• Lighter themes – less theme options
• More problem solving themes – like accommodate massive images, showcase icons
• Better designed themes – including use of CSS3, new webfonts

Read the full blog post here.

Instagram boasts more than 15 million users with a current signup rate of 2 people per second… all with a humble staff of just 10. Madness.

In the interview he tells us how with any startup you need to ask yourself “What 3 problems is my product solving for real people?”

In his case he says Instagram solves these 3:

1. We hate terrible photos taken on bad camera phones (Instagram developed great photo filters)
2. We need to share our photos easily (Instagram allows us to share across multiple networks, easily)
3. We need to share quickly, files take too long to upload (While filling in photo caption, Instagram is uploading already)

He ends with a simple, but great line that has resonated a lot with me lately; especially when people say they have bad luck:

You make your own luck by working really really hard and trying lots and lots of things.

Enjoy!

Andrew Gibbs started the site in 2007 and talks about crazy stuff like walking into Target and physically taking photos of products to list on his blog. Now he gets exclusive pre-release submissions from advertising agencies.

He also talks about how he was at a cross roads when he got offered his dream job but chose the site.

Today The Dieline site features jobs, a designer directory and they even host their own packaging conference.

A great success story, enjoy:

Yup, that time of year again to jot down the things I’d like to change from the previous year and also what I’d like to accomplish over the next 12 months. Here it goes…

• TV: Watch less series
• Reading: Read a lot more books, prioritize more time for reading business/tech/startup blogs
• Health: Eat better, get fit, drink less
• Exercise: Surf more, hike more
• Play more chess
• Finance: Quadruple the passive income, up the emergency fund to 6 months
• Events: Less gigs, more tech meetups
• Improve skills in: Google Adwords, Responsive web design
• Work: Hire someone, move into a shared office space, spend way less time on email, more skype
• ThemeCobra: Release 12 themes, launch new site
• Pear Hosting: Launch new site, double clients
• One Page Love: Hit Alexa rank 50k, make redesign responsive
• mmminimal: Hit Alexa rank 100k, launch secret feature
• Start an e-commerce store
• Give away half of my clothes
• This blog: write more often, share more experiences
• Declutter even more than 2011

Productivity is: one step at a time, most important thing first, start now.

My biggest (and toughest) goal for 2012 is to get my own project’s income to surpass my monthly spending. This will mean I can ‘take the leap’ and stop building websites for clients by the end of the year and purely work on my own stuff.

Let’s start now!

That being said, it’s always good to aim high and you’ll always accomplish something satisfactory.

It’s been frustrating at times working online. You read daily stories of overnight millionaires in new startups and all you want is a piece of it.

I really want to blog more, but as soon as I start writing, this annoying self-doubt kicks in whispering “what do you really know that others don’t, what have you made that has changed things and the way people work”. The time it takes to blog, you could be building something.

The work hours have increased, I’m surfing less, been saying no to gigs, music festivals, cricket matches, comedy shows and other events I’m normally jumping at.

Worst of all I’m seeing less of my friends. But it is my choice and it’s the path I’ve chosen not working 9 to 5 for anyone and I don’t regret any of it.

Negativity aside, for the first time ever I feel all the reading and hard work is starting to really come together.

Loads of solid foundations have been put in place for 2012.

In April this year, my mate D Rock and I launched a blog on minimalism, a subject that we’re both passionate about. Traffic is great and our (secret) master plan of using it to leverage other goals is working perfectly.

I have cleared a fair chunk off my plate by deleting a lot of my little ideas and side projects I had going on. When I say ‘deleted’, I mean absolutely murdered them so I never have to think about them another second and they are impossible to resurrect. Examples being CardFlare, BoardFlare and the FlareBrand network with loads of sub-sites almost going live. I also left a venture I have been working on for 3 years, even went to UK to work on and now it’s no more and I actually feel amazing about the decision. All those were good ideas, but not great ones.

These decisions all sort of came clear to me after my Indo trip in May that I needed to declutter to see clearer into the future.

July and August saw some big chunky Atlantic swells and the boys and I really pushed ourselves to surf some bigger rounder stuff. The adrenaline hadn’t pumped like that in a while.

