Build a Ruby Gem Email Course - Week of Hustle - Day 1

email course, gem, jfdi, marketing, open source, ruby, week of hustle

I did an 8-day sprint to launch my Build a Ruby Gem email course and documented my progress through this series of blog posts.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Weekend Update Summary

JFDI

Living outside a major metropolitan area has made it hard to surround myself with other entrepreneurs. Fortunately, the internet has made the world a smaller place. Last week I joined JFDI.bz, a community for solo-founders launching their own thing.

My goal for joining this community was to have access to other motivated entrepreneurs that I could use as a sounding-board. I also figured it’d be great opportunity to peek in to other solo founders launch process and motivation for a particular product.

Week of Hustle

Week of Hustle is an 8-day sprint to launch something. Anything really…could be an existing product that you need to put the finishing touches on, or a brand new idea. It was one of the things that attracted most to JFDI.

Launching any kind of product is time consuming. And with a family and other full-time responsibilities, life can get in the way. I feel like I’m pretty good at managing my time efficiently, but when accountability is involved, it’s much harder to put it off.

My Goal

This week I will be launching a free 5-day email course focused on Building a Ruby Gem. My goal for the course is to build my newsletter audience and work through the steps of building a smaller info product to determine if there’s enough interest in the subject to warrant writing an ebook.

As part of 8-day process, I will be posting blog entries daily about my progress and the challenges I’m facing at each step.

Why an email course on Building a Ruby Gem?

One of the first blog posts I wrote was about how to get started contributing to Open Source. I wrote it because I remember being somewhat unsure about the topic early in my Ruby career. Additionally, it garnered far more attention than any of my other posts, which tells me there’s clearly a need for this kind of discussion.

"Google Analytics of my first few blog posts."

The Ruby gem ecosystem is really powerful, but equally confusing, in my opinion. There are strong recommendations about how to structure the internals of a gem, which can make writing your first gem pretty frustrating.

My plan this week

So getting down to business…here’s my tentative plan this week:

  • Day 1 - Overall topic and organize what content goes on which days, setup GH project and ready tags, write WOH day blog, why gem discussion (ref. open source blog - pics of GA)

  • Day 2 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

  • Day 3 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

  • Day 4 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

  • Day 5 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

  • Day 6 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

  • Day 7 - Setup auto responder and way to capture for the course, write emails for each day of sequence

  • Day 8 - Launch with new landing page and notify subscribers

Time Management

I do have a full-time job and will be working all week. Because I try to spend as much time as possible with my daughter, my goal is to accomplish the steps above early in the AM. This morning I set my alarm for 6am, but got up 4:30am because I was excited to start the week. Today was a relatively easy day in terms of time-consuming tasks, so I’m guessing I’ll shoot for 5am the remainder of the week. We’ll see!

Today’s Accomplishments

Until tomorrow!