

I took significant time off to travel in 2017. I sought after experiences I knew I would never come across otherwise such as spending time in various abodes in Northeastern Thailand and the French countryside. Being in new and unfamiliar environments helped me see almost right away that I wanted to end up in Toronto. I was reminded of the other joys in life– family, nature and community, and I gained clarity on myself.

Pure joy in the Burgundy countryside where I spent 5 weeks as a bartender and waitress at a French restaurant

It may seem drastic, but leaving behind all my comforts was my big ‘ah ha!’ moment. I don’t think it changed me as a person, rather, it allowed me to recalibrate for my desired life path without external influences.

Now that I have a better footing on my goals and values, I am rebuilding my life around that and I couldn’t be happier. See, if I wanted to make a bunch of money and make a name for myself, I would not be a solopreneur. Solopreneurship optimizes for freedom first, not money. And right now, running Lunch Money as a company of one while living in Taipei is exactly where I want to be.

Appendix

My journey was largely influenced by my extensive technical background, and I’d love to take this space to highlight someone else’s story. Allison Seboldt, solo founder of Fantasy Congress and a political sciences major, shares her approach into web development here.

Optimizations as a company of one

Mon, 18 May 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Hello! 👋 My name is Jen and I’m the founder, engineer, designer and customer support at Lunch Money, a personal finance and budgeting web app.

In short, I am a company of one. I answer the customer support emails and I code and deploy new features. I also manage the API docs and knowledge base, poke around the logs when there are issues, write the bi-monthly newsletters and I designed the logo!

As the company scales, so too must all aspects of my work which I break down into 4 parts: customer support, engineering, product and marketing.

Finding opportunities for process optimization is honestly one of the more fun parts of running a business. I greatly attribute these to how I’ve been able to stay both solo & sane up until now, currently with 600+ users and $45,000 ARR. In this post, I’m excited to share some of my most successful strategies along with anecdotes from my experience working on Lunch Money.

Learning to juggle it all

In the last 14 days, here’s what I got done across all departments:

Product: Launched an internal beta testers program and two sets of new features to test
Engineering: Wrapped up a 2-week long refactor of some core components on the client-side
Engineering: Launched a major feature: advanced transaction filters
Engineering: Closed 13 tickets related to feature improvements and bug fixes
Marketing: Sent out a newsletter outlining the latest new features
Marketing: This blog post
Marketing: Added new pages to the marketing site (Rules and Collaboration) and updated the icons in Features
Support: Received 239 inbound support tickets and sent out 358 emails

What makes all this work bearable for me is the fact that there is so much variety (which, of course, is the spice of life!). I love being able to switch between tasks to keep the job interesting and my mind refreshed while still being productive overall.

Case in point: I just finished a major refactor and pushed out 2 major features to beta, so writing this blog post right now feels like a vacation for my brain.

To state the obvious, I enjoy being hyper-efficient (without burning myself out, of course). Even though I am a single person, I can still automate, optimize and parallelize processes.

Optimizing engineering & product

Implement safeguards

Ah, the blissful beginnings of Lunch Money when I’d push code directly to production several times a day.

At 500+ users now, those days are long gone and I’ve since needed to adopt the more boring but responsible approach of implementing safeguards to prevent shipping faulty code.

For one, I’ve been thoroughly reviewing my own code before every change. Every major feature, improvement and bug fix lives in a feature branch that I still, by habit from the corporate days, prepend with jen/. After verifying everything works great locally, I make sure to take a break first, whether that’s working on a completely unrelated task, going for a meal or going to bed. The point of this is to ensure that I’m code reviewing with a clear head.

While adhering to these standards of code reviewing myself may add extra time to my overall process, it potentially saves hours of bug-fixing, answering related support tickets and self-loathing (I’m half-kidding here) down the line if I accidentally ship bad code.

New phase of Lunch Money– no more pushing major features straight to production 🤯😂 https://t.co/RYsz7BnU3L
— Jen (@lunchbag) May 3, 2020

I also recently implemented an internal beta-testing program open to Lunch Money subscribers. With more users accessing my app on a regular basis, the stakes are higher to ship a version that’s as bug-free as possible.

As an engineering team of one, it’s nearly impossible to always get it right the first time, despite having tests (what if I missed an edge case?) or testing locally extensively (how I think my users will use a feature is not always so).

The beta-testing program has provided some additional benefits. It’s nice to have a cohort of users with whom I can have a more candid conversation about Lunch Money and it’s also a great way to show users that their feedback is valued!

Automate later than you need to

While automating tasks can save a lot of time in the long-term, it doesn’t always make sense to automate right off the bat.

Obligatory XKCD comic (link)

Automating too late is not a bad thing. I’ll have done the manual work enough times to understand how to eventually automate the task and what edge cases to look out for. I equate it to doing a job yourself before hiring someone– it’s always better to grok the requirements first to some degree so you can understand how to best utilize who you’ve brought on (and appreciate them more!).

I manually triggered the emails for bi-monthly account summaries for months because I wasn’t confident the sending cadence was reasonable. After observing open rates and collecting user feedback, these are now automated to go out on the 5th & 25th of every month.

Something that I’m glad I didn’t spend the time to automate at all was the referral program. If an existing user refers a new user and the new user subscribes to a plan, then both users will receive credit for 1 month.

In the end, the referral program only brought on 11 extra users. It was not a pain at all to manually process rewards for those who did. If I had spent time conjuring up all the edge cases and automating this process, it would not have been worth the time investment.

Keep low-hanging fruits in the back pocket

In my task management system, I use a tag (🍏) to denote which tasks are low-hanging fruits. For the uninitiated, low-hanging fruits are quick tasks that are easy to knock out, such as one-liners or 5-minute fixes.

I find that keeping these around and tackling them on days when you feel generally unmotivated can really help raise spirits. Still being able to get something completed and shipped is a great way to get out of a slump.

Optimizing marketing

Timing marketing pushes

At Lunch Money, a big part of the business is using the services of Plaid for bank syncing. Plaid charges on a monthly basis which means that if a user signs up on April 30, connects a bank account immediately and doesn’t end up subscribing at the end of their 14-day trial, they will charge me for this user in both April & May’s invoices.

This realization coupled with my intense aversion to paying more than I need to has shaped a lot of practices at Lunch Money.

For one, the data retention policy used to be 30 days which means if your trial ends and you didn’t put in your billing information, your data will be deleted in 30 days. This certainly guarantees that I’ll be overpaying for churned users and is the reason why the data retention policy has since been revised to 5 days.

In total, a user who does not end up subscribing can spend up to 26 days in the Lunch Money system. This comprises of a 14-day trial, the potential for a 1 week trial extension and a 5 day grace period. Assuming enough users connect their bank accounts, the best way to minimize my costs for churned users is to ensure their lifetimes are within one calendar month.

As a result, I always schedule marketing pushes such as blog posts and product launches in the first few days of the month. When I came to this realization, my next Plaid bill went down for the first time.

Merging marketing and engineering for a combo win

Taking this a step further, the perk of having a spike in new users is that their trial periods more-or-less overlap. Usually when a new user signs up, they will poke around the product and maybe send in a bug report, a feature request or another piece of feedback. If I reply and address their feedback by putting in a fix or shipping their requested feature within days, more often than not, they end up converting into a happy customer.

I’ve therefore identified the following cycle to maximize potential conversions from spikes in user signups:

After a marketing push, let’s say a product launch, I will see an immediate increase in signups lasting about 3 days and then slowly trailing off.

Over the next few days, I’ll start hearing from these new users via support tickets. I prioritize responding to them and I get to work. Showing these users that I’m committed to improving Lunch Money based on their feedback is a great and honest sales tactic.

About 3 days before the initial wave of user trials ends, I wrap up my engineering sprint and send out a newsletter detailing the latest features and improvements. This re-enforces to new users that the product is under continuous development.

Finally, I have a drip campaign that automatically notifies users a few days before their trial expires and on the actual date of expiry. This period of time is when I typically see most users convert 🤞.

Optimizing Customer Support

I used to think that if I were to hire someone, it would first be a customer support agent but I’ve since been moving away from that idea. Users are constantly surprised (in a good way!) when they realize the founder is responding to their bug reports or feature requests directly.

Consistently providing great customer support is a long-term investment for Lunch Money as it is undoubtedly a great way to turn customers into champions. As I receive and respond to support tickets, I’m also able to identify and overhaul the common sources of trouble for users.

I’ve always believed that customer support would be the most important and the hardest part of the business to scale, especially if I have the goal of staying a company of one.

Corroborating data from EmailMeter and my database, it seems my changes are making a difference. Despite a growing user base, inbound support emails remain fairly steady!

Handling support on my own should be sustainable at least for the foreseeable future!

How do support tickets work at Lunch Money?

A feedback button is located at the bottom right corner of every page. Clicking on it opens up a text area wherein users can submit feature requests, questions, bug reports, or whatever else is on their mind. My server then bundles up the feedback with relevant user information into an email and sends it directly to my inbox.

Self-triage support tickets

I practice inbox-zero and I view my email as a To-Do list. My personal philosophy is that any unarchived email has an action waiting on me. From the beginning, it made sense for me to combine support emails with any other emails I would get in my inbox because I weigh them all equally in importance.

I’ve been consistently receiving over 100 support tickets every week for the last 3 months. While I can still reply to everyone within a reasonable amount of time, it wasn’t optimal to wake up every day to my main inbox full of unread emails.

Waking up and innocently checking my phone

The biggest issues were:

Every email was coming through to my main inbox, and
Priority order was by date received which is indicative of the actual urgency 0% of time.

To address these, I revamped the support flow to have users triage their own support tickets and I set up some simple filters in Gmail:

With this system in place, support tickets would land in respective folders within my email, but skipping my inbox.

The built-in priority system is also helpful. For instance, I’ll look at bug reports more frequently than feature requests because a bug report can denote a serious issue within the app whereas a feature request is usually a “nice to have” and doesn’t require my immediate attention.

This is so much better than seeing 18 unread emails in my inbox.

Update [Dec 2020] I’ve implemented yet another layer to the self-triaging system! Now when users submit a bug ticket, they are presented with three options for priority that very clearly outline the SLA:

Instead of spending time every day on support, I can now tackle it every other day. High priority emails come with in a special label that land in my main inbox so I can make sure I get to those urgent problems sooner rather than later. I was worried users may abuse the “High Priority” tag by spamming with me with non-issues, but I’ve actually found that most users tend to downplay the priority of their issue.

Create specific support flows

While common questions can be quickly identified and handled with the addition of an FAQ page, common issues requiring personalized support are a bit trickier to generalize. In Lunch Money’s case, I get a lot of support tickets related to bank syncing.

Here is a sample interaction:

User: I am having issues with my Chase accounts.
Me: What types of issues are you having?
User: I am not getting transactions.
Me: Please let me know a sample transaction that you’re missing and I will look into it for you.

There are at least 3 emails exchanged before the issue can enter the resolution phase.

Eventually, I implemented a specific support flow to address 99% of the issues that arise. I made this accessible from the details pop-up of their synced account, where one would be poking around if something was amiss.

The flow runs through the common scenarios of bank syncing issues (wrong account balance, missing transactions, delayed syncing, etc). It presents routine resolutions before allowing the user to submit a ticket or requests specific additional information along with the submission.

For instance, a common issue is that persistent 2FA will cause Plaid to lose connection frequently. Instead of hearing it from me now, users will see this notice when they select the “My account is not syncing” option. Once they confirm that 2FA is not the issue, then they will be able to submit a support ticket.

Optimizing yourself

Practice context-switching

Shortly after I started working on Lunch Money, I was also freelancing for two different companies (while living abroad in a new city I was excited to discover, no less.). With limited waking hours in a day and so much I both needed and wanted to do, I ended up getting really good at context-switching.

