Forem: Danielle

We live streamed for 14 hours from Bali for our v2.0 launch!

Danielle — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 09:03:50 +0000

On Wednesday 2nd October, 2019 we officially launched Leave Me Alone v2.0. To celebrate we hosted an event that included interviews with entrepreneurs from around the world, and live streamed the entire day from Bali. This post is the breakdown of everything that went into the most crazy, incredible, and exhausting 14 hours of our lives!

Cooking up an event

Since this was a version 2 launch we wanted to do something a bit different. James had this wild idea to live stream the whole day. We were somewhere with moderately stable wifi, we had a community of friends around us for support, and it sounded like a load of fun! What we didn’t anticipate is how much work goes into live streaming and hosting an event like this.

The initial plan was to setup in one of the outside booths at our co-working space, use one of our laptops to record, and have people drop in to say hello during the day. We asked a few people to join both in person, and remotely and everyone was really interested.

This is one of the garden booths at Tropica Nomad we initially planned to stream from

This sparked an idea to officially invite people to come and join us on stream at specified times to talk about their products, startup life, remote work, blogging, the maker community, and more. We sent out Calendly links to 12 influential people in the indie maker communities and they all said yes! We now had an entire day of interview sessions scheduled with incredible indie hackers, nomads, and founders from around the world!

Interviews were scheduled with:

Fajar Siddiq - serial entrepreneur, indie maker, and freelancer
Stas Moor - founder and designer of time tracking app Klokki
Jon Yongfook - publicly bootstrapping to $100k ARR with Mojosaas
Women Make with @stephsmithio,@diannamallen,@marie_dm_, and @HeyItsCharr
Sergio Mattei - maker nomad and maker community Makerlog
Anne-Laure Le Cunff - runs Ness Labs and maker publication Maker Mag
Ben Tossell - founder of no-code platform Makerpad
Pat Walls - founder of entrepreneur interview site Starter Story
Harry Dry - founder of practical, real-life marketing tips Marketing Examples

We shared our plans to live stream with the digital nomad community here in Canggu, Bali who were almost as excited as we were, but they completely shattered our illusion of how we planned to actually do the streaming part. Our good friend Dan offered to help us, and I can say that without a doubt, none of this would have been possible without him.

We went to Tropical Nomad Coworking three days before the go-live date to perform a stream test and to make sure everything would work. The setup worked perfectly. The wifi, however, did not.

Our first stream test with Dan

We started outside in a garden booth, which was a bit far away from the access points, and gradually moved further inside, but none of the locations we tried were good enough. The internet connection was fast enough, but it wasn’t consistent enough to maintain a stable stream. It would work fine for a few minutes, but then it would lag and stall like crazy.

This was a disaster. We had to postpone the event until we could find a better location. We already shared our stream event all over social media and we had 10 people who had committed their time to us on that day.

Dan came to the rescue again. He is a member of WiFi Tribe, a co-working and co-living community who travel and live together all over the world. One of their selling points is that they provide excellent wifi for working in their living spaces. We tested our stream setup again at the WiFi Tribe villa, and it worked like a dream! They even had a backup connection just in case!

WiFi Tribe kindly agreed to let us use their villa for our event, and we offered them an interview session slot on the stream and social media mentions in exchange. They had a rooftop space with a big table for working and views over the rice paddies which made the perfect backdrop for a live stream from Bali.

Dan essentially managed our entire live stream single-handed. He doesn’t travel as light as we do, and that was a huge advantage to us. He carries a microphone, a spare iPhone, a spare Macbook, a tripod, and more cables and extensions than I thought possible!

Thanks to Dan our setup was bordering on professional! We had an iPhone 5 in a tripod stand for the video, a proper microphone, and a dedicated laptop to run the streaming software (OBS) and remote interview sessions (Zoom).

Here’s the stream setup on the day

The calm before the launch

We had a new location, we set a new date, and all of our interviewees were super understanding and agreed to join us again! We planned to stream from 10am - midnight Bali time. The first interview would be 11am and almost every hour until midnight apart from our Product Hunt launch at 3pm and post-launch beers at 6pm! We now had more than a week before launch day to prepare, which turned out to be just enough time to get everything done.

Promotional material James put together that we shared everywhere we could think of

James worked super hard on our Product Hunt assets, added a stream countdown banner to our landing page, and he even created a walkthrough video of him using Leave Me Alone. He also spent an entire day researching every one of our interviewees and writing questions and talking points for the sessions.

Inspired by the 24 Hour Startup Challenge, James made some images to use for different screen setups like “starting soon” and “taking a break”. He also wrote a couple of scripts which would display the upcoming interview sessions and our live stats in scrolling banners at the top and bottom of the screen at all times.

Our Twitch stream complete with scrolling banners and beautiful Bali backdrop

I wrote a launch blog post, the Product Hunt first comment, a tweet thread for the event schedule, and tweets for each upcoming interview like this. Plus, I built hype on social media by posting everywhere I could think of (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers etc) and I even created a Facebook event!

