🔥999 days on Makerlog

There’s this other streak I’d been keeping that’s way longer and unbroken than my writing streak – my Makerlog streak.

Makerlog is a community of indie makers and creators, and we log our daily tasks for our indie products there. The principle is the same as Lifelog – ship a little bit every day. Compound your daily efforts. Consistency over intensity, progress over perfection.

I started on Makerlog right at the same time I started my daily writing habit, but since I purposely broke the writing streak back when the old writing platform closed, the Makerlog streak was the only one left that puttered along.

There’s no other streak I kept up for this long.

What a wild, police car chase journey it had been!

How it started

Truth is, the first few hundred days weren’t tasks about my side projects, even though I’d been working on them. I only logged my daily writing there as a way to share the writing. I just didn’t feel like putting in the time and effort to log each task – it felt like work, and didn’t add any personal value to me. But it’s only the last one year or so that I started religiously logging my tasks for all my products there, because I finally discovered a way to use it that’s relevant and valuable to me – for reflection, learning, and as a showcase.

Makerlog is for reflection

There’s no way I can do my monthly wrap-ups here properly if I didn’t scroll through my entire month’s worth of tasks on Makerlog. The referencing back is important – very often, I have a vague impression that I didn’t do much at all for the month, but the task logs prove otherwise. It provided me with data to celebrate small wins which I wouldn’t remember otherwise on my own.

Makerlog is my learning log

When I was coding out Lifelog, I logged all my mistakes, struggles and breakthroughs there, for each feature I deployed. That proved valuable as an archive of my creative process, because when I needed to tweak that feature in the future, I could refer to the logs to see what my thinking was, which would then inform my approach moving forward. It was like telemetry for my coding process, the flight recorder black box that shows me what went wrong in the event of a system crash or bug.

Makerlog as my maker portfolio

Lately I’d been increasingly linking people to my Makerlog profile page. It’s like a portfolio page of sorts for my indie maker career. I link the individual Makerlog product pages to each of my products’ websites (like for Lifelog here), to inform users to check it out if they’re interested in following the journey. It’s just more convenient and it’s where all the action is anyway. I don’t even have a portfolio website myself!

How it’s going

I distinctively remembered that I started an account on Makerlog because I decided I wanted to be an indie hacker. That was the big dream that I aspired towards. 999 days on, that dream had only burned brighter.

Admittedly I took too many detours and pit stops to figure out how to do this indie hacker thing, and even now I’m still learning and pivoting (like for marketing!). I’m slowly but surely trodding down on this overgrown jungle trail into a clear path, with nice little milestones nicely recorded on Makerlog:

• Made my first product
• Earned my first dollar from the internet
• Won the coveted #1 spot on Product Hunt for the day
• Learned how to code
• Launched my first SaaS that I coded myself
• Earned my first MRR dollar recently, on Lifelog
• Solidified my tech for good, social impact patronage work
• Had my first ever viral product
• Best thing? Made many lifetimes worth of like-minded maker friends

Wow. It’s such a nice feeling to have it all on record. Like keeping a journal during your teens, and rereading when you’re old.

Looking forward to reading all that a decade later, after I’d earned my millions lol!