I woke up at 7:30am every day to attend a stand-up meeting for one company. By 11:30am, I wrapped up 4 hours of work total for both companies just in time to go to the gym and eat lunch. After lunch, I headed over to a co-working space where I’d finish up any remaining freelancing work before spending the rest of the afternoon and evening on Lunch Money. I juggled all 3 for 7 months before I finally decided it was time to go full-time on my own project.

This intense context-switching and practice of self-discipline trained me for the life of a solopreneur. Being able to switch between engineering, marketing and customer support in the blink of an eye helps with my overall time efficiency and being constantly aware of the bigger picture is my source of motivation for getting through a tedious task.

Be grounded & well-rounded

When I was in high school, I remember being told that between two otherwise equal candidates– one having 99% average and no extra-curriculars and the other with 89% average and numerous affiliations with different clubs, the latter is the one who would get accepted to medical school. The reason is because medical schools do not want someone who is all about studying because during stressful times, they might go crazy whereas the one who deliberately makes time for interests will likely stay grounded.

Well I didn’t get close to going to medical school, but I feel the lesson can be extracted for any high-stress career. A wearer of many hats is by nature well-rounded after all.

Having hobbies that are not work-related is really helpful. I’ve been consistently attending in-person classes to strengthen my Mandarin Chinese since July 2019. While being pulled away for 2+ hours every other day during the work week isn’t always welcomed at the time, I usually feel good about getting out of the house or focusing on something that isn’t work-related and it allows me to get back to the grind with a clearer mind.

Even though I feel that I'm not due for R&R and that I'd rather code through the weekend, I know it'll be good to get away for a little bit and focus on hobbies I haven't had time for lately, like:
- exploring nature 🏞️
- reading 📚
- catching up on my Mandarin studies 🇹🇼
— Jen (@lunchbag) February 22, 2020

Celebrate the small wins and have fun

As a company of one, the hard truth is that the company’s success is highly dependent on me and will only ever be as successful as I allow it to be, either intentionally or unintentionally.

But success is also defined by me, and can have multiple levels each being a reason for celebration. I feel incredibly blessed to have a supportive partner and parents who are willing to celebrate all the milestones, both big (500 users) and small (5 users) with me.

Lastly, I hate calling Lunch Money work because I don’t feel that it fits the sentiments generally associated with work. I’d rather equate it to being able to play video games all day and get paid for it. Sometimes I’ll hit a hard level but that only makes me want to keep going at it. Genuinely enjoying what you do is the best optimization and will take you far.

The biggest mistakes I've made with Lunch Money (so far)

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quick introduction: 👋 Hi, I’m Jen! I’m the founder, chief budgeter, engineer & designer behind Lunch Money, a personal finance and budgeting web app.

It’s been 6 months since the official launch of Lunch Money and I’ve been sharing milestones, both big and small. But that’s hardly the full picture. While I like the idea of sharing highlights regularly to keep morale up, I thought it would be a good time to reflect and start a periodic series on the biggest mistakes I’ve made (so far).

Mistake: Having an ill-prepared launch

We launched via Show HN on Hacker News in late August 2019. Readers upheld Lunch Money’s standing on the front page for nearly 24 hours!

About an hour into the launch, I started to get notifications and emails that users couldn’t connect their accounts via Plaid, our third-party banking importer. In a state of panic, I spammed their support channel and the two friends I know who worked there, crying for help. That is until I realized that it was my own dumb fault because I accidentally left my Plaid environment set to development which only supported 100 connected accounts. My free test accounts which I had been diligently rationing up until this point had been depleted and Plaid was rightfully denying any new connections.

Lesson learned: Have tests in place to check critical environment variables are properly set before deploying to production

A simple test could have saved me a ton of headache

Next, I ran into issues with a third-party email service provider, Sendgrid. I was using Sendgrid to send confirmation emails to new users as they signed up for Lunch Money. The issue was twofold which I discovered while prematurely celebrating the first fix. I had hit my 100 emails per day limit due to being on the free plan, so I quickly upgraded to a paid plan only to find out that Sendgrid was also rate-limiting me! Thankfully, this was quickly resolved through their responsive support chat.

Lessons learned: Ensure your current plans with third-party services you depend on are sufficient, and monitor usage on launch day to catch issues before they arise

Side note: Lunch Money’s launch was by-and-large unplanned and accidental. If you want to read the “full story” of the launch, check out the Indie Hackers post I had written at the end of the day.

Mistake: Assuming user sentiment

I started Lunch Money as a web app since that is the platform I’m most comfortable with and can iterate quickest on. I like the idea of having more screen real estate for a proper user interface and I also have a lot more experience (and fun!) designing and coding for web apps over mobile apps.

However, at the back of my mind I always felt that I would need to have a mobile app. Who would use a new budgeting app if it was not mobile-first? Who even owns a laptop or desktop computer anymore?

I had a fully-functioning web app that was mobile responsive, but I had also fully convinced myself that no one would take my app seriously because it wasn’t available natively on iOS or Android. Though I wasn’t going to let this be a barrier to launching, I ended up pricing my product low enough as compensation for the fact. I was also a bit overzealous in my copy. I had a line that promised a mobile app was coming soon and I even called it the “pre-mobile launch”.

Way too much attention on the lack of a mobile app 🤦‍♀️

After launching, I realized through user feedback that a mobile app was not the dealbreaker I hyped it up to be. Of course, there were a few users who made it clear they would only subscribe once a mobile version was available, but there were way more people who were just excited about the potential of Lunch Money itself. It became obvious that I should focus on continuing to develop the core product rather than halting progress in favour of spawning a half-baked version on a new platform.

Lesson learned: Don't assume what is and isn't important to your users. Focus on an MVP and wait for feedback.

Looking back now, it was the right decision to hold off on a mobile app. Keeping parity with both web and mobile while iterating regularly on the product would have been nearly impossible. The web version changed so quickly with many features having been completely re-written in the last 6 months. That would have taken more than twice the time if I also had to consider the mobile app whose update cycles are at the mercy of Apple and Google.

Embracing the fact that we’re a web app!

This is not to say that Lunch Money will never have a mobile app. I’m still working on rounding out core features and as the product approaches stability, I’ll spend time thinking seriously about a mobile app. Whether that involves hiring a contractor, outsourcing the development or encouraging users to build their own via our developer API is still up in the air!

Mistake: Charging too low…

As mentioned earlier, I priced Lunch Money initially to overcompensate for the lack of a mobile app. At launch, the product was offered at $3/month or $29/year.

I was getting feedback over the next few weeks that my pricing was too low! If your users are telling you your price is too low, it’s even lower than you think.

Mistake: … and charging too high

Over the course of 4 weeks, I experimented with pricing. I raised my price every time I came out with a new major feature, which, at that time, was happening on a weekly basis. These are core features to the product today, such as CSV import (+$2/month) and the Query Tool (+$1/month). My pricing basically went from $3/month to $5/month to $6/month and finally $8/month.

At $8/month, there was a noticeable drop in signups. But that by itself was not the issue as it was compounded by my next mistake..

Mistake: Offering too long of a free trial

At launch time, we were offering a 45-day free trial. The idea was to allow users the experience of a whole monthly budgeting cycle to assess Lunch Money. Also, YNAB, who I perceived to be my biggest competitor, was offering a 38-day free trial so I thought that with a longer trial and lower price, Lunch Money would be more appealing.

While I could have been right about that, it wasn’t worth the painfully long sales cycle that came with offering a 45-day free trial PLUS the option for a whopping two week trial extension. Major facepalm. At the longest, users were not going to convert until 2 months after initially signing up. This made assessing product-market fit an unnecessarily long process. Also, very few users opted to extend the trial after 45 days which was unsurprising– if a user is still on the fence at day 45, they probably won’t be subscribing.

Fully prepared to give away a 2 week trial extension on top of a 45 day free trial… 🤦‍♀️

Eventually, at the advice of a friend much smarter than me, I decided to shorten the free trial length to 14 days. Even though I now ran the risk of users not having enough time to assess the product, I felt the shorter trial might instill some urgency in users, and I was still offering the option for a 1 week trial extension.

Lesson learned: Be aware of the difficulties in offering too long of a free trial

It’s worth mentioning now that this realization and the realization that I was charging too little happened in parallel so I actually ended up increasing the pricing to $8/month AND decreasing the free trial length to 14 days on the same day. Yes, I changed two very important variables at the same time. My sign ups dropped drastically and I had no way of knowing if it was because I was charging too high or my trial length was too short.

My two inner selves when I realized what I’d done

Lesson learned: If you are testing major changes, do not change two variables at the same time. (Duh!)

The recovery: I ended up sticking with the shorter trial length and offering a discount off the $8/month pricing which was determined to be too high. I’d like to eventually get Lunch Money to a point where it is worth $8/month and until then, I’m offering lifetime percentage discounts. I started off with a 30% discount for Cyber Week which had great reception. Afterwards, I lowered the discount to 20% off which amounts to $6.40/month. Based on the rate of new signups and a user feedback survey I sent out a few weeks ago, I’m confident the current trial length and monthly price are both reasonable for the time being.

For a month and a half, we didn’t have an About page. I wasn’t sure how Lunch Money would be perceived if people found out there was a singular engineer behind a personal finance app. I wrote an article on my personal blog that would link Lunch Money to me, but it would only be discoverable by those eager enough to read the origin story.

After some initial feedback, I decided to implement an About page and start sending a welcome email to new users introducing myself as the one-woman team behind the product.

Let's not be strangers anymore 👋 We finally have an About page! https://t.co/koZiMSAM3o
— Lunch Money (@LunchbagLabs) October 5, 2019

I now regularly get emails back from users letting me know that they find my story inspiring, or that they love the fact that an indie developer is behind the product! 🥰

My mind is kind of blown that @lunchbag made Lunch Money on her own _and_ she's the support staff.

The unbelievable thing is that Lunch Money is truly better than Mint and YNAB. I've never been able to keep using budgeting software because they're so bad. Not anymore!
— Eric Windmill (@ericwindmill) February 10, 2020

Lesson learned: People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!

Also, I sent out a user survey recently and 20% of responses cited me as an indie developer as a reason why they love Lunch Money. All of this was incredibly heartwarming and I learned to embrace my story more.

So much ❤️ from our users!

Closing Thoughts

I’m happy to report that despite all these bumps in the road (and many more that didn’t make the cut for this post!), Lunch Money is still alive.

Of course, I never thought that any one of these mistakes would be the downfall of Lunch Money but I’m sure in the moment, each one felt like the dumbest thing I could have possibly done.

My overdramatic self reacting to my mistakes as they happen

This whole journey is a learning process and I’m grateful to be able to share mine transparently. It’s important to not only celebrate the highs and stay humble, but also face the lows and forgive yourself.

I’m sure there are many more mistakes to be made on the horizon and I look forward to writing and laughing about them in another 6 months!

How my start-up saves $100+ a month with home-grown solutions

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Hi there, my name is Jen and I am building Lunch Money, a multicurrency personal finance tool for the modern-day spender.

Frugality is in my blood. Early on in life, I learned the value of a dollar from my parents and have been particularly frugal (or money-conscious) since I quit my full-time job 4 years ago.

This has permeated all aspects of my life now, as a self-proclaimed “froodie”– a frugal foodie (sure you can pay top dollar for the best food, but the real gems are when you find unfathomable value for the taste) and as the founder of a budgeting app. So it’s no surprise that in building my app, I found myself evaluating if paying for a service was worth saving the time it would take to just roll my own solution.

I’m a big believer that time is money, so if you value your time at a certain rate, then you can easily figure out if spending 1 to 2 hours engineering your own solution is worth yet another recurring monthly charge for potentially the lifetime of your product. Remember, it all adds up!