Somehow, I also wrote some code so that people could sign-up for our Teams plan without being on-boarded by us, in the hope that we might get some monthly subscription customers from the launch (which we did - woo!).

We invited our friends from Bali to come and hang out or work at the villa during the day, and to join us for post-launch beers. We wanted the event to be a social day with people having a good time, chatting about their work, and for people watching the stream to engage and ask questions while James and I were busy.

The final piece of preparation was to get supplies for the event! The night before we stocked up on fruit, snacks, and a case of beer for everyone.

Stocking up on the all-important stream supplies. One case was not enough...

Judgement day

All of the preparation was done and stream day was now here. We grabbed a quick Bali breakfast of delicious eggs and veggies, and headed over to the WiFi Tribe villa to help Dan get setup. He was way ahead of us and everything was already set up and ready to go. We really don’t know what we would have done without him!

Before we knew it 10am arrived and we were live on stream! It was a bit weird at first knowing that people were watching us just hanging out on our laptops and eating some snacks etc, but it soon felt natural and viewers were tuning in to say hi and ask us some questions!

We absolutely loved the level of engagement from viewers on Twitch. There were so many great questions asked about all kinds of topics from working in Bali specifically, to digital nomad life in general, and everyone on the rooftop was getting involved and answering them.

Our first interview session was at 11am. I fired off the pre-session tweet I had prepared introducing the guest to remind people to come and tune in and we waited for our guest to join the Zoom call. Dan had setup Zoom so that we would use James’ laptop to join the call to talk to our guests, and the streaming laptop would host the call so that it could be shared with the stream. This worked extremely well, and the audio was great for the viewers!

The start of the stream while we are still bright-eyed and ready to go!

The rest of the day flew by in a bit of a blur. We totally underestimated how much free time we would have between interview sessions! I am so thankful that I wrote all of the upcoming session tweets. This saved me so much time and I managed to send each one ~15 minutes before each guest joined us. Plus, I took a few notes during each interview and tweeted a miniature summary of what we talked about for people who missed it.

We have all of the stream footage and we are in the process of making videos of each interview to share with you soon. We found out that this takes a lot of time and effort, so please bear with us, it may take a little while but we will be releasing them!

Interviewing Jon Yongfook, our first in-person interview on the stream!

A few hours in and everybody started having problems posting on Twitter - it seemed like Twitter was having problems, or something weird was going on at least! It worked temperamentally from Europe so we managed to keep tweeting by using our VPN.

We totally skipped lunch. We didn’t eat a proper meal all day and sustained ourselves on the fruit and snacks we brought. This isn’t great but neither of us were hungry - I think the adrenaline and everything else going on totally overshadowed our personal needs!

Three hours after we went live on Product Hunt we took a break to have a beer and watch the sunset. This was a much needed rest, and ended up being the only beer we had all day - we didn’t want to lose focus!

Shout-out to all the incredible people who came and joined us all day!

A few hours before the end Steph ordered chicken wings for everyone from our favourite wings truck here in Canggu. We just about had time to stuff our faces while our stream viewers got ~30 minutes of us chomping on our dinner!

Before we knew it, it was 11pm and we were doing our last interview of the day. James was starting to ramble and my cheeks were hurting from smiling and laughing with everyone so much! Our last guest Harry was so chatty and animated he gave us one last boost of energy and we had a fantastic chat with him.

Chicken Wings delivered by Steph Smith courtesy of Wings Canggu!

And then it was all over! We were completely and utterly exhausted, but extremely happy with everything. I haven’t even talked about how we were doing on Product Hunt, and that is exactly what happened on the day. We got off to a great start and maintained #1 for a long time but we didn’t have time to constantly refresh and check if we were still leading. This was actually really awesome, we wanted the launch to be about more than just the Product Hunt, and more of a social event, and it turned out perfectly.

We actually ended up #2 of the day, which is still an incredible achievement that we are very proud of - especially for a v2.0 launch! But, the real success is outside of Product Hunt - we have a community of people who were incredible with their support both online and in person and we couldn’t have done it without them.

These legends supporting us all day!

Pretty much plain sailing

Apart from Twitter being weird, we didn’t encounter any critical stream problems! Dan’s 2011 Macbook Air held up like a trooper! It only started getting a little slow while it was sat in the sun after 8 hours of streaming.

The weather was a little bit windy and we didn’t have a muffler for the microphone. This was creatively solved by putting a cloth over the top which helped a great deal! We also had to keep reconnecting the video because it would cut out every time we switched from Zoom back to the stream camera. Shout-out to viewers on Twitch for raising these issues with us!

Once again, eternal thanks Dan for making all of this possible. He had all of the Zoom links ready to go, he switched between Zoom and the stream camera after every session, he fixed video and microphone issues, and he was constantly monitoring Twitch to make sure everything ran smoothly.

