Maker Life - Abstractionist by Keenen Charles

Abstractionist by Keenen Charles

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Maker Life

Posts about my journey and observations as a maker.

Goals for Redesigning Wave Radio

Goals for Redesigning Wave Radio

This week I've started working on a major redesign of Wave Radio and it's becoming a lot bigger than I anticipated. While I'm testing out new ideas and trying to find the best one I think I need to keep in mind the reasons for this redesign along the way.

Building a Blog for Wave Radio

Building a Blog for Wave Radio

Recently I've decided to shift my focus on Wave Radio to growth. The goal is to gauge the results of product improvements I've made in the past few months since launch. I'm not looking to find a million users now but rather I'm trying to find sustainable methods to bring

Why I Killed User Activity

Why I Killed User Activity

A while back I wrote about how the product incentives I'd built into Wave Radio had pushed users' behaviour in a direction I didn't anticipate. To win the weekly game of "who's the best music discover-er" a few users would just post as many songs as they could. This drowned

Wave Radio Launch

Maker Life Featured

Wave Radio Launch

About two weeks ago I finally launched my latest project, Wave Radio. A community for sharing and discovering new music. It's been far from an astronomical launch story but there's been enough growth for me to be encouraged. The initial launch included a few tweets and emails to beta testers.

Tired, But Good Tired

Tired, But Good Tired

Today I finally shared my project Wave Radio on Product Hunt [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/wave-radio]. I've been delaying it for a bit and waiting for the right moment but as with most things sometimes you just need to do it. So far I have to say the most

Risk being ridiculed

Risk being ridiculed

In the past few months, I've been working at taking more risks especially when it comes to my work. I like to think I'm a risk taker but I can also be hesitant and get stuck worrying about the potential to be embarrassed. I've made some progress now but there's

Value Your Products

Value Your Products

I launched InboxReads back in September of 2017 with the intention that'd it be a long process to grow the site to a point where it could possibly make some money. In most of the time since I focused on just that. I tried new tactics to grow traffic, I

Managing Anxiety As a Maker

Managing Anxiety As a Maker

Being a maker requires you to put yourself and your work in front of the world. You are required to share your passions, your goals, and more. You have to be ready to face negative feedback or even worse, deafening silence. Many of our projects are labours of love. They

The Trap of Building More

The Trap of Building More

Being able to code can be a blessing and a curse as a maker. It's easy to fall into a trap of building more features when you should be working on other things. Typically you're drawn to the kind of work you're most experienced with or enjoy the most. As

The Struggle To Finish A Side Project

The Struggle To Finish A Side Project

After a lot of technical and design work in the past month to get Wave Radio [https://waveradio.co] ready for launch, I'm finally launching the beta today. I started working on this project in August 2018 but progress completely stalled when I found some technical issues with the stack

Google Killing Products Is Ok

Google Killing Products Is Ok

Where were you when Google announced they were killing Google Reader? If your answer is "What's Google Reader?", then you're in the majority. But in the world of mega-corps like Google, a product loved by a minority can have a user base of millions. Whenever Google decides to shut down

Putting Your Side Project On Auto Pilot

Putting Your Side Project On Auto Pilot

When I launched my last side project, InboxReads [https://inboxreads.co], it took up a lot of my time. Building the site was easy but to add new newsletters, and share content on social media took a ton of time. At the time my day job had me super busy

Designing A Logo For A Side Project

When designing a logo I try to think of a few ideas and then quickly test them out and see how they feel when translated to a digital image. I'm not a designer so I don't go for any designs that are too extravagant. I try to keep it simple

Designing A Brand For A Side Project

This one of my favourite parts of any project. After picking a name, which took me way too long this time around, I start designing a style for the entire project. Elements of this style usually come up in the development process so I use pieces of the design I

My Maker Journey So Far

My Maker Journey So Far

For most of my life, I've been making things and putting them out into the world. It started with simple websites for myself, ambitious attempts at games, random blogs, videos, and now software products. The vast majority of those aren't worth sharing now but I thought I'd share a little