I have outlined 3 home-grown solutions which are currently saving me in total over $100 per month and I am confident these solutions can sustain Lunch Money well through the first 1000 users. As volumes increase, I will surely re-evaluate these solutions but until then, here they are!

Knowledge Base

The problem: Lots of repeated information in support requests

Since launching, I’ve been getting a steady stream of support requests and questions from users. That along with the fact that I was pushing out new features and improvements on the daily means a lot of information I was conveying would quickly be outdated.

I was also noticing a lot of the same questions. While this was a strong indicator that certain parts of the product could be more intuitive or have a walkthrough, I felt it was nearing the time for Lunch Money to have a centralized knowledge base.

The hunt for a solution

Something like Discourse would be cool to have eventually if I build a community around Lunch Money, but for now it didn’t make sense. Since our features are still evolving, I didn’t want to worry so much about outdated answers. Also, at $100 per month, the price point is unjustifiable.

I found that knowledge bases are typically a feature as part of a larger set of tools for customer support. The most popular option I could find was Zendesk, whose support docs system is an add-on, so you have to subscribe to a base plan first which in total would cost you at least $10 per month.

I also found other solutions such as Helpscout, offered at $25/month and packed with features, as well as startups using Notion as a knowledge base. Though they lack analytics and the general look and feel of a knowledge base, the price comes in lower at $4 up to $8 per month.

It was looking like it would cost on average about $10/month for a decently-featured hosted version. From afar, it was enticing given that these services were offering beautiful templates that were already fully hooked up and all you had to do was provide the content.

Deciding to host my own

I realized that all I really needed for my knowledge base was a good-looking template. All the other features that were offered were not so useful to me and would only be distractions (e.g. comments, live chat, etc). I also didn’t want to spend too much time beyond writing content to get this off the ground.

This led me to browsing Themeforest for some Jekyll or Hugo themes since I was familiar with these static-site generators and I wasn’t looking for the bloat that came with a Wordpress or Ghost site.

Lunch Money’s knowledge base, powered by Jekyll (free) template from Themeforest for one-time payment of $49

It took me 10 minutes to find a beautiful, simple template that met my basic needs and it costed a one-time fee of $49. So this template would pay for itself after just a couple of months and considering a docs site is something I would want to have for as long as the product is around, this will end up saving me a lot. I bought the template, added some basic content, pushed it to Github and deployed it for free with Netlify.

Final Cost and Savings

Set up time cost: 10 minutes to find the template, 5 minutes to deploy to Github and Netlify (excludes content-writing time)

Paid solutions:

Notion offered at $4 - $8 per month
Freshdesk offered at $15/month
Helpscout offered at $25/month

Estimated savings: $15 per month or $180 per year

Cost: $49

Pays for itself in: just over 3 months

Support Requests

While researching customer support tools, I noticed they also handle support tickets that come in through email. However, at those price points, I simply couldn’t justify it. I used a service like Freshdesk exclusively at my first start-up and I can’t exactly pinpoint the value it brought from separating support requests from my normal inbox.

Here’s the thing– your first few customers are so important. They will be your champions later on. It’s imperative to give top-notch service from the very beginning. For me, this means support requests have a high priority and deserve to go to my work inbox which I check most frequently. I also don’t want to install yet another app on my phone or have yet another tab always open in Chrome.

Setting up my support email for free

To allow users to email me at support@lunchmoney.app, I hooked up the domain to Mailgun (free) to receive emails and route them appropriately to my inbox. This initially saved me the $6 it would cost to get on GSuite and have Google manage my work domain.

While I was happy with this solution for the first few months, I quickly noticed issues with relying on a free tier for something as important as my email. I was experiencing almost no deliverability to outlook.com and hotmail.com email addresses. This is because spammers also tend to use these services (Mailgun, Sendgrid) and they end up “polluting” the shared IPs that are used in these free tiers, causing them to be blacklisted by email service providers.

Eventually, I grew frustrated enough with the deliverability issues that I upgraded from Mailgun to GSuite.

Having every form of communication from my users arrive in my work inbox has actually simplified my workflow and hasn’t felt overwhelming yet. Furthermore, I use filters, tags and the snooze feature religiously, so if you have a good system, this can also help to improve your workflow. My work email is essentially my TODO list so I like to keep it clean and as close to empty as possible!

Final Cost and Savings

Set up time cost: 15 minutes to set up Mailgun and/or GSuite

Paid solutions:

Zendesk offered at $5/month
Front offered at $12 per month
HiverHQ offered at $15/month
Helpscout offered at $25/month

Estimated savings: $15 per month or $180 per year

Cost: $6/month

Pays for itself: immediately

Drip Campaigns

Let’s talk about drip campaigns. They are crucial to customer engagement and guiding your users to eventual conversion. However, many tools out there designed to help you manage your drip campaigns are overloaded with features and therefore really expensive. Furthermore, they require set up and integration since you’ll want to update the service with your customer’s traits so they can be segmented and targeted properly. Overall, I felt these tools brought a lot of extra overhead for a cost that was way too high.

So I started thinking about what it would take to implement my own simple drip campaign. I figured I could start off pretty simple and just email a user over the course of their trial 3 times: when they sign up, one week before their trial ends to offer a trial extension, and on the last day of their trial.

These were all straightforward queries to the database. I store the join dates for all users as well as a type so I know how long their trial is. I also have to hit the Stripe API to make sure that I wasn’t asking already-converted users to convert. This was another nice thing– I could query all the information directly when I needed it, instead of playing telephone between multiple services via webhooks.

Using Redis queues (free as a Heroku add-on) with Bull, I created a daily repeating worker which would, for each email template, query the database and retrieve all eligible users, double check their Stripe status and double check that they haven’t already been sent this email (safeguarding in case the queue hiccups and the job retries itself) and eventually sends the email.

I use Postmark as my email service provider. I’m a big fan of Postmark after experiencing the lowest lows with Sendgrid and Mailgun. Postmark has a rigid selection process to ensure spammers do not get on their platform and so they maintain high deliverability rates. The best part is they offer a $75 credit to bootstrapped startups which gets you 7 months of free service if you send under 10,000 emails a month.

My solution is working great for me so far as I have no complaints. I have all the open rate and CTR stats I need from Postmark and I can corroborate the data easily by querying my database to see how many actually extended their trial. I have also since added a 4th email: if you extend your trial, we send an email to follow up on how the extension is going.

The key is to make your homegrown solution robust and extensible from the beginning. I can’t see a reason yet why I would switch to a paid full-service tool anytime soon!

Final Cost and Savings

Set up time cost: 3 hours to set up queues once and write the code to power your campaign and write tests

Paid solutions:

Drip offered at $49/month
Intercom offered at $49/month
Customer.io offered at $150/month

Estimated savings: $80 per month or $960 per year

Cost: 3 hours at $75/hour = $150 in engineering cost

Pays for itself in: 3 months

My journey so far

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 05:00:00 +0000

This is a recounting of my journey so far post-college. I feel as though I’ve allowed myself to fully explore every phase of life and follow every inkling of curiosity. It is an ongoing journey and I hope it keeps surprising me!

Note: I’ve written in depth about a number of my experiences mentioned here, so instead of going into detail, I’ve just linked to the relevant blog post where appropriate.

2012

May - Stepping out into the real world!

I graduated from a Canadian university with a degree in computer engineering and my first job was as a software engineer at Twitter in San Francisco.

2015

September - Leaving the comfort zone for the first time

I stayed at Twitter for almost 4 years, experiencing both its startup heydays and post-IPO growing pains. Eventually, I quit because I grew frustrated with the increasing layers of middle management and bureaucracy that come with any company on that trajectory. At the same time, my roommate was working on getting her startup off the ground. I witnessed her work ethics and determination every day.

I ended up joining the startup as a co-founder and formed the one-person engineering team. We worked on it together for a year, went through the first batch of YCombinator Fellowship and eventually made it into 500 Startups.

2016

November - Second big decision in 2 years

I made the decision to leave the startup shortly after we started 500 Startups, mainly because I was burning out. At this point, I am 26 years old and had resolved not to spend the rest of my 20s living in a tech bubble and working on a startup. I guess you could say after 5 years of the Silicon Valley grind, I was getting jaded. As cliche as it was, I just felt like I needed to find people who were on different journeys motivated by something other than money or a certain lifestyle and the only way to do that was to go out and find them myself.

I gave away or sold almost all my stuff and said my goodbyes with no regrets (Read: How to move out of the country, part 1 & part 2). San Francisco had treated me well, but I was close to overstaying my welcome.

2017 - A Hiatus in Programming

January - First time long-term traveling

I wrote out my pre-departure thoughts and I set off in mid-January to meet my boyfriend in Taipei. He had already been there for 2 months studying Chinese at NTU. I didn’t have much of a plan of what I was going to do there so I ended up self-studying Mandarin Chinese as well.

February - First time solo backpacking

I went to Thailand… without my laptop! Shocking. I started in Bangkok and backpacked my way through the Eastern part of Thailand. I was actively trying to avoid the tourist hot spots because I was more interested in immersing in the local culture. A few things that happened:

May - First time solo long-term traveling

Summer was descending upon Asia, which is the last place I want to be at that time due to the humidity and discomfort, so I set off to Europe on a working holiday visa. I spent most of my time in France where I was working on improving my French through experiences like living with a family in the middle of the mountains and working as a bartender/waitress at a restaurant in rural Burgundy in exchange for lodging (further reading: Culture shocks, food & drinks edition).

I stayed for weeks in both Paris and Lyon and fell in love with both cities.

Later on, I traveled through Italy, Estonia, Finland (went to a music festival there!), Sweden (where I ran my first 5k!), Denmark, the U.K., and finally back to France where my parents met me for a 2-week vacation before heading back home.

September - Going home

I had decided early on in May to move back to Toronto. It was a decision I made with my heart that I trusted would work itself out. I didn’t want to go back to San Francisco because I had already made the decision to leave once, and Toronto was where my parents resided.

I had a blast of a summer yet never felt more ready to go back to Toronto. I had learned a lot and grown as a person in ways I could never have imagined or planned for myself.

October - Reunion with my love

My boyfriend joined me in Toronto from Taipei and we moved in together downtown.

December - Engagement

We got engaged while on a 3 week trip to Mexico. We started in Mexico City, then moved on to Oaxaca where we took the bumpiest collectivo ride of our lives to San Jose del Pacifico. We stayed in a cozy cabin overlooking a beautiful cliff of trees where my now husband proposed to me. Next, we went to Puerto Escondido, to date still one of my favorite vacation spots.

2018

February - Marriage

We got married in an intimate ceremony in the house I grew up in with only our parents as witnesses.

April - Getting back into software development

At this point, I hadn’t done any programming in over a year. And as is expected in the world of software engineering, a lot had changed. The biggest change was that React was now the hottest thing and I had no experience in it at all. After deliberating on how to get back to employability, I took a chance and invested time in learning React. It took me about 2 months of going to coffee shops every day and following a bunch of random tutorials on React Native and Redux, but I was able to release a fully-functioning app to the App Store!

A phrasebook app inspired by my own travels! It has almost no downloads aside from my mom.

June - Strengthening my skills

As it turns out, phrasebook apps are not as lucrative as I thought they would be. I was beginning to feel anxious about not having made a single penny in the last 1.5 years. It was probably time to start thinking about a steady income stream.

After thinking through my feelings and experiences both as an IC at a large company and a founding engineer of a start-up, I knew if I could help it, I didn’t want to get stuck working for someone else’s vision or company for a long time. I ended up finding a happy medium by pursuing the non-committal alternative of full-time employment– freelancing!

Through my network, I was able to find two freelancing jobs. At one company, I was one of two engineers and I was in charge of a large part of the stack. At the other company, I was in a team of about 4 other engineers and we were managed by one person. Their stack involved a fair amount of React so this gig really helped accelerate and improve my knowledge of the framework.