It was a hell of a show

We thoroughly enjoyed every single interview we did! The conversation flowed so easily, and every guest had great answers for the questions we had prepared.

Here’s a summary of each interview:

Fajar Siddiq

Fajar talked about overcoming hard times, finding your tribe for good vibes, the importance of compassion towards fellow makers and developers, and how success comes from helping people rather than looking for fame and money.

Dan Sloan + WiFi Tribe

Dan and fellow WiFi tribe member Aura talked about the challenges of remote work and the power of community. The benefits a nomad family provide can help to offset feeling lost and alone - especially as a solo nomad.

Stas Moor - Founder of Klokki

Stas shared some great advice for other makers aspiring to build something. He advocates jumping in and getting started even if you’re scared of failing and shipping early on and getting feedback. For long term success he suggests having some money put away for stability so that you know how long you can work on your side project.

Jon Yongfook

Jon talked about his new venture to reach $100k annual recurring revenue while sharing his journey to get there publicly - something which he hasn’t done before. Plus, how he was forced to make a decision about shutting down his previous project and what he learned from this.

Women Make

The five of us had a super long chat that covered so much great stuff. The highlights were:

Steph talked about the challenges of joining a company as a remote developer and for people who want to grow their blog she suggests finding your style and being consistent with that.

Charlotte had some great insights into her career transition and upcoming UX bootcamp in Berlin. Her decision to switch roles was because she didn’t enjoy the job she was doing anymore, but it was scary to take that leap.

Dianna shared her strategies for growing a mailing list to thousands of subscribers in just a few short weeks. She reached out to communities of people she thought she could genuinely help, and people loved it.

Marie discussed how she founded Women Make when she was struggling to find a community of women helping each other online, and grew it to over 400 members. Plus, how she keeps engagement high with the new forum and by running events like a 30 day challenge to build something.

Sergio Mattei

Sergio shared a lot of insight into the problems with the maker community right now; that hype does not equal idea validation, and how the “ship and dump” culture is harmful to other people. We are one big family but we should be sure to validate our products outside of the maker bubble.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Anne-Laure talked about how she manages her schedule so that she can blog every day, learn to code, and study for an MSc in Neuroscience. She suffers from time anxiety and to battle this she decide what to work on based on what she will feel the most guilty about not doing by the end of the week.

Ben Tossell

Ben shared how he rocketed to maker fame with his no-code platform, but how he still thinks that there will be a place for developers and no-code tools to co-exist in the future. No-code tools enable people to build things who wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

Pat Walls

Pat talked about his success with the 24 Hour Startup Challenge and growing Starter Story to a profitable platform. His advice for building products is to avoid analysing the long-term risk and just start building - failing and learning something is better than not doing anything.

Harry Dry

Harry shared some solid advice for makers and developers who are trying to succeed at marketing. You should be yourself and use that to your advantage. If you have weird and wonderful quirks then that will be something people can relate to - don’t be a sheep, make yourself stand out. Plus, you should prioritise direct sales as a totally under-rated sales technique.

An amazing in person + remote session with these incredible women 💪@stephsmithio,@HeyItsCharr, @diannamallen, and @marie_dm_

After hours

We thought we would go out after the stream to party and celebrate. We were wrong! James went straight to sleep but my brain was so wired I couldn’t sleep for ages. I experienced a super fast picture show, like when films show your life flashing before your eyes before you die! It was like my thoughts were so focused on the stream, interviews, and everything I had to do, that when it was over my mind was playing catch-up.

We spent the next couple of days making sure we had replied to everyone on Product Hunt, Twitter, and our support chat. Then we took the weekend off to go diving in the North of Bali and left our laptops behind - we needed some total recovery time!

We spent 3 days next to, and in, the ocean recovering from non-stop work to make the stream a success!

When we returned to work Leave Me Alone was still running, nothing had caught on fire. Plus, I had a couple of exciting messages in my inbox...

Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers invited me to talk about Leave Me Alone on the Indie Hackers Podcast, and Pat Walls asked me to share the story behind building and growing Leave Me Alone with Starter Story! I was absolutely blown away, and so happy that these publications that share successful entrepreneur stories wanted to hear mine!

If you’re interested, you can listen to the Indie Hackers Podcast here and read my Starter Story interview here!

A huge milestone in my life, being on my first ever podcast - and it was with Indie Hackers!

Signing off

The whole process leading up to the actual launch day was 3 weeks of non-stop work. We worked every day, including weekends preparing for this. It was really hard work, took a lot of planning and preparation, and it was totally worth it!

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our incredibly helpful and generous friends here in Bali, the super supportive communities on Telegram, and everyone giving love and encouragement on Twitter etc.