In September I finally came to my senses and bought a MacBook Pro. It’s allowing me to change scenery and still work, productivity is at an all time high. Best. Purchase. Ever.

September I also dived into my first bit of actual e-commerce. For ages all my projects have been bringing in cash via an advertising model with me updating them daily and I wanted to create something more passive. I’ve been really pushing to sell something digitally online and it has started with a WordPress Theme. Response and sales have been great.

In October I officially teamed up with two super talented guys for a venture which I’m really feeling is going to help me take the big leap into getting out the client game next year. More info on this venture soon.

November has a quick getaway planned to Mozambique then full steam into the next year.

Once I’ve accomplished more of the milestones I’ve set, I’ll blog about them and the lessons I’ve learnt.

Here’s to 2012.

Aim high and you’ll always take something away to be proud of.

I also realized everything around me in my day-to-day life was unnecessarily busy and I really needed to declutter when I returned.

In a recent book I read Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, he quotes…

When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no. Say “Yes!” to less.

Applying this to my everyday thinking, I’ve really started to not waste time on semi-cool ideas. I’ve even applied this to buying new things, going out to clubs and even going surfing when the waves aren’t good when the workload is crazy.

This is a list of things I’ve done to simplify and try improve my lifestyle over the past 2 months:

Things

• Gave away 2 surfboards to a local surf school
• Gave away 2 pairs of shoes and slops
• Lent out my guitar as I never play it anymore
• Lent out and gave away books

Online

• Deleted my LinkedIn account (It’s never got me good work)
• Unsubscribed to almost all email newsletters
• Auto-archived website backups that send to my gmail
• Unsubscribed from 20+ RSS feeds in Google Reader
• Unfollowed at least 30+ accounts in Twitter
• Moved all my important documents online to Google Documents
• Started using YouTube “Watch Later” feature when friends send me videos in day

Banking

• Cancelled my 2nd (UK) PayPal account
• Closed my Standard Bank account
• Officially started my “Emergency Fund“

Projects

• Deleted several “potential” domains I had hanging about that I day-dream about
• Completely removed everything online to do with FlareBrand ie. CardFlare and BoardFlare (IdeaBin entry coming soon!)
• Deleted two other potential site ideas I had sitting in Tumblr
• Pulled out of a UK Venture I was involved in for years, big decision but feeling great about it

There are a couple more I can’t remember, but I feel a load off my back from the above, hope an item or two on this list inspires you to do something similar.

Good luck with the decluttering!

To define this term, a spike in traffic is when there is a major boost in website traffic and it goes back down to normal shortly after, forming a sharp spike shape in the stat timeline.

The problem here, and I’m guilty of this too, is that when the emotions are high we tend to ride on this spike. “The site is now doing well”, “Traffic is pumping”.

At this point we often tell friends and family the site is doing well, and they congratulate us. They tell their friends and introduce you as the guy who runs the site that is doing well.

You have to really see things as they are.

Take the spike away:

• How many users are visiting a day?
• What is the average time spent on the site?
• How many users are returning?
• How high is your bounce rate?
• How many pages are being viewed per user?
• What have you done in the past month to improve your stats? If nothing, why not?

The answers to these questions is what you want to be telling your colleagues, not riding on a traffic spike you got 6 months ago.

If you’re still riding that spike when you launched your site 2 years ago and your traffic has been dismal ever since, it’s time to see things as they are and move on.

A few close mates and I have officially started posting in the “Kurt Cobain Journals”. In simplified terms it’s an ongoing (big) birthday card.

Some background

My dad and 4 of his close mates have been passing around the ‘Barry Manilow song book’ for about 24yrs and are still going strong.

What they do is whoever had the previous birthday (holds the book) writes a poem about the guy who’s birthday it is and includes stories on what had happened to the guy in the past year (work/travels/embarrassing stories etc).

The guys who’s previous birthday it was reads the poem out on the mates birthday in a quiet corner of the pub they meet at. They talk some crap catching up over some beers and then paste the poem (and anything naughty they find) in the book and pass it on to the birthday boy to hang on to until the next mates birthday in the circle. In this time the birthday boy can browse all the entries over the years with a million memories.