While it was a lot to context-switch between two clients, I believe it was really beneficial to my professional development to have been in both an ownership role and in a position to learn and grow.

2019

January - Going abroad together

Winter had arrived, so my husband and I set off to Fukuoka, Japan for the next 4 months! We had always wanted to go abroad together and we found a reason to leave in the Canadian winters. We spent the last few months diligently adjusting our work and lifestyle to make our digital snow-mad journey a reality.

We absolutely fell in love with Japan and I personally derived a lot of fun from noticing the differences in our cultures.

During our time in Fukuoka, I started working on my own app while continuing to freelance for 2 companies in parallel.

May - Back to our home base

We arrived back in Toronto just in time to enjoy the beautiful summers here. I continued to freelance for 2 companies while working on Lunch Money on the side.

June - Planning for the next adventure

My husband got his dream job working as an engineer at a blockchain company. The best part is that the company is remote-friendly and was especially encouraging when we mentioned we might be living abroad in Asia next year for a few months!

September - Starting my own adventure

I posted Lunch Money on Hacker News and received the validation I needed to go full-time! It was an unreal feeling to have so many people sign up and try out my product. I am grateful for everyone who has given Lunch Money a chance and even more thankful for all the feedback, bug reports and feature requests that came in.

2020 - What’s next?

In January 2020, my husband and I will be setting off for Taipei, Taiwan as our home base until late April. I’ll be continuing to work full-time on Lunch Money while also blogging and sharing parts of my entrepreneurial journey. We have also been taking lessons in Mandarin Chinese so here’s to hoping our language skills improve while we’re there and we’re able to interact more with locals!

A look back in terms of Github contributions

I thought this would be fun to share! My Github contributions from the last 5 years, from when I started as the founding engineer of a startup in 2015, to my almost 1.5 year long programming hiatus while I was traveling, and finally to my freelancing gigs that merged with my Lunch Money progress.

Do you notice the streak of dark greens in the first week of September 2019? That represents the frantic programming and bug fixes that ensued after the Hacker News launch. Fun times.

Life in Fukuoka: Building an app, freelancing, and living abroad

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 11:00:00 -0400

TL;DR: Lived in Japan for 5 months and spent most of that time developing a budgeting app from scratch, working as a freelance software engineer, learning Japanese and getting acquainted with the local culture. Sign up for the open beta or skip to the part about what makes the app different. Keep reading for the story, process, and motivation behind this.

Last August, Justin and I booked round-trip tickets from Toronto to Asia leaving January 3 and returning May 8th. Our plan was to live in Japan for the majority of our time abroad while freelancing.

We knew that leaving a familiar place for such a long time would force us to wrap up everything we had going on currently. Ideally, when we arrive to our new home, we would start with a mostly free calendar to focus on whatever we want.

So, that “whatever we want” for me ended up being an app that I have been itching to develop for a while.

This is the story of my journey in creating this app from scratch and how it fit in with other commitments such as freelancing, living/traveling abroad, learning Japanese, and hosting our visiting friends and family.

October 2017: The Inception

The story starts way back to when Justin and I moved to Toronto to start our life together in October 2017. One of the first things we did was set up a budgeting spreadsheet. It started off simple and innocent just tracking our daily transactions and eventually, it amounted to over 20 tabs and dozens of cross-sheet equations. Our routine and process strengthened while our DIY budget tool, strained by our lack of expertise in spreadsheet formulas, stagnated. As this was happening, the idea of turning it into an app, which would allow for more computational freedom, started to float around in my head.

Redacted

September 2018: Finding Purpose Abroad

We are about 3 months from our departure date and going through a small crisis trying to figure out exactly how we were going to pass our time abroad. Beyond our travel dates and work situation (we both had freelancing contracts lined up), we had no plan for what we would actually be doing; we just knew we wanted to use this time away to accelerate our personal growth. Some ideas we had that did not materialize included getting into calligraphy, learning some form of martial arts, joining some local sports league, and taking online courses in something we were interested in, like digital animation.

On a trip to visit Justin’s family, it was revealed that my sister-in-law was still using the budgeting spreadsheet I had set her up with a few months prior and was looking to get her boyfriend on it, too! This catalyzed the decision to build the app version and I resolved to work on it while in Japan.

We also decided to take a break from our current freelancing contracts starting around Christmas time and ending the first week of February so that we could start our trip without work obligations and settle into Japan at our own pace.

November 2018: Design Kick-off

I couldn’t wait to get started, so I fired up Sketch and began making some initial designs to get the creative juices flowing.

The first design iteration of the Transactions page based on the layout of our spreadsheet

December 2018: Programming Kick-off

I started programming during the Christmas break, a week before leaving for Japan. First step was to figure out my stack. I explored a few different ideas and eventually landed on a mix of new (Typescript, Semantic UI) and familiar (Node.js, React, PostgreSQL) technologies.

I was pretty excited to get into Typescript– I’d heard a lot of good things but the opportunity to use it just hadn’t come up. I was also curious about what it would be like to work with a UI framework like Semantic and excited at the idea that it would save me a lot of time and CSS-induced headaches. It was nice that I would be learning something new with this project! This is important because if I spend a considerable amount of time on this and it falls flat, I will at least have an up-to-date skill set.

Prior to starting, I wanted to set a clear goal in case I lose track. I decided the first milestone would be to get my web app to the point where Justin and I could completely switch off our spreadsheet.

January 2019: The Arrival and Settling into a Routine

Once in a blue moon, I initiate a project that absolutely consumes me. Actually, Justin and I are both the type of people who can stay up late working on something that interests us, just to wake up early the next morning to pick back where we left off. For me, this is an incredibly elusive high and a mode in which I can hammer out a bunch of work and feel like a million bucks after. It is definitely a feeling that I yearn for especially after a long bout of comparitively monotonous work, and excitedly, I knew it would overtake us in Japan.

The danger, however, is that we can easily lose sight of other priorities. We have additional goals that are important to us, so we prioritized finding an effective daily routine that could best set ourselves up for overall success.

Fitness

The first thing we did after moving into our apartment was look for a neighbourhood gym. It was crucial that we kept our fitness regimen since we would be spending a considerable amount of time in front of the computer every day. Also, we were living in the land of ramen noodles and we knew we would be trying lots of new food and eating a lot!

Cooking

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to learn Japanese cuisine and experiment with ingredients that are not as readily available or affordable in Toronto. We are already used to cooking at home, so we were looking forward to keeping that up while abroad since it’s generally the more frugal and healthier option.

Language learning

Since we were going to be living in a foreign city that doesn’t see many Western tourists, we agreed that we should learn enough basic Japanese to get by everyday life. We set aside time every day to practice Japanese via apps like Memrise, Lingodeer and Tandem in addition to going out to restaurants and coffee shops to try to make small talk with shop owners.

February 2019: Running on nitro

February was by far the most productive month, clocking in about 88 hours of work on Lunch Money. It was our first full month in Fukuoka and we had very minimal external obligations. We also found a free co-working space (The Startup Cafe) that we ended up holing ourselves in nearly every day for at least a couple of hours. At the end of February, The Startup Cafe closed for renovations and would not re-open until after we leave Japan.

It was very sad at first, but ultimately it was a blessing that the Startup Cafe closed because it forced us to find other options. As a result, we started working out of various Starbucks and Manu Coffee’s in different neighbourhoods allowing us to weave in exploring more of the city with working every day!

Milestones

On February 9, I reached my first goal and got Justin and I up and running on an internal alpha. I had a working version of Lunch Money with the basic features from our spreadsheet. It was a glorious feeling and Justin immediately filed a handful of bugs. Perfect!

I also started freelancing again. I scheduled daily standup meetings for 7:30am, forcing myself to wake up by then. Although I had more commitments now, it actually helped me get by on a more rigid schedule thereby increasing my productivity overall. Prior to this, we were getting up at much later hours in the day.

March 2019 and April 2019: Final stretches

By contrast, March and April were much busier since both our parents visited and we found ourselves out and about a lot more as spring approached. We spent a total of 3 weeks out of town– in Tokyo to meet up with Justin’s parents and in Okinawa and Taipei. Finally, my parents visited us in Fukuoka for about 2.5 weeks. All in all, this translated into a forced but much-needed break away from Lunch Money. I still kept up my freelancing commitments but the rest of the time was mostly spent sightseeing and passing quality time with our loved ones.

Milestones

By this point, Justin and I are using Lunch Money every day and it has very much become part of our routine now! The spreadsheet, which had served us very well for over a year, officially retired.

During my time in Japan, I was able to spend 215 hours working on Lunch Money while going to the gym 41 times during the 83 days we were in town and signed up, and we also cooked two-thirds of our meals at home. Yes, I keep tabs on everything.

Reflection: The Hard Parts

Losing motivation

When you’re a one-person team working on everything from design to coding and everything around and in between, you’re supposed to carry knowledge of the grand vision all the way down to the name of every individual variable. It’s easy to lose sight of the reason you’re doing this when you’re knee deep in tasks and bugs. The worst is when I spend an entire afternoon in front of the computer and leave feeling like I wasn’t as productive as I should have been. However, this usually passes with a little pep talk from Justin. Shout out to my husband for periodically reigniting my fire!

“Proper” use of time abroad

I occasionally questioned how we were spending our time. We were in an enviable situation living in a new country with much to discover yet we were spending a lot of time working on our computers. Was that pretty lame? Was it considered squandering our opportunity here?

It was a challenge to explain our situation to people and equally difficult to convey that we were having an excellent time just going to a coffee shop to work for 4 to 6 hours a day whenever possible. The freedom to work endlessly on a passion project is fun, luxurious, and normally out-of-reach for us.

I eventually came to my senses and understood that I didn’t need to prove anything. It took a lot of planning, effort and sacrifice to re-arrange parts of our lives to make this time in Fukuoka work. We’re now enjoying the fruits of our labour and having a great time abroad doing what we love even though it doesn’t fit the template for the perfect Instagram story.

In the end, we are not leaving as strangers to the city. Justin and I effectively ate our way through Fukuoka which is surely our favorite way of getting to know a new place. We saved a lot of the sightseeing and day trips for when my parents visited which was a fantastic decision since we were able to share all the joys of new discoveries together.

Reflection: The Good Parts

Getting organized and going at my own pace

I loved being able to start a big project from scratch and figuring out the best ways to stay organized. This helped keep everything sorted and prioritized properly which in turn keeps my mental energy up. To keep track of features and bugs, I used Asana religiously. For time-tracking on both Lunch Money and my contracting work, I used Harvest which I highly recommend for its ease of use and beautiful design.

Although it was overwhelming how much I had to do on top of the basic coding (design from branding to icons, analytics, error tracking, admin stuff like domains and e-mails, etc), I enjoyed having such varying tasks. For instance, it was nice to have something completely unrelated to programming that I could do whenever I got exhausted from staring at code.

Getting help from the technical hubby

I am so lucky that the areas in which I am weakest or find the most tedious (dev ops-related stuff, mostly) happen to be among Justin’s favorite technical challenges. He’s saved my butt a few times by helping me properly set up my environments, fix my error tracking, and he even wrote my daily currency rate fetching script!

Lunch Money: How it’s different

On to the app! I will expand on the 3 key concepts core to our spreadsheet that I’ve adapted into the app.

Multi-currency supported natively

Multicurrency support is a non-negotiable for us because we have money in both American and Canadian banks and we like to keep track of our cash spending in local currencies when we are travelling. Lunch Money was designed from the beginning with multi-currency in mind.

Choose from over 50 currencies to use in your budget!

