I use Rails credentials:
edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/se…

Works well and doesn’t require any external dependencies. I can easily update the credentials during development without context switching.

As for the book’s website I would use a combination of looking at what other successful authors are doing (especially those with a analytical background as they are more likely to have tested different approaches), trying out different approaches yourself, and finally just doing what feels uniquely yours. You might come up with something new that works very well.

The most recent book I read because it was the “book of the month” at a digital art (NFT) community I’m part of. The topic was not only relevant to me, but because it was part of the book club it also was a way to connect with other community members and have a shared foundational understanding of a complex topic.

So for your book it might be worth thinking in terms of communities, tribes, and if there are any people/organizations/etc that could benefit from having their peers read your book.

Hi Vasanth, welcome to WIP!

You have a bunch of great projects. Me and my friends spent a lot of time on Looptap haha. My personal highscore is 124, but one friend got over 300 🤯

With regards to motivation, I'm curious what motivates you?

For me there's a couple of things I know that motivate me:

1. Making (incremental) progress on the product

If I get in too deep of a rabbit hole building a certain feature or doing some kind of refactoring, then eventually I'll lose motivation to continue and I end up with a half finished thing. That's ultimately a waste of time and demotivating.

Instead, I try to work in small increments. For example the "Apply to WIP" flow you experienced is being built step by step. I shipped it quite early in the process. And I continue to build it out as people use it and give feedback.

2. Getting feedback

This ties in to the previous point. If I get feedback from users, that usually motivates me to improve the product and keep going. But if nobody is using it (either because I haven't shipped a usable product yet, or I'm making something nobody wants or knows about), then there's no feedback and the excitement of the idea and building it tends to wear off quickly.

So now I try to build stuff for people I already can reach (I built up my network through tweeting, blogging, building in public, helping others, etc), and ship many incremental changes based on feedback. That usually keeps me going. And if for some project I lose motivation anyway, that's probably an indicator that I should move on to the next thing instead.

Hope that helps!

🙌

Me too!

I like the idea of rewarding members for bringing in more people, but I'm not sure the economics of a $20/mo subscription will allow us to offer an incentive significant enough to get people to actively start inviting more members.

I think the key incentive for people to invite cool makers is that it helps improve their own experience of WIP. However, right now that's complicated by the fact that those cool makers need to get over that $20/mo hurdle first.

Hence the idea to offer a free (but invite-only!) membership.

If there was a stripped-down free version, in addition to the current paid membership, would you downgrade? If not, do you think it would negatively effect that motiviation you mention?

Yeah, Dribbble's approach is a big inspiration for this. I think they are in a similar position where having a larger community increases the value of their platform, but only if the quality of the content and the members remain high enough.

The Pro subscription along with some of their other revenue models seem to work well enough to offset the free memberships.

I'm in a number of private Telegram groups, but those are more "friend group" than "community"

Besides that I'm in a few NFT-related Discords. Primarily the PROOF Discord which is token-gated, so it's more of a tight-knit community than those hyper-active open-for-all Discords.

Other than that I don't think I'm part of any online or offline communities. I occasionally jump into the Nomad List Slack when I have a travel-related question. But nomads as a group is too broad for me to really feel a connection.

I used to visit co-working spaces, which are a nice way to find a local community when traveling.

I've tried two approaches:

1. Integrate with Intercom. It requires syncing your database of users and any data/events that's relevant for the emails you send. So the downside are that it requires a bit of setup, isn't as flexible as a custom-made solution, and costs money. The upside is that it's super easy to write and send emails which is something most of us probably don't do enough of yet.

2. Add these one-off emails to my codebase. This is a bit of a hassle as it requires re-deploying the app if you want to send an email. It also is prone to error with sending to the wrong people or sending duplicate emails. You'll need to manage unsubscribes, etc. The upside is that it's not yet another monthly bill, and it's really flexible. You can target just the users you want quite easily and have access to all the necessary user data without needing to share it with a third party.

I'm not sure which one I prefer.