On stream someone asked Pat if he would ever do the 24 Hour Startup Challenge again, and although he loved the event, it required so much work that he thought it was unlikely. We had an insanely fun, exciting, and inspiring day, but we agree with Pat. Anyway, we’ve got to top this event for Leave Me Alone v3.0 now eh...?!

Announcing the Official Launch of Leave Me Alone v2.0

Danielle — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 07:02:42 +0000

Today, after 9 months of listening to all of your feedback, Leave Me Alone v2.0 is finally here! If you haven’t heard about us yet, Leave Me Alone is a service to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails, with a focus on privacy and data security.

We launched the first version in January this year and we received an overwhelmingly positive response. Since then we have scanned over 19 million emails, seen over 700k subscriptions, and unsubscribed people from over 200k of them!

This version was somewhat quietly released in July, but we have made even more improvements since then. The core product is still the same service you know and love, but we've rebuilt everything from the ground up to be faster, more resilient, and more effective at unsubscribing you. This post is a breakdown of the new and improved Leave Me Alone!

Featured in Lifehacker!

Our home page now proudly shows that Leave Me Alone was featured in Lifehacker and Fast Company this year! We have also been featured in other publications which you can see on our news page. These articles gave us a huge boost in sales and social shares, more people are talking about us, and Leave Me Alone is growing!

Multiple email provider support

We've added support for all your inboxes including Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, FastMail, AOL, and Yahoo. Plus, we've introduced IMAP support so you can connect any other inbox you might have. You can attach all of your email addresses to a single Leave Me Alone account and deal with all those subscriptions together!

Scoring subscriptions

Using aggregated anonymous usage data we've created an algorithm called Subscription Score. We score each mailing list you receive based on the following:

how frequently it's been seen before
how many times it's been unsubscribed from
how many addresses they send from
how many emails they send each month
many other data points

Using this information combined with some secret sauce algorithms, we give each email a rank from A to F, so you can instantly see if it's worth keeping.

Credits to unsubscribe

Unlike our competitors, we've always charged a fee for unsubscribing you. This is how you know we don't need to sell your data in order to keep afloat. With v2.0 we've made our payment system fairer and easier to understand - now we only charge based on which emails you want to unsubscribe from. You can buy credit packages starting at $2.50 for 50 credits, all the way up to $10.50 for 300 credits.

If you aren't sure how many credits to buy then you can find out how many you might need by using our estimator on the new pricing page!

Teams plan for company wide unsubscribes

Are you part of a team? Unwanted subscription emails are bad enough as an individual, but when you’re running a company they could be costing you hours of time each month managing and sorting through them.

Many users have asked us if we offered a monthly subscription plan, or a way for them to buy scans for their entire office. To help with this we've introduced a plan for Teams where you pay a fixed rate monthly per seat for unlimited unsubscribes!

Better user experience

We have a brand new and improved UI which makes unsubscribing even easier. You can now filter your mail by email address and status (subscribed, unsubscribed, or failed), sort by date received or score, and navigate using the new pagination.

You don’t need to do all of your unsubscribing in one go. Your mail list will now be kept up-to-date with your inboxes so that each time you log in your new subscription emails will be ready to view.

We have also made everything more compact so you can see more mail on each page, show you whether it was seen in spam or trash, and added more details about each email. Plus, we now have a report feature for senders who are still sending you emails after you unsubscribed!

More secure login

You can now sign up and log in using email and password for better privacy, and add two-factor authentication for extra security! If you signed up with Google and Microsoft you can switch your account to password login from the security settings page.

If you want to connect Fastmail, iCloud, AOL, Yahoo, or IMAP accounts you need to have a password account. This is because we want to keep your IMAP credentials as secure as possible and the best way to do this is by encrypting your information using the password you log in with.

Even more open and transparent

We take security and data privacy very seriously at Leave Me Alone. We have a page dedicated to data and security where we are completely transparent about:

What permissions we request when you sign in using Google or Microsoft
How we power our statistics and Subscription Score algorithms
How to revoke permissions and deactivate your account at any time
Our commitment to you and our security features

Unsubscribe from CO₂ emissions

We recently participated in a challenge to help fix the climate. During research we discovered that unwanted emails contributed a whopping 986,000 tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere every day! So we implemented a way to see how much carbon you can offset by unsubscribing. Check it out here. As well as this, we partnered with One Tree Planted to let all users donate an extra $1 when purchasing credits to plant a tree!

New landing page

We have completely redesigned our home page to make everything more clean and simple, with a focus on social validation and testimonials.

The core features that we provide are the focus of the landing page. We now have separate pages where you can learn more about how it works, read about our security, find out what package you might need, read about us in the news, check out our Leave Me Alone for Teams, and discover more about us and our mission.

We love our customers

Our Wall of Love is no longer a collection of tweets! We now have a showcase of official testimonials from our awesome customers. You can read about how we gather testimonials and built our Wall of Love here.