Transactions are tracked in their native currency. For example, a transaction from our Canadian credit card might show up as CA$30.00 while Japanese yen spending displays ¥1,800. When we calculate your total spending for the month, we add everything up in your primary currency according to current exchange rates. You can even set your budget in one currency while tracking spending in many others and it will all work correctly and seamlessly!

Recurring expenses are not part of the budget!

Most budgeting apps treat your recurring expenses like any other transaction by categorizing and tracking them in the monthly budget. However, these are charges that will not change month-to-month and there is very little value in categorizing and budgeting for those amounts as if they are adjustable!

In Lunch Money, recurring expenses show as a separate type of transaction and are managed on their own page. I really like this system because it can tell us exactly how much money we need to simply get through the month. If you need to cut spending, recurring expenses should be the first place to look.

Recurring expenses allow you to easily see your minimum monthly expenditures

If you connect your bank accounts to Lunch Money, we will automatically detect which of your transactions are recurring expenses!

Re-budget every month with last month’s data

I don’t like the concept of rolling over budgets because I believe we should be building good habits rather than trying to cover up bad ones!

Justin and I’s end-of-the-month routine revolves around setting the next month’s budget. We do so by looking at what we budgeted for the current month and how much we were over or under. This might let us know that we were wildly unrealistic last month and that we should adjust going forward. We call this course correction!

Set this month's budget by seeing your budget from last month versus how much you actually spent!

We also consider upcoming events that might need some extra budgeting. For example, a friend’s wedding would require extra budgeting in the Gifts category. This monthly reflection and planning helps us come up with a reasonable budget for the forthcoming month and is a skill that improves over time. With course correction, you will strengthen your ability to predict and anticipate future spending.

What I am looking for are friends and strangers alike who are interested in a new budgeting solution. Ideally, they would find the multi-currency feature useful, have banking institutions in Canada and/or America and would be willing to provide continuous feedback. I am excited to see where Lunch Money could go and what others think of it!

If you made it this far and like what you see, please sign up for the open beta.

Life in Fukuoka: On society and culture shock

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 11:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: This post is ripe with generalizations based on my observations as a foreigner in Fukuoka. Note that when I say “the Japanese”, I know not everyone here abides by these principles. And more than anything, I’m referring to the people we interact with day-to-day in Fukuoka, which is located near the country-side and is much less diverse than Tokyo. Please enjoy!

Low tide canals in Fukuoka at sunset during the winter

We’re just passed our second month here and officially halfway through our stint in Japan. It’s been interesting to look back and reflect on how our perception of Fukuoka and Japan in general has changed since first arriving starry-eyed. Unsurprisingly, living and attempting to integrate into Japanese society generates different situations than visiting for a short period of time would. For someone like me who finds immense joy in noticing and analyzing all the details, it’s been amusing to say the least.

Dare I say we’ve officially surpassed tourist status? Restaurant owners and coffee shop keepers are starting to recognize us. Staff at our neighbourhood sake bar recounted seeing us walking around the area. We’re getting better at navigating the local bus lines of this canal city wherein we’re starting to feel the comforts and familiarity of Home.

While discovering Fukuoka as a city has been relatively straightforward, the cultural landscape has been more difficult to scale. We’re realizing every day the extreme differences and lack of overlap between Japan and Canada & the US. For starters, as I’m sitting here typing at a busy Starbucks, the lady next to me has left her phone charging and her purse unattended for about 15 minutes now.

Gone in 60 seconds if this was in San Francisco

By far the biggest difference and shock is the ubiquity of common courtesy in Japanese society. The hyper-awareness of when one might be inconveniencing someone else is instilled deeply. I feel this could explain many peculiarities someone might come across as a tourist, such as why public areas from shops to the streets are often kept tidy and clean, and why service people always appear so polite and attentive. On top of that, the Japanese concept of hospitality, Omotenashi, in which one attempts to anticipate someone else’s needs before it’s shown or even realized by the person themselves, further distinguishes an already idiosyncratic society.

This can be felt in every day life. The bus driver waits for each new passenger to sit down before starting the bus up again. A restaurant worker will walk you out to the streets to bow goodbye. A supermarket cashier will name every item they are scanning and recite the price to you almost melodically. A fellow patron might notice that you’re trying to find a seat for two and willingly move without being asked or even leave the shop so you can sit together.

Then, it gets more intense. We’ve noticed that hosts at a very fancy restaurant will stay in the bowing position on the streets while covertly stealing glances to see if the diners have left their field of vision (In Japanese culture, there is a hierarchy when it comes to who should give the last bow). Multiple people have apologized to us for their poor level of English. (How I would respond if my Japanese was half decent: ‘Um hello? We are in Japan and our Japanese is poor. We are sorry! We’re in your country! And if you’re speaking English at all, we absolutely think that’s amazing!) If you go to a large department store like Bic Camera or Yodobashi, you might catch a worker awkwardly running without trying to seem like they’re running because their arms are clinging by their side. Chances are they are getting something for someone and they don’t want to keep them waiting too long since department stores in Japan are huge, but they also don’t want to cause alarm by running through a store frantically.

It seems that while the Japanese are heedful of inconveniencing others, sometimes they are self-sacrificial and will inconvenience themselves in order to keep you at ease. But to us foreigners, this usually results in an elevated level of awkwardness because we are unaware of how to navigate such a social situation. If you’ve ever seen the episode of Rick & Morty with the Meeseeks box, I sometimes wonder if the Meeseeks were inspired in any way by an exagerated version of the service-oriented Japanese. For those unaware of the episode, “Meeseeks^[1] are creatures who are created to serve a singular purpose for which they will go to any length to fulfill […] If a Meeseeks is not given a purpose at the beginning of its existence it seems to default to taking the purpose of the Meeseeks before it” (credit).

Two Meeseeks summoned to help Beth and Summer with whatever they desire

Once, as we were leaving the Startup Cafe where we work out of, I casually asked one of the volunteers if they knew where else might be open to laptop workers during the day. He couldn’t think of a place and proceeded to summon 2 of his fellow volunteers. Together, they racked their brains for an uncomfortable number of minutes as Justin and I were awkwardly trying to convey that it’s not a big deal because we were aware there aren’t many places but figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask anyway. It took a while to abort the situation and we got some very unnecessarily deep apologetic bows on our way out.

We’ve adapted in some weird ways to this. Because our Japanese is still not very good, we often find ourselves struggling between wanting to ask about something but not wanting to accidentally trigger the relentless pursuit of a Japanese person. In other words, we might avoid asking a staff member for help because the amount of effort they will pour into finding the solution for us might not be worth the period of awkward broken communication. Sometimes we get anxious if we’re leaving a place and the shopkeeper who had been serving us is no where to be seen; we don’t want them to feel bad for missing the opportunity to say good bye! Sometimes after we leave a shop and we hear someone running, we get worried thinking we might have forgotten something. It’s very common to see shopkeepers and waiters chasing after a patron who left something at their shop– embarrassingly, it has happened to us twice!

Update (2019-04-19): Last week while we were visiting Kagoshima, a shopkeeper chased after me with a 1 yen coin (equivalent to about 1 U.S. penny) that I had apparently dropped when I was rummaging through my change purse to pay.

Another facet of this vigilance is that they can’t seem to bear delivering any sort of bad news. Oftentimes, we will walk into a restaurant that happens to be full or not accepting new diners. Instead of simply telling us the facts, they will say a lot of “sorry’s” while bowing their head apologetically and slowly pushing us out the front door.

They also have special vocabulary that exonerates them from giving any further information or excuse so as to “soften the blow”. The common one is “chotto” which can literally mean a million things depending on how you say it. This article explains it well; I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around it. The gist of it is depending on the context, it can mean anything from “a little” to “a lot”, from “wait a moment” to “can’t do it”. Notably, it can be used as a cop-out to say, hey I don’t really want to get into it and I want to save us both from discomfort so I’ll just say chotto, and the other person will understand and both people will move on. Conceptually, it’s a word that I would like to use on other people but would be very annoyed if someone used it on me.

There’s a lot that we still can’t quite figure out. When we think we have reasoned an unfamiliar habit or reaction, we discover something contradictory. For instance, in Japan, the notion of mottainai is very strong. In short, it represents an ideal of not wasting anything and not taking more than you need of anything. It ties into a lot of behaviour. We’ve heard anecdotes on how the Japanese seldom throw things out or replace them even if it’s broken. Children are taught from a young age not to waste food and to finish every grain of rice. This recent Economist segment describes an ongoing radical recycling movement. Public buses and a number of cars (at least the rental cars we’ve been getting) seem to run on an eco-friendly engine that shuts off when idling. Sounds great and environmentally conscious, yet Japanese consumption of single-use plastic is awful. We’ve experienced shopkeepers’ mindless excessive bagging of purchased goods, disposable wet towels wrapped in plastic served at numerous restaurants, single-day-use face masks which are worn by nearly everyone during winter, and a new plastic sleeve for covering your wet umbrella anytime you enter a shop or restaurant.

A common sight at supermarkets: individually wrapped vegetables

Update (2019-04-19): I’ve come to realize that this excessive use of plastic at the supermarket is in fact very much in line with their principles of not wasting. Wrapping perishable items in plastic prolongs the lifespan of the food, thereby reducing food waste both at home and at the supermarket. They have just chosen to not waste food over not creating plastic waste. Also, the 2016 discovery of this plastic-eating enzyme is a pretty neat and might explain why the Japanese bin-sorting system is so strict about PET plastic versus normal plastic!

Additionally, there is a strong notion of not disturbing or causing discomfort to others. Anyone who’s been to Japan will notice how quiet the subways are, even when they are absolutely packed. You could hear a pimple pop on a bus full of people during rush hour. They just don’t talk. However, when allergy season comes around, for some reason, is when this rule has its one exception. I now have confirmation that Asian men are the loudest sneezers in the world. I thought it was just my dad for the longest time. There is no effort to conceal the sneeze. It is as if all the noise they have pent-up is permitted to come out all at once and it is excusable, because, well, the entire country of Japan goes through allergy season together at the same time.

The Japanese are also relatively conservative people. They don’t dress in revealing clothes compared to the west and they can be profoundly shy. So shy that in most public (and even in some home) restrooms, the sound of streaming water will play to mask the sound of one’s peeing. You might think you could understand why performing a normal human function behind closed doors might make them feel uncomfortable until you learn that hot springs and public bathhouses in which patrons are expected to strip fully naked is pretty much a standard activity.

Lastly, while the archetype of anything Japanese is highly efficient and process-oriented, for some reason, there lacks a canonical side of the street to walk on. We are constantly startled when we’re walking on the sidewalks even though we are trying hard to be aware of our surroundings. If you want that Japanese “Mario Kart” experience, just walk on the sidewalks with bikers zooming by and pedestrians all over the place.

Yet there is somehow organization to all this chaos. There’s rarely honking and everyone seems to be able to manoeuvre whatever obstacles are in the way. We walk down this small side street all the time and it is shared by bikers, pedestrians, scooters and cars. The craziest part is that while it appears as a single lane road, it is actually bi-directional. I stood there for a few minutes and it didn’t take long to capture the following photos to show varying states of occupancy:

Pedestrians taking up the whole street

A car coming through with pedestrians in the way

Three cars trying to navigate around each other

In fairness, there are tons of great perks from having a society in which 99% of members are courteous, polite, and respectful. This is literally a fantasy world. When I was still living in San Francisco and I had a car, I often dreamt of a place where ‘courtesy re-park’ could be a thing– a concept in which anyone could re-park anyone else’s car if they just needed an inch or two more for parallel parking. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if this already happens in some Japanese towns.