They chose Barry Manilow as their songbook of choice as he was sort of a legendary figure in their day. (Apparently you hear him often in elevators:)

I’m forbidden to read this song book, but caught a glimps once of a photo pasted in of a girl licking her own boob, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since:)

Our version

We decided that Nirvana pretty much is everyones (or our youths era) biggest influence so we got hold of Kurt Cobain’s Journal/Songbook which contains drawings and sketches from his career including drafts of some of our favorite songs.

We wanted more people to be involved on each birthday so we collectively decided that each guy or girl attending the birthday drinks brings a birthday message to paste in the book. It can be a short message, a funny pic of the birthday boy, or just write in the book on the page designated to the birthday. There is no real pressure and if you can’t make the meetup, you can just visit the guy that week and write in the book.

The book is 294 pages long and with only about 5 birthday inputs, it already has real character!

What we paste in the book:

• Notes/Messages
• Newspaper clippings
• Photos
• Drawings
• Concert tickets
• and more…

The real magic

The real magic will be when it’s your birthday 10 years down the line and you get to page through hundreds of pages of messages from all your mates. This journal will be priceless in years to come.

Your turn

Why not come up with something your can share with your friends for the next 10 years, or start your own song book!

Examples:

• Someone decides to tell you exactly what they are drinking at the pub, starting with 5 updates before they go out
• Someone gives you their feedback after every contestant in Idols
• As someone adds an ingredient to their meal
• Jamie O’Brien has had one too many Red Bull’s and starts tuning the world
• Two people you follow start a convo in your feed, perfect for their own chatroom
• CricInfo decides to give you over by over reports on a match between Zimbabwe and Kenya

Ok blah blah, you get the point… The idea is simple:

You visit the annoying users profile (you don’t want to permanently unfollow) and hit the “mute button”. This pauses/removes the users updates from your feed for 12 hours, the perfect amount of time until their binge is over, food is cooked, cricket match is over. So you’re left in peace without having to refollow their profile, updates simply continue 12 hours later with no harm done to anyone.

Simple.

This idea was meant to tie in with my previous Idea Bin entry, Reminder To Me, but as you can see they both found themselves in the idea bin:)

My idea was more about a fresh concept in task vs idea management opposed to creating another to-do-list app which the market is definitely not crying for.

Below I’ll explain exactly how the idea works and why I’m not rolling it out as an online app. You can totally use this idea on paper yourself, I do on a daily basis and it works really well.

The Concept

You may have noticed the 3 i’s in ‘Liiist’. They stand for:

1. Important (to do right now)
2. In time (next to do, not important)
3. Ideas (not yet tasks/to-dos, still being finalized/brain stormed)

Now you divide your page/app into 3 columns like this:

The illustration should explain it all but in a nutshell:

• Left column (important) is today’s essential tasks, people are expecting work and you said you’d deliver
• Middle column (in time) are tasks that need to be done, but not as much as left column tasks, these can be done tomorrow or in next few days. Once these become important they move left. The app I envisioned could do this with drag-and-drop functionality.
• Right column (ideas) are not yet tasks, they are potential tasks, they could be deleted right here if they aren’t good ideas. If they become tasks they move to middle column as tasks to be done in-time.

Competition

There is tons, and tons and tons of competition. But none obviously using my concept.

DaeIt

This week the dudes behind NIVO Slider brought us an uber minimal to-do-list online app called DaeIt. I’ve been using it and must admit the simplicity and functionality is pretty much exactly how I envisioned To Do Liist, but of course without the 3 column concept.

iOS5

Also this month, Apple released a video overview of it’s (incredible) iOS5… which includes a built-in to-do-list app… yup, the big boys at Apple have just formed a dark cloud over all to-do-list app developers and it’s starting to drizzle.

Conclusion

The sea of online to-do-list apps with a cherry of the iOS5 built-in one on top, is the reason I’m not putting a line of code down. I really like my concept, but don’t think development time is going to be worth it. So yeah, developers out there, take it, leave it, use it, it’s yours… just drop me a credit if you do:)

I must admit at the end of the day, nothing beats a pen and paper. I find myself reverting back to this every time after trying new online to-do-list applications.

Try ‘To Do Liiist’ yourself

Give the 3 column approach a go and let me know how it goes!