You can now find us at .app

Update your bookmarks and start sharing our new URL leavemealone.app! We asked you about how much you trust an app using our previous .xyz domain, and we received over a thousand votes in favor of switching to .app. We still love .xyz for prototyping and idea validation, but we have moved to a more recognised domain (especially outside the tech community) to help our reputation as we grow.

None of this would have been possible without the continued support of every single one of you. Your feedback has helped to shape Leave Me Alone into a product that people love, and that helps people every day. We are still growing, and we still need your support and feedback going forward.

Our long term plans for Leave Me Alone are centered around our mission statement, to help people keep control of their inbox. We want to stop the current reactive response to our inboxes - the never ending cycle of unsubscribing to keep control, and shift to being proactive - helping users avoid subscribing to unwanted mailing lists in the first place.

It would really, really help us if you could share Leave Me Alone and help to spread the word, anywhere and everywhere.

As always, please reach out on Twitter if you have any questions, feedback, suggestions, or want to say hello.

Enjoy your clean inboxes!

Danielle & James

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

We were featured in Lifehacker and got 1,057 new customers in 5 days

Danielle — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 10:39:13 +0000

Leave Me Alone was featured in Lifehacker and recommended in a newsletter with 28k subscribers within the space of 5 days. This post is a breakdown of the traffic, sales, and other statistics from this crazy period.

A newsletter recommendation

On Sunday 22nd September we were getting ready to go to sleep when Leave Me Alone started receiving an unusually high number of pageviews and payments. We couldn’t tell where they were coming from, but there were several referrals from gm.android.google.com which is the Gmail Android app. This meant that it was probably a mailing list, but we didn’t know which one.

After digging into some of our own referral stats we found that it was this newsletter from Recomendo, and that they had nearly thirty thousand subscribers! The quality of the traffic must have been really high, because we went to sleep and 12 hours later woke up to 624 visitors, 271 signups (43%), and 24 sales (8% of signups or 3% visit to sale). We also scanned almost 2 million emails and unsubscribed people from 6,521 of them!

We had another spike of traffic and sales on Monday evening (in Bali) and we assume that is because our Western friends in San Francisco were waking up and checking their emails from the weekend! Overall for the 2 days combined we got 498 signups, 62 sales (12.5% of signups), $378.9 revenue, and 1 new teams customer. Plus, we scanned 2.9 million emails and unsubscribed people from 9,835 of them!

The irony of a newsletter driving traffic and sales to Leave Me Alone is not lost on us, but we are not against newsletters, we only want to help people clear out unwanted ones! Not all newsletters are bad, in fact I am subscribed to several which I enjoy receiving and reading, but I need a good clear out fairly often because the ones I’ve lost interest in just pile up.

Leave Me Alone was Featured in Lifehacker!

Two days later, during another late night for us we saw another spike in traffic. It wasn’t coming from the newsletter this time, we had been featured in Lifehacker!!!

We weren’t sure if we should go to sleep just in case anything went wrong, and it turns out we were right to have concerns! Lifehacker had given us the “hug of death”. We awoke to find our server had fallen over and people couldn’t access the website.

One of our processes randomly span up to 100% CPU for an extended period of time and the server stopped accepting connections. Unfortunately, this effect cascaded down to the web server. It was fixed in 20 seconds with a reboot once we woke up that morning.

After some investigation we think it was caused by a single rogue mailing list. When someone tried to unsubscribe from that list, it created an infinite loop, and refused to die. We have now deployed some tweaks to our unsubscribe bot so it hopefully it shouldn't happen again.

The server started slowing down at around 4:30am, and we woke up and rebooted it at about 7am, so this wasn’t great but Leave Me Alone wasn’t down for long.

The Lifehacker spike is actually lower than the Recomendo newsletter. This could be because the audience from the newsletter was already more qualified, or that 2 1/2 hours of downtime lost us a chunk of Lifehacker traffic - it would have been prime afternoon time in San Francisco, or more Lifehacker readers have trackers disabled. We received more signups and sales following our feature, so I guess we will never know!

That said, the traffic kept coming. I can’t separate the stats for Recomendo and Lifehacker precisely, but my best guess for the Lifehacker feature is 559 signups, 85 sales (15% of signups), $507 revenue, and 2 new teams customers. Plus, 3 million emails scanned and we unsubscribed people from 9,779 of them.

That brings the grand total for 5 incredible days to 1,057 signups, 147 sales (14% of signups), $862 revenue, and 3 new team customers. We scanned a total of 6 million emails and unsubscribed people from a huge 19,614 mailing lists. I can’t believe that in 5 days our customers unsubscribed from nearly 20 thousand emails!

Digging deeper

I analysed some of these numbers and found some interesting stats. For each of these values, the average number per user has remained consistent.

The average number of unsubscribes per user is 19, which is probably related to the number of free credits we give away. 20 credits can be earned for free fairly easily by connecting additional accounts, setting a reminder, and tweeting about us. We are not changing this, we are happy with our decision with this.