Justin and I went to our first concert in Japan a few weeks ago to see a female hip hop duo, an electronic music producer and a ska band perform live. The venue was filled with young people dancing and drinking. There were noticeable differences with the way people act at concerts here. While I can report that even in Japan, people will push their way to the front, the difference is that they genuinely look ashamed and are bowing their heads apologetically to everyone they happen to pass by. I also noticed that there is way less obnoxiously loud singing and woo-ing or screaming to take advantage of the lulls, just to be potentially noticed by the band. But to me, the biggest difference was the behaviour when all the performers came out to take a group photo with the audience at the end of the show. I’ve been in plenty of these, or rather I have tried to be but because I am short and have no desire to be in the front row of any show, I usually just accept that I’ll be hidden among a sea of arms in the air. To illustrate my point, here are some random concert selfies I found on the internet:

creditGloria Gaynor

creditSelena Gomez

creditSome random group from Morocco

Now here’s the photo from the concert we went to:

creditClick here for a bigger version!

I’m actually in it! Thank you Japanese people and your aversion to being in the way of others. Also, notice that the only people raising their hands are the ones on the sides, presumably because they know they wouldn’t be in anyone’s way!

At the end of the day, every bit of the experience of being in Japan is enjoyable to us, even the frustrating bits. They are fun to decipher and when we ask our Japanese friends for more context, it often ends in mutual shock that the other culture doesn’t do a particular thing the same way. Personally, these culture shocks are my favourite parts of any travel I do. It forces us to question why we do things a certain way and challenges what we perceive as normal. Ultimately, it helps us understand ourselves and the world better, plus it creates lots of interesting stories to share!

[1] Unsurprisingly, in the Japanese dub for Rick and Morty, the Meeseeks are voiced by a woman.

Life in Fukuoka: the first month

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Hello world!

It’s been over a month since our last correspondence. Justin and I have been doing very well in Fukuoka. We settled in fairly quickly, having found a routine that works for us which includes grocery shopping at our local supermarket, going to the gym every morning and rotating through a trio of hot teas (soba tea, green tea, and rooibos!) throughout the day.

Our time has been split between working on our personal programming projects, continuing our contracting work, keeping up our fitness regimen, learning Japanese, and anything food-related such as cooking at home and seeking out restaurants. These are precisely the goals we set out for ourselves before we left home.

We have not seen a lot of the tourist spots, local attractions and have only managed to take 3 day trips out of the city so far (Itoshima x2 and Yanagawa). Although we do take the effort to take days off from our routine to explore, our goal in Fukuoka is not to vacation, but to see how well we can integrate! We wanted to see if we are able to be just as, if not more, productive in a foreign environment while preserving our values (staying financial lean and physically healthy) and personal goals (fitness, cooking, programming, etc), thereby proving that this lifestyle could be sustainable to repeat in the future– our ultimate goal.

That being said, our first month in Fukuoka has definitely been an adventure. Below is a small sample of a few anecdotes we find interesting! (Side note: not much specific foods and language stuff mentioned here; I’m saving most of that for another blog post!)

What’s awesome

Supermarkets

The supermarkets in Fukuoka will be sorely missed when we leave– the asian grocery store in Markham do not compare. Very affordable Japanese ingredients remove barriers to experimenting with new dishes that would normally cost $20 just for the raw ingredients back home (I’m referring mainly to kelp, bonito flakes, and sake).

In my opinion, the quality of supermarket sushi here is comparable to mid-tier sushi restaurants back home in Toronto, though the value simply cannot be beat. If you go after 7:30pm, most of the sushi and sashimi will be discounted and if you get lucky, you get a coveted second discount sticker!

Delicious double-discounted supermarket sushi! Total came out to be US$8.43 for both!

Furthermore, the selection of yuzu products is unbelievable. For the uninitiated, yuzu is a flavourful citrus fruit popular in Japan and Korea. Its peel and zest can enhance any dish, soup, cocktail, dessert– you name it. Since arriving in Japan, we’ve discovered so many more applications of this fruit, most notably in sauces and condiments! Yuzu kosho (柚子胡椒) is a paste made from chili peppers and yuzu peels and is wonderfully addicting to add to any meats. Yuzu ponzu (similar to a light vinaigrette) and yuzu ichimi (Japanese chili pepper seasoning) also sit on a shelf in our pantry. Not to mention, our favorite つけ麺 (tsukemen, dipping ramen noodle) restaurant uses yuzu in their soup! We’ll definitely be bringing back yuzu products in our suitcases.

Our favourite つけ麺, a spicy broth with fatty pork and yuzu peels floating around

The other notable difference about the supermarkets here, or at least the Sunny’s (which are owned by Walmart) is that there is a special station past the checkout counter where you can take your time to pack your own groceries. It works like this: you bring your basket to the cashier. The cashier grabs another basket and places it on the other side of the food scanner. As they scan everything from your basket, they place it back neatly into the other basket. Finally, you pay and you take your re-packed basket to the packing station where they provide you with thin clear plastic bags in case you have meat that you want to double-pack. I’m a huge fan of this system because it’s incredibly efficient and takes away the pressure of packing your groceries quickly to get out of people’s way!

Preparing to pack up our own groceries!

What’s not so great

Working remotely

This is without a doubt the biggest disappointment we have encountered in Fukuoka (and maybe Japan in general?). Justin and I both work remotely, so we need a reliable internet connection and our laptops to get things done. In all the cities we have spent considerable time in (San Francisco, Taipei, Toronto), coffee shop culture is very welcoming to laptop workers. However, in Japan, coffee shop culture is very different. From what we can tell, using your laptop is frowned upon yet staying at a coffee shop for hours on your phone is okay! (Side note: the Starbucks here seems to allow laptop workers but we try to avoid these.)

Thankfully, we have discovered a whopping two places in the city of Fukuoka that are open to laptop workers. The first is called Startup Cafe and it has been a godsend– we probably go about 5 times a week. It is essentially a free co-working space open from 10AM to 10PM with very fast internet. The atmosphere is like a library and we believe it’s funded by the local government in an attempt to stir up entrepreneurial interests among locals. They provide free tax, immigration, and law consulting services and put on lots of local events. The downside is that they will be renovating starting March 1st and there will be no free co-working space offered anymore!

One view of the Fukuoka Start-up Cafe, basically our second home

The second alternative is a store called Tsutaya. Now, there are two kinds of Tsutayas, so you have to be careful. One of them is a time portal back to the 90’s and the other one is set in the future. The one from the past is a multi-story CD and DVD rental store that puts the Blockbuster catalog to shame. The other one is a re-imagined bookstore concept that allows you to read books and shop for related items in the store. They have a large Starbucks with free wi-fi and outlets where you can stay for literally hours on your laptop. The downside is that it’s extremely popular and getting any seat at all is difficult.

One section of DVD out of literally dozens. These English series are all available to rent.

We’ll have to figure out next month what to do in terms of where we’ll be working. We’re considering signing up for a co-working space if it’s not too expensive, or simply working out of the Starbucks here.

Smokers

In Japan, it is still legal to smoke indoors at restaurants. It’s terrible. There’s no worse feeling than getting excited about the food you just struggled to order, and then having the patron next to you start smoking a cigarette.

Coffee selection

While (mostly) everything in Japan is cheaper than in the Western world, one thing that is not is the coffee here. A latte will run you at least ¥500 which is about US$4.50 and it usually comes in a much smaller size than what you would get at home for that price (unless you live in SF). On top of that, decaffeinated coffee is extremely rare in Japan as are non-dairy milk options.

What’s different

Alternative title: Mundane things that I find interesting!

The bus system

The way the bus works here is quite interesting. The pricing is variable which means the further you ride, the more expensive your fare will be.

You enter through the back door where you tap your IC card. When you tap, you’ll notice a number which indicates your ride segment. At the front of the bus is a screen with a grid. Whatever the number is under your ride segment number is the price you’ll pay. As the bus drives further, the numbers will go up accordingly!

Shaky image of the fare screen at the front of the bus

Raised rubber tiles

All main streets in Japan have these yellow raised rubber tiles for the visually impaired. When you get to an intersection, the rubber tiles fan out and are yellow circles instead. I like to think of it as braille for your feet!

Tactile rubber tiles at an intersection

High school reputations

Apparently this is a thing in Taiwan as well because when we first stumbled upon it, our Taiwanese friend was surprised that we had never seen something like this before.

“This” being a full-blown poster board of statistics for a particular high school’s graduating class.

One of two giant boards posted in front of a high school in Yanagawa

On the left (blue) side is a list of all the universities and colleges and the number of recent graduates who were admitted. The middle (red) column is a list of all the companies that graduates who will not be going to university will be working at. It also denotes whether the company is a corporation, public service (i.e. police force), or a small company/start-up. On the right side lists various “certifications” and how many of the graduating students were able to get them. Apparently Microsoft Office is a highly regarded skill in Japan.

Something as trivial to us Westerners such as what high school you went to bears a lot of weight in Japan. The parts of an identity that are protected by anti-discrimination laws in US and Canada are put on full display and openly used to judge a person’s employability here. A friend that we met in Japan told us that whenever he applies for a new job, he must include his home city, his birthday, the high school he went to, and what year he graduated. An updated photo must also accompany every application. Knowing all this information, employers can calculate if an applicant was able to complete high school in the standard 4 years or if they had to take an extra year. From this, they judge how hard-working you must be. They may also choose to employ someone else over you to achieve a “diverse” workforce based on where you’re from, but seeing as Japan is not an internationally diverse country, this is the equivalent of an American company choosing to hire someone from the mid-west instead of the west coast because they already have a lot of Californians on the team.

Japan is indeed a very advanced city when it comes to technology, public transportation and general efficiency, but fundamental parts of the culture (such as working culture, gender equality) still set the country back many decades.

Greetings from Fukuoka!

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0500

Hello from the other side of the world! Justin and I are currently in Fukuoka, Japan and we’ll be here until May.

Um what? Where? Why?

We first read about this city 2 years ago on a weekend trip to Tainan, Taiwan. I picked out a bilingual travel magazine and flipped to a page that highlighted Fukuoka in Japan. Neither of us had heard of it before but after reading the article, we both knew that one day we wanted to end up there together (cheesy, but it’s true.)

Home for the next 4 months

The article painted the picture of an up-and-coming city where today’s Japanese youths, who are being priced out of Tokyo and Osaka, are flocking to in droves. With its proximity to the beautiful mountains rich in history, it maintains balance between the new, modern Japanese bustle and the slow, traditional countryside lifestyle. Apparently, the mayor of Fukuoka looks to Seattle as a model city, admiring their bike-friendly roads and tech-driven economy. Their similarities as port cities is his inspiration to be able to replicate desirable living standards for his city. Fukuoka itself already has a lot of culture especially in the food scene. In fact, it’s the birthplace of the tonkotsu (pork bone broth) ramen, which is likely the style of ramen that you have had before!

Deciding to live here

Though Justin and I moved to Toronto in late 2017, we knew that eventually, we wanted to go abroad together. We’d never done this before since Justin went to Taiwan for his own personal purposes and I spent most of my travels alone in Europe. This time, we wanted to plan, anticipate, and experience everything together. Initially, we had an idea of going to Busan, South Korea but eventually decided on Fukuoka, Japan. (Conveniently, Busan is just a short ferry ride away from Fukuoka!)

It was around April of 2018 that we decided firmly on Fukuoka. We set a rough departure date of January, primarily so we could spend Christmas with Justin’s family and New Year’s with mine before leaving. We also wanted to time it so that we would miss the most brutal part of Toronto winters but be back in time for the beautiful summer and fall.

Learning the language

Learning Japanese was going to be essential, especially if we were going to be spending a long period of time there and we were going to a part of Japan that doesn’t see as many western tourists as say, Tokyo. There would undoubtedly be less English-friendly experiences in Fukuoka.

