Posts by Shawn Liu
A Good Enough Doodler
More about Shawn:
https://mrshawnliu.com
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Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re
terriblenot good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.We’d love it if, whenever we make something good, we could just “drop” it and millions of people will instantly show up and fall in love with it. But we’re not Beyoncé. The harsh reality is that most people have never heard of us at Good Enough, and we have to work on the marketing for people to know about our work.
So, how do we tell the world about our wondrous inventions?
Disclaimer: This is not a marketing tutorial. We’re not good at this stuff! But we’re going to learn, and we’re going to try a bunch of things. I thought it would be interesting to share our process and progress. At the very least, we’ll make some hilarious blunders along the way and this should be entertaining. 😅
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How We Made A Good Enough Zine
We made a zine!
The first issue was released in August, and I finished the second issue just last week. Right now, a hundred copies are on their way from the printer to me (update: they've just arrived!). Today I'd like to share the story of how this zine came about.
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Bad Ideas Are Fun
Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that coming up with ideas is actually very easy––what makes it hard is that we’re aiming for good ideas.
The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.
And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.
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Cosmic Maelstrom
As Barry wrote in his recent blogpost, we're busy building prototypes here at Good Enough.
It's weird to be in this situation. Most of the Good Enough team are used to working on just one software at a time, focusing on steadily improving it. But right now we're doing the opposite. For the next few months we'll have no revenue and no customers. Most afternoons, we won't even know what we'll be working on the next morning. Exciting times! 😅
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Beware of Free Software
Beware of free pizza If I want a slice of pizza, I don't expect it to be free. In fact, if you try to offer me a slice of free pizza, I'd suspect there's something wrong with it.
And ever since my kids can understand me, I've taught them to be careful of free stuff. Nothing is free!* Don't take any free candies from strangers!
But on the internet, we expect things to be free. We're more than happy when Big Corporations offer us free software. Want to upload thousands of photos and videos to share with your family, all for the price of nothing? Come on in! While you're at it, can I offer you free email, too?
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Asking the Right Question
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've spread the word enough that there's now a steady stream of new users coming in each day. So, what's next?
Portrait of the author pondering My first impulse was to answer this question: How do we get people to come back and spend more time on Album Whale?
Following that questions, I came up with a list of ideas on how to get people's attention so that they'd use Album Whale more often. But something didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a whole night of sleep to figure out what was wrong.
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Good Enough, A Serious Business
Hello reader, my name is Shawn, and I'm one of the co-founders of Good Enough. I'd like to tell you a bit about how Good Enough came to be and what we plan on doing here.
Barry and I started working together again in early 2022. By “work,” I mean that I’d show up on Slack for a couple of hours each day, make some wise cracks, try to design in Photoshop and give up, and once in a while wrote some poor HTML and CSS. (Barry probably worked a lot more––somebody had to do the heavy lifting!)
Our first public project was DoEvery.Day, and then we didn’t do much for the rest of the year until we met up again in the fall to work on Album Whale.
For me, this half-ass effort wasn’t cutting it. I wasn’t proud of my work, and I felt like I was often not there for Barry. I felt like I had to make a choice: either leave Good Enough and go back to making Neophyte all day, or take it more seriously.
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TIL: Victory Symbol
We noticed that the victory symbol at the bottom of our homepage looked different in Chrome than Safari––it was playing smart and rendered the unicode character as an emoji. Lettini found a fix though! Append this string of code to the symbol:
︎.So
✌︎renders to ✌︎ and not emoji. Weird.(Here’s a blogpost that explains it all.)