Free credits for connecting additional accounts encourages users to scan more of their email addresses in one place, setting a reminder increases returning customer rates, and tweeting about us helps to spread the word about Leave Me Alone.

For this period revenue per user is much higher at $0.84 than on our open page which shows the all-time average. This is really good for us and our growth moving forward. We think this has increased since we changed our pricing to credit-based, since we demonstrate more initial value to the user, they are more likely to purchase a package. We are going to add revenue per user to the open page as a graph, so that we can track this stat historically, and hopefully see an upward trend!

Self-serve company plans

Just before both of these feature happened we changed signing up to our teams plan so that it is now possible via self-serve, and we got 3 new subscription customers from this press!

We initially thought that Leave Me Alone for Teams needed a manual onboarding process for people to understand how it worked, but we added a team specific onboarding process, and we haven’t had any questions or support requests so far!

Growing our monthly recurring revenue is important moving forward, since it is a more sustainable form of income for us, that means we can continue to work on improving Leave Me Alone for all of our customers.

Just a stroke of luck

We didn’t reach out to Lifehacker, we think they picked us up from a combination of the Recomendo newsletter, Indie Hackers, and social media.

These features, and previous ones in Fast Company, the Register, and Makermag, have really helped us. The best part is that the traffic and sales increased at the same rate, so we just need to find a way to get more traffic, and our revenue will continue to grow.

Popular publications featuring your product should be a nice boost, but it wont help in the long run if the product isn’t something people want to use and pay for. This week has been an absolute whirlwind of emotions! There have been very few support requests, the server only died once, and people are sharing our product!

We hope that this will continue. Thank you to every single one of you for following our journey and making articles like this possible!

Cover photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

How we get awesome testimonials from our customers

Danielle — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 09:18:17 +0000

Customer testimonials are important to us for both marketing and social validation. We feature them all over our website and we have a dedicated Wall of Love for all of the awesome things our customers have said about us.

Many founders don't ask for them because they are scared to ask their customers for feedback, but customers often want to help.

Starting simple

When we built and launched Leave Me Alone we received an incredible positive response including a lot of love on Twitter! After the launch madness died down we realised that we could make use of the all of these lovely tweets. Inspired by Baremetrics Wall of Love we put together the first version of our very own Wall of Love!

The old Wall of Love with embedded tweets - and several profile pictures being Holiday themed!

This was a really good start and people started asking how we built this page. It was very simple, we just used the Twitter embed code for the tweets. However, there were several downsides to this approach.

The main issue was that because embedded tweets are loaded from Twitter when someone visits the page, they are not available to search engines which meant we were losing out on potential SEO benefits. We also experienced issues with the tweets taking a long time to show or appearing on the page without their styles which looked terrible!

We wanted the testimonials to be more customisable, match our brand, and for our customers to be able to specify how their information would be displayed rather than using their name and avatar from Twitter.

Asking for a testimonial

We wanted to make it as simple as possible to write a testimonial for Leave Me Alone. Gathering testimonials is not easy, it takes time and follow ups to get people to provide feedback.

The first thing we needed was a short and sweet message that we could send to our customers. If you use Intercom or another chat CRM then this could be automated but we are sending these out manually at the moment.

A short message asking our customers for help :)

We have tried and failed with this kind of thing in the past because we were overthinking what to say. We are getting responses with this message because the request is genuine. We really are so grateful to every single one of our customers and if they have a few minutes to write us a testimonial it helps us so, so much.

Saving the responses

We could have asked people to reply via email but we knew that would become difficult to manage. We use a form to collect the responses because it makes it super easy to gather all of the required information and makes it clear what we are asking for.

We use Airtable for this which is hands-down the best tool for the job. You could use a spreadsheet but Airtable is like Google Sheets on crack - seriously, it's great. It provides us with a hosted form for customers to complete and the response goes straight into a table. We already use Airtable for other things at Leave Me Alone - bug reports, feedback, to track news coverage, and to record our expenses.

We ask for some basic information (name, company, and an avatar) and one or two sentences. We also ask for the main reason they used Leave Me Alone which we don't use anywhere right now but is valuable information for us!

We are asking for them to write about how we have helped, which prompts them to think and write about something specific. This is much better than "write us a testimonial" since that results in lower quality and non-specific responses.

Airtable even has this gallery feature to preview the responses, but we tend to use the spreadsheet view most of the time.

Some of our testimonials in Airtable - the gallery view makes it really nice to view them!

We found that Baremetrics also used Airtable at some point for their testimonials (maybe they still do!) and they have created this Airtable template called "base" which you can copy to start collecting testimonials for your product straight away. This is a preview of the form which customers will use.

The final result

Once we had enough testimonials we replaced the Tweets and styled them to match our branding. It looks much more professional and cleaner than our previous tweets solution.