We started off by learning the alphabets. Written Japanese is made up of 3 different sets of characters– Hiragana (46 characters), which is phonetic like our alphabet; Katagana (46 characters), which has a one-to-one mapping to Hiragana; and kanji (infinite characters, probably), which are Chinese words that have no phonetic properties– you just have to memorize as many of them as you can! We felt slightly relieved that both of us have existing knowledge of a limited set of kanjis; mine coming from years of Chinese school when I was younger and Justin’s from his year-long stint of learning Chinese in Taiwan.

Next, we moved onto phone apps. We started with Duolingo but eventually found that it lacked in a lot of areas and ultimately landed on Memrise as our primary learning tool. We also supplemented with JapanesePod101, a textbook that Justin’s parents got for his birthday, and various episodes of Terrace House on Netflix.

Planning Process

The planning process took months due to all the moving parts. Here’s a subset of things we had to consider:

Finding contract work that would be open to time off and/or 16 hour difference starting in January;
Starting a packing list early to make sure we don’t forget anything (for example, we read randomly that deodorant is hard to come by in Japan so I told Justin to make sure we get some extras packed!);
Starting a “finishing marathon” in which we try to finish all the perishable items/condiments in our fridge and pantry. The last thing we want is to come back to rotten items in our kitchen;
Looking into eliminating unused costs while we’re gone, such as our car insurance;
Looking into flights and the best/cheapest flight path since we also wanted to visit Taipei and Hong Kong;
Looking into long-term accommodation options in Fukuoka. Airbnb is heavily regulated in Japan, so the available options were much too expensive;
Getting our international driver’s permit;
and most importantly, making sure that we were able to see our friends and family before leaving!

Thankfully, we use Wunderlist religiously and were able to get everything done in time!

First Impressions of Fukuoka

We arrived late last night. A man from the rental property company met us at our building. He brought his own pair of house slippers to use while he showed us around our apartment.

One view of our apartment!

After we settled in, we decided to get a bite to eat. It was quite late, around 11pm, so we were hoping that places wouldn’t be closed. Obviously, we were the new folks in town because there were at least 6 izakayas (Japanese-style bars that also serve food) open within a 20 meter radius, and they all close between 1AM and 5AM! We decided to go to the izakaya that was right around the corner from our apartment. It was our first meal in Japan and we were excited to put our Japanese to the test.

The first thing I asked was, 英語のメニューはありますか, which means, is there an English menu?

Their English menu is more like a reference dictionary (larger version)

Next, we ordered our beers. I decided on a small (小さい) Sapporo draft and Justin wanted a medium but wasn’t sure how to order a 中 (since this word has a bunch of different pronunciations in Japanese), so he decided to go with a large (大).

We ordered a bunch of skewers and were thrilled that our first neighbourhood izakaya was so welcoming. We will surely be back because as I write this, Justin is feverishly translating their entire menu and, every few minutes, he’s eagerly telling me about their off-beat offerings.

乾杯! Cheers!

2018 Year In Review

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0500

To my fellow reader,

It’s been just over a year since my last blog post and I would hate for you to think I’ve abandoned my platform.

2017 was a year of many firsts as well as the longest period of time I’ve ever spent on my own. Blogging was therapeutic because it helped me feel connected to the people back home and was my lone source of familiarity. The asynchronous nature of blogging boded well for me– I liked that I could express myself without needing someone on the other end actively listening (or reading my messages on IM). Admittedly, this meant that I did not have a lot of direct communication with friends and family. On the other hand, I opened up to a wider audience which included people I probably would have otherwise never spoken to. My blog enabled me to rekindle past friendships and brought me closer to some because of a newfound mutual interest in an alternative lifestyle. Among my favourite moments in 2018 was seeing acquaintances at weddings or other gatherings and hearing that they had been following my blog and were inspired by a post or two. Thank you! It means a lot to me.

The purpose of this post is to fill in the blanks of what I have been up to in 2018 to precede opening up on what 2019 has in store.

I moved to Toronto.

I moved back to Toronto in late 2017, shortly after my travels. My then-boyfriend, Justin, and I broke up early in our travels. I realized shortly after that my desire was to be back in Toronto where my parents are based. I had no idea what I was going to do there, but I felt in my heart that after 6 years away, I no longer wanted to be so far from my aging parents. Moving to Toronto wasn’t much of an option before since Justin and I had plans to continue living abroad and Canada didn’t quite fit that definition for him back then.

In our very own version of Love, Actually, Justin and I’s individual journeys over the summer of 2017 eventually led to us getting back together. He happily agreed to move to Toronto with me to start our new life.

We got married!

In December 2017, Justin and I got engaged during a 3-week trip to Mexico. Specifically, we were in a cabin off the cliffs in a tiny town called San Jose del Pacifico. We kept the engagement to ourselves until we could tell our family and closest friends in person or at best, over video chat. After a year abroad and limited communication, we felt the desire to rebuild the intimacy in our personal relationships.

We got married in a private ceremony with our parents present at the house I grew up in. We had plans for a larger wedding with all our friends and family together; however, the private ceremony and the hours proceeding it were some of the most emotional moments for the both of us. It felt overwhelmingly special to have been able to share this with our parents and to give thanks for all they had done for us leading up to the moment where Justin and I officially began our lives as a married couple.

Since we were not going to have the burden and time sink of planning a wedding, this enabled both of us to apply our time to some personal goals of ours.

I launched an app!

Only 12 people have downloaded it and my mother is one of them.

Having spent a year abroad, I did zero programming aside from the Markdown formatting for my blog posts. Working in a fast-changing industry, it was definitely at the back of my mind that I might now be behind my peers in terms of experience and employability. It seemed like before I left, React had gone from a potential Angular replacement to the de facto framework for cross-platform mobile development and modern web applications.

I spent the first 3 months of the year learning React and I developed a phrasebook app. It hasn’t reached the worldwide success I had envisioned for it, but it was a great learning experience and lead me to the next chapter…

I started remote contracting.

I knew that I wanted to continue a life of long-term travel, setting my own hours, and being able to work from anywhere. I am grateful that I was able to leverage existing connections to find remote contracting opportunities.

After a brief stint of working at a start-up in Toronto on a work permit, Justin was also able to start remote contracting as well. This was the pivotal moment that has allowed us to begin the lifestyle that we envision for our future.

I launched a scholarship.

This is a very personal goal of mine that I am ecstatic to finally cross off.

From a young age, my older sister and only sibling, Janet, had the foresight to set me up for success. When we first got our family computer, I spent all my time on nonsensical websites and games. She told me to stop wasting my time and to learn something productive. That was how I first started programming. When Janet was in high school and university, she participated in study/travel programs. She opened my eyes to a world of possibility outside of the city we grew up in. When I was in grade 12 and contemplating choices for university, she advised that engineering, particularly at Waterloo, would be the path that could open up the most doors for me. She also told me to live away from home because that’s how I could develop my independence. It’s quite obvious the impact all this advice has had on my life– currently, I am a freelance software engineer who is preparing to travel abroad long-term for the second time.

November 29, 2018 marked the 12th year of Janet’s passing. I am pleased to announce that I am starting a scholarship in her honour and memory through the University of Waterloo. The Janet Law-Yip Memorial Award is a vision I’ve had for a few years and I am truly humbled that it is coming to fruition.

If you’d like to learn more about Janet, the award, or would like to contribute to the fund, please visit https://janetlawyip.com. ❤️

What’s next?

Stay tuned for the next blog post!

How much I spent solo-traveling

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

INTRODUCTION

If you take nothing away from this article, have this: I love collecting data and I track almost everything I can, from daily steps to restaurants I eat at to my exact bicycle route from point A to point B. As a result, I'm able to tell you where I was, how I got there, and how much money I spent on any given day during my travels.

So when a number of friends asked me questions related to finances and how I kept myself afloat, I had a reason to justify sifting through all my data, consolidating them, and spending time designing a neat way of showing it all. This is the result of that.

I'm not claiming that my way was the best bang-for-your-buck or the most luxurious. It is in my nature to spend carefully and wisely. I lived day-by-day the way I wanted and in the end I am pleasantly surprised with the total amount I spent in exchange for all the memories, experiences, challenges, and surprises I encountered.

I believe certain decisions I made and the mindset I held while traveling contributed to a fruitful trip. I've tried to pepper these into the article in the form of tips or anecdotes. I'm not one to tell someone exactly how they should travel (I've encountered so many of these people in the last year!) but I hope I can inspire them to look a certain way.

Trip Overview

3 months in Asia:

1 month backpacking through rural Northeastern Thailand, splitting my time between a farmstay, a homestay, and figuring out a medical condition.
2 months living in Taipei, Taiwan, where my boyfriend was studying

5 months in Europe:

35 days working and living on a campsite/restaurant in rural Burgundy
3 total weeks hanging out in Paris, France with friends in between traveling
2 weeks subletting an apartment in Lyon, France
1 week living with a French family in the mountains
3 to 10 days each visiting: Munich, Switzerland, Milan, London, Helsinki, Tallinn, Stockholm, Copenhagen

Note: I usually reference Asia and Europe as the two different parts of my travels. The difference is that in Asia (except for in Thailand), I was with my boyfriend whereas in Europe, I was by myself.

As such, these numbers exclude 2 months of expenses since my boyfriend and I split those. When we're together, we tend to do more activities (concerts, eating out, going to bars) than I would when I was solo-traveling so I didn't feel like it would add to an accurate representation of my expenses.

These numbers also exclude 2 weeks of traveling, when my parents met up with me in France.

F.A.Q.

How did you track your spending? I used MoneyLover for iOS in Thailand and Taipei, since those places were mostly cash only. I was taking out money from the ATM and used MoneyLover to track my everyday spending. In Europe, I mostly used credit cards so I utilized Mint to keep track of everything.

How did you track your steps and miles? I used Moves for iOS.

How long did it take you to save up for this? To be honest, I couldn't tell you. I've been saving money from my paycheques ever since I started working 6 years ago. I also am fortunate enough to not have any debt. Furthermore, I do not consider myself a frivolous spender. I check Mint religiously and am always aware of my financial situation. I don't indulge in expensive and/or luxurious experiences or products. I think this contributed greatly not only to how much I was able to save, but also to how much I spent during my travels.

Can you show your breakdown cost by city? I honestly don't think that would be representative of the city or my time there. Every city was so different situationally and as such, my expenses varied wildly. For example, Stockholm was the most expensive city I visited but my lodging was basically free after I met some locals and was able to cook a few meals.

Did you have a daily budget? No, I didn't. I checked my finances everyday, though. I understood and trusted my habits and I felt I should be able to travel freely without consciously adhering to a strict daily budget.

Any other questions? Don't be shy!

Transportation

Below are my total expenses in USD and distance traveled in miles for all my transportation between cities and/or countries, sorted by average cost per mile.

How I Flew For Cheap

13 legs for $1,193.90 comes out to a little over $90 per flight, which is absurd considering I had 3 long-haul flights: Toronto to Taipei, Taipei to Frankfurt, and Paris to Toronto. If there was an extra column in the table, you would see that I also spent 109,000 points on reward travel. I spent the last 3 years signing up for credit cards to get their point bonuses and amassed a giant pot of points that I never dipped into until now. And let me tell you, it was so worth the wait because it saved me $1000!

Save up points and miles to help pay for your long-haul flights by taking advantage of credit card welcome bonuses. Check out resources like DoctorOfCredit.com, ThePointsGuy.com, and r/churning or r/churningcanada. Note that bonuses are typically scores better in the U.S. than in Canada.

I always opted for any other form of transportation over flying. I once chose a 9 hour red-eye bumpy bus ride from Paris to London over a 1 hour flight. The only times I flew within Europe were to get from London to Helsinki (3 hour flight, bounded by music festival) and from Copenhagen to Paris (waited too last minute and was constrained for time because my parents were flying into Paris as well).