It's unlikely that visitors are going to read all of the testimonials, so we took inspiration from Baremetrics (again) and made it so they load in a different order each time. This way every single one of our amazing customers get a chance to be at the top!

You can check out our new Wall of Love here!

✨ Our brand new Wall of Love! ✨

We are incredibly happy with our new Wall of Love. We hope you agree that it looks much better, and we now have super organised way of collecting and managing our testimonials for the future!

We hope you enjoyed this post and hope you feel inspired to create a Wall of Love for yourself. Even if you aren’t ready to display them yet it is never too soon to start collecting social proof! Let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Also, we would love to see your Walls of Love so please share them with us on Twitter!

Unwanted emails dump 28,397 tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere every day

Danielle — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 09:09:46 +0000

Our mission at Leave Me Alone is to help you to take back control of your inboxes by getting rid of unwanted spam. We bring calm and control back into your digital life and give you more time for the things you love.

When we heard about the world’s first hackathon to help fix the climate we immediately started researching what we could do to help. We have tried to build a product that helps people, but we wanted to see if we could help our planet too!

We immediately discovered that emails have a significant carbon footprint. In fact, 246 billion emails dump 986,000 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every day. [1]

Leave Me Alone users are already reducing their carbon footprint by unsubscribing from unwanted emails. So we decided to build a new feature to highlight the impact of this on the planet and help people see how much they could reduce their carbon footprint by from unsubscribing.

Clean your Inbox from unwanted subscription emails and Save the Planet at the same time!

Read on to learn more about how emails can contribute to carbon emissions or jump straight in and check out how to save the planet by unsubscribing!

How do emails contribute to carbon emissions?

A regular email produces 4 grams of CO₂ on average [2]. Long messages and emails with attachments produce up to 12 times more. Sound like a lot? Well lets explore how this is calculated.

The carbon impact of all things digital is generally attributed to the daily operations of the gigantic data centers that store almost everything on the internet. These data centers consume huge amounts of electricity storing, transferring, processing, and analyzing all this data. Plus to keep everything cool and running efficiently requires a lot of water.

Even to send a single email there exist thousands of data-centers around the world for every step of the journey from the sender’s inbox to yours.

And don't forget the the greenhouse gases and carbon emissions that were produces when the data center equipment was manufactured!

How can unsubscribing help?

Unsubscribing is not just good for the soul, it is good for the planet too! 75% of emails are never even opened [3] and sending and receiving them contributes to carbon emissions.

By opting out of mailing lists you don’t want you can stop the email from being sent unnecessarily. This helps to reduce your carbon footprint, and also the carbon footprint of the person or company sending the email.

From our anonymous usage data of nearly 10,000,000 analyzed emails [4] we know that around 8% of our users' inboxes are subscriptions and 36% of those are unwanted. That means up to 28,397 tonnes of carbon is emitted the atmosphere every single day for emails people do not want and do not read. That is the same as producing nearly 3 billion plastic bags [5] or almost 1 million people taking flights from London to Paris! [6]

Here are the raw numbers based on worldwide usage:

246.5 billion emails sent every day
19.72 billion are subscriptions (8% of 246.5B)
7.1 billion are unwanted (36% of 19.72B)
28,397 tonnes of carbon produced daily (7.1b x 4g for 1 email)
2,839,680,000 plastic bags (28,397 tonnes / 10g for 1 plastic bag)
946,560 people flying from London-Paris (28,397 tonnes / 0.03 tonnes for 1 person flying)

Unsubscribing also helps the sender improve their mailing list reputation by no longer sending emails to people who are not interested, which in turn helps other Leave Me Alone users!

Estimate the carbon footprint of your inbox

You can use our carbon footprint estimator to see how much you can reduce your carbon footprint by. 4 grams of carbon per email doesn’t sound like a lot, so we included the environmental impact of other activities like using plastic bags, drinking coffee, and driving a car for comparison.

See how much you could reduce your carbon footprint by with our estimator

Donate at the checkout to plant a tree

Unsubscribing is a fantastic way to clean out your inbox and reduce your carbon footprint but we wanted to do even more. When purchasing credits to unsubscribe you can now add a $1 donation to plant a tree! 🌳

Trees are incredibly important in our fight against carbon emissions and climate change. Trees help clean the air we breathe, filter the water we drink, and absorb harmful carbon from the atmosphere. One tree can filter up to 16kg of carbon out of the atmosphere by in just a single year [7].

We have partnered with One Tree Planted who plant trees all over the world. We chose One Tree Planted because they have a super simple pricing model; one dollar plants one tree. We wanted our customers donations to be easily measurable - no matter the size of your inbox you know your donation is equal to one tree being planted in the world.

We started our climate change campaign off by planting one tree, and we will plant an additional one for every 10 our customers do! We have already had several donations which makes us super happy. You can see how many trees we have planted, and how much carbon has been saved by unsubscribing on our open page.