Taking the Bus vs the Train in Europe

Taking the coach bus was my main mode of transportation in Europe. It is totally underrated and I never booked a bus fare that I thought was not reasonably priced. The main bus company in Europe, similar to Megabus, is Flixbus (Ouibus is also quite popular in France).

The bus would take much longer than the train (i.e. 6 hour bus from Paris to Lyon vs 2 hour train), but time was no longer considered a luxury. I had so much of it, and I never planned out more than a week in advance. Train prices in Europe work like plane prices– it jumps significant as the departure date approaches. On the other hand, bus tickets always stayed the same, even if you booked it an hour before.

"Slow travel", or simply taking your time and not being rushed through your traveling, saves you money in the long run because you no longer need to pay for the luxury of time.

The bonus aspect to this is that the scenery in most of Europe is beautiful so your bus ride is rarely lacking window candy. And if that's not your thing, you can get through a book or a movie pretty quickly, as well!

On Carpooling

I used Blablacar in France to get between cities where there aren't established bus or train routes. Blablacar is a popular carpooling service that connects people who need rides with people who were going there in the first place. Each time was a great experience and the bonus is that I was able to practice my French with someone who was forced to stay in a car with me for at least 2 hours.

On Taking A Boat

The boats I took were between Stockholm, Helsinki, and Estonia. Aside from flying, it was the most reasonably efficient way to get between each city. The boat from Helsinki to Stockholm was about 120 euros, but considering the fare includes one night of lodging, it doesn't seem so bad! Also, I booked it fairly last minute, and had I booked it 3 days sooner, the price would have been 80 euros!

Making last-minute travel plans adds fun and excitement to your trip but keep in mind there is a tax on that!

Lodging

Below are my total expenses in USD and nights stayed for varying lodgings.

A Surefire Way to Save Money While Traveling

Here's the obvious: friends are ultra valuable resources when you're traveling! I'll admit after tallying up all the numbers, I was definitely surprised that I had stayed so many days with a friend! My average cost per night was less than $13, and I never even had to stay at a gritty hostel!

The friends I stayed with varied between friends I just met–

Met a girl in Thailand and ended up staying in her apartment in Paris for a total of 21 days
Met someone in Lyon and later stayed with her boyfriend in Lyon
Met new friends in Stockholm 2 nights into paying for an absurdly expensive Airbnb and ended up crashing with them for 8 nights
Met a friend in Milan who provided accommodations in both Milan and Manchester

– as well as old, familiar faces!

Reunited with my first friend from college and stayed a weekend with them in Lausanne, Switzerland
Had a friend visit Milan for a business trip and stayed in her hotel for 2 nights
Had an old friend from San Francisco move to London recently and stayed with him for 6 nights

Choosing Experiences

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, I stayed at a campsite while working at a restaurant for over a month, and I also lived with several families while traveling through Thailand and France. These experiences helped me save money when it came to lodging. Instead of finding expensive hotels or Airbnbs in busy tourist areas, I was welcomed in small rural towns where the host glad exchanged free accommodation for a bit of work every day. I found my experiences via Workaway (highly recommended!) and i-likelocal.com. You can find a lot more of these via Google!

Find local experiences for a more enriching and affordable time during your travels. Be weary though– I would never "pay to volunteer" and I would always make sure that the experience is ethical and doesn't take advantage of the local villages (this can happen a lot in Southeast Asia, e.g. elephant retreats).

On Hotels

I stayed in a hotel mostly in Thailand because 1. they were not that much more expensive than hostels, and 2. I was going through my medical emergency and much preferred to have had my own private room.

I also opted to stay in a hotel sometimes when I felt like I needed my own space and I wanted to be guaranteed nice accommodations and amenities. It would be like a vacation while I was on vacation when I needed recharging. Sounds silly but it happens!

On Airbnbs

Choosing private room Airbnbs was a great way to have access to a local for recommendations. The downside is this isn't exactly the affordable option. I only rented Airbnbs in 3 cities: Munich (relatively cheap), Stockholm (costed an arm and a leg for basic room), and Copenhagen (came with a bike!).

On Subletting

Around month 2 of being in Europe, I was starting to crave my own space. I visited Lyon once before and really enjoyed the city so I ended up finding a sublet there for 2 weeks. It was a great plan because it felt like I had my own apartment and I also had access to a kitchen which encouraged me to visit local farmer's markets. Subletting ended up being a cheaper cost per night than Airbnb'ing (gets expensive!) or staying in a hostel (wouldn't want to stay in one for more than a few days). I found the sublet opportunity from local Facebook groups, and I was also searching the local Craigslist site as well (leboncoin.fr).

Staying in a city you like long term doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg! Look for short-term sublets from local Facebook groups.

On Hostels

I have a love/hate with hostels. On one hand, I love the idea of them– travelers from all over crossing paths for one night. In reality, it's not always like that. Sometimes you get a place that's dirty, or you have anti-social roommates. Sometimes you luck out and meet some amazing people. I swore off hostels after a bad experience in Thailand but ended up having one of the best nights of my trip at a hostel in Tallinn, Estonia. It's a great way to force yourself into social situations after days of mere basic human interaction– I found these slumps happening from time to time while solo traveling.

Public Transit

Below are my total expenses in USD for local transportation.

This one was hard to map out and compare. I wasn't diligent enough to track how I was moving every mile, so the cost factor is not useful.

Nevertheless, here are my main takeaways from the data and from what I remember:

Everyday in Europe, I walked an average of 3.9 miles, or 8,300 steps. In the beginning, I opted to walk everywhere if it was less than 1 hour and I didn't have anything scheduled. It was great! I saw so much more of the area on foot.
I only took taxis in Thailand because they were very cheap and sometimes the best option.
Being from San Francisco, I am so proud that I only took Uber 6 times in the last 8 months! I remember each of those times and it always involved being in a rush. Go figure!
City bike rentals are awesome! I tried them in Taipei, Xiamen, Munich and Helsinki. The only city where it was not the affordable option was in Stockholm– no surprise there!

Miscellaneous

On Food

Overall, I feel that I spent relatively little money on food while I was traveling. When I worked at the restaurant in France, I ate all my meals for free, as well as during my homestays. I also cooked almost every meal when I was subleting in Lyon (by that point, I just missed making my own food so much!).

On Gifts

I spent a lot of money on gifts to friends as a way of expressing my gratitude for their contributions to my travels. These are people who have provided me with accommodations or amazing opportunities.

I don't believe anything comes free. You should always return the favor or show your gratitude!

On Shopping

I brought limited clothing with me and was not necessarily prepared for the fluctuating summers in Europe. I (along with my bank account) also discovered that I love shopping in Stockholm.

On Concerts & Shows

I love live music and theatre, and I was lucky enough to catch some bands, both familiar and newly discovered, while abroad. The highlight was watching Mary J. Blige throw down in a 1st century Roman amphitheatre just outside of Lyon.

On Personal Care

This category mostly involves the costs from the medical care I had to deal with in Thailand as well as spas, gyms fees, and allergy medicine.

On Mobile Phone

A data and phone plan in Thailand was relatively cheap and easy to obtain. The story is a little different in Europe. I wasted 40 euros on a SIM card in Frankfurt I was told would work in all countries only to find that it didn't work in Switzerland and was barely operational in France. I ended up going with a budget phone company in France and essentially paid 20 euros a month for unlimited data.

Why I quit my job to go on a sabbatical

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 04:02:48 +0000

I get asked frequently why I did what I did, so below are my personal reasons. I hope these serve as inspiration as you search for your own reasons to make big changes in your life.

1. Because I had no dependants

I’m unmarried, have no kids, and my parents are healthy. At the end of the day, nobody in the world truly needs anything from me right now. In my opinion, the timing could not be more right.

2. Because I’ve spent most of my life on someone else’s schedule

From grade school to university to full-time jobs, I’ve spent most of my life on someone else’s schedule. Example: my employer needs me at work by 9AM every day for the morning sync up. Or I’m about to go on vacation but had to schedule it around major deadlines. I figured it was about time I did what I want, when I want.

3. Because I’m not getting any younger

Two years ago when my friend asked if I want to go on a 4 day hike to Machu Picchu, I really wanted to say yes but I was worried about the physical challenge. I casually asked a co-worker if I should go, and he said to me, “well, you’re not getting any younger”. So true and so obvious, yet it never occurred to me until someone said it out loud.

4. Because it won’t break the bank

I’ve spent the last few years saving up and learning how to be financially responsible. I understand the value of a dollar and I know that I won’t be spending extravagantly abroad. I feel fortunate that I can afford to take time off work.

5. Because there is so much to explore in the world

I never traveled much until about 3 years ago. I had only been to Europe once for 10 days before applying for my 5-month visa. There is so much more to see beyond what 21 vacation days could do for me.

6. Because I was not happy in my current situation

Honestly, my life was getting stale and dictated by routines. I had been on the grind in San Francisco for 4 years and counting. My job at the time, although fulfilling, was wearing me down and affecting my relationships. I was starting to find lots of things I didn’t like about the Bay Area. All of this happened very gradually so it was difficult to notice the negativity building up. It took one particular day of reflecting on the different aspects of my life to realize that I was not happy.

7. Because hitting the reset button on life didn’t scare me

Of course I knew big changes were coming. I was quitting my job. I was leaving all my friends. I was moving out of the country I called home for almost 5 years. Although scary, I was excited for how much I would be shedding all at once especially considering I was at the start of my minimalism phase. I figured I had nothing to lose and I welcomed the forthcoming changes. I was also interested in testing my strength, resilience and adaptability as a person.

8. Because I knew I would only regret not doing it

At the end of the day, even though it took a lot of mental strength, tedious preparation, and complicated logistics to get here, I knew that I would never regret it.

lunchbag

AI Agents for SaaS: My Setup with Claude Code and OpenClaw

Codifying skills with Claude Code

Experimenting with OpenClaw

Combining OpenClaw and Claude Code

Learnings so far with OpenClaw

The takeaway: portability

What’s next and final thoughts

Lunch Money: Why we lowered our pricing near the height of inflation

Lunch Money: The New Era – how a divorce redefined my one-person business

On new beginnings

Prologue

The intertwining of work and life in solopreneurship

I’m going through a divorce.

Reflections on my healing journey

So, what’s next?

I moved to Los Angeles.

I am building a team around Lunch Money.

I am starting a new company!

Lifestyle business = an underrated path to entrepreneurship

Introducing: Picnic Collective, Inc

How is Picnic Collective different?

How can Picnic Collective help me?

What if I don’t have a business yet or I’m not sure if entrepreneurship is for me?

Current status

Get involved

Final thoughts

Weekly #4 - 1000 paying users!

Lunch Money just hit 1000 paying subscribers and $80,000 ARR.

Email marketing

What went well

Lunch Money

Personal life

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

Personal life

Weekly #3 - Major milestones in hiring and marketing

Hiring

Marketing

How I thought it would go down:

What actually happened:

Customer support

Affiliate Program

What went well

Lunch Money

Personal life

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

Personal life

Next goals

Weekly #2 - Prioritization, (more) hiring and a case study!

Engineering (New feature): 17 hours, 9 minutes

Support: 6 hours, 28 minutes

Engineering (General): 6 hours, 10 minutes

EU Pilot Program: 3 hours, 50 minutes

Contractor prep: 3 hours, 33 minutes

Email newsletter prep: 2 hours, 32 minutes

Miscellaneous: 47 minutes

What went well

Lunch Money

Personal life

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

Personal life

Next goals

Weekly #1 - Pricing, (not) hiring and my first hate mail!

On pricing strategy

On (not?) hiring

What went well

Lunch Money

Personal life

What didn’t go so well

Lunch Money

Personal life

Next goals

Preparing for solopreneurship

Joining the right companies

Optimizing experience breadth-to-depth ratio

Building something from scratch

Hitting the reset button