Climate Fixathon additions to our open startup page

Every little helps and we are really excited to see how much carbon we can save by helping our customers unsubscribe!

Thank you for reading. If you want to know more or just want to chat you can find us on Twitter or send us an email hello@leavemealone.app.

[1] Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019: 246.5 Total Worldwide Emails Sent/Received Per Day (B)

[2] Report on the carbon footprint of spam in couriers: A legitimate email emits on average 4g of CO₂

[3] 2019 email marketing statistics compilation: 24.8% average email open rate across all industries in 2018

[4] https://leavemealone.app/open

[5] The environmental impact of some common activities

[6] Flight carbon footprint calculator: Economy class direct one way flight from LON to PAR per person is 0.03 tonnes (30kg) of CO₂

[7] Trees for the Future Carbon Calculator: A tree in a Forest Garden sequesters a rate of 34.6 pounds (15.694kg) of carbon per tree

Header image by Unsplash.

Case Study: Taking back control of my inbox with an indie product

Danielle — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 06:28:16 +0000

Luke Chadwick, Founder of GraphQL360 shares his experience of using Leave Me Alone.

One of the most important things about Maker Mag and the indie maker community in general is that they have a willingness to explore and understand how we go about making products and providing value. I’m a big advocate for the need to focus on value rather than squeezing every dollar out of a group of people who are willing to pay.

When I think of an indie-made product that is providing value, I have a hard time forgetting Leave Me Alone. It’s a pretty simple premise, though undoubtedly the execution is harder. Leave Me Alone scans your inbox and helps you to unsubscribe from all the pesky newsletters and spam emails that you receive.

It seems to be the practice that every new SaaS product wants to send you drip emails to keep you engaged. Nevermind if you just wanted a quick look around, now you’re on their mailing list(s). Just finding the link to opt-out can be a pain. To add to the frustration they all use different methods of unsubscribing and often require a combination of emailing, confirming unsubscription, and checking checkboxes. All this means that it’s not something you can easily do automatically.

I discovered Leave Me Alone in December of 2018 through a couple of tweets in my Twitter timeline. It was a product for which I instantly felt a strong affinity. Yes, I did have an inbox overflowing with newsletters, and no matter how many I seemed to unsubscribe from there were always more right behind.

Using Leave Me Alone has resulted in a ~17% drop in emails

After playing with the free version and realising I had received a lot of subscription emails in the last three days, I committed to paying $8 to scan the last six months of my inbox using Leave Me Alone. A few minutes later, I was merrily unsubscribing from newsletters. 238 of them to be precise. In total, I had unsubscribed from 255 newsletters.

Over the next few weeks my inbox felt like a ghost town. The constant stream of alerts when I received new mail on my phone vanished. Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to last forever, but it was a great respite.

I was curious about the impact of Leave Me Alone on my inbox. I decided to enlist the product’s founders James and Danielle to help me explore. We are lucky that the indie making community is incredibly open. There are many businesses that are sharing their stats as part of the Open Startup movement, and Leave Me Alone is one of these businesses who are making a firm commitment to transparency. You can find their stats, including revenue, sales, users, expenses and more on their website.

Given their willingness to be open with their numbers, I wasn’t at all surprised when they agreed to help me understand the impact they had on my inbox. This was risky of course, I could have discovered that it had no meaningful impact.

In the interest of keeping things neat I decided to wait until exactly six months after my first “six month scan”. It couldn’t be truly scientific with a sample size of one, but it would be a start in understanding the value that they’re providing the community.

Leave Me Alone is very careful about how they handle data, which meant that I had more access to data about my unsubscribes than they did. However, they pointed me to a private URL that allowed me to view my encrypted data in JSON format, so that I was able to capture the stats of my previous and new scans.

The findings (and some caveats)

When Leave Me Alone scans your inbox it uses a variety of methods to detect emails from which one can unsubscribe. For the purposes of this article I’m going to refer to these emails as “subscription emails”. That is, emails that are behaving correctly and are in some way presenting the ability to unsubscribe.

My first scans 6 months ago resulted in me unsubscribing from 255 subscription emails.

6 months later Leave Me Alone found 169 unique subscription emails from my second scan. Of those, I could only find about 90 from which I wanted to unsubscribe. So far so good. Less than half the number the second time around.

It is worth noting that the first time I also left some, though didn’t bother to keep records, so the number returned from the original scan was somewhat higher than 255.

Digging into the 90 from the second scan revealed that most were just things that I’d signed up for over the last 6 months. Some companies have several different lists, so it doesn’t actually take that many signups to get to 90 unique unsubscribes.

Most of the emails I had previously unsubscribed from seemed to be gone forever. I was very happy with this, having failed for so many years to successfully unsubscribe from all those lists. When you’re unsubscribing manually, it feels like you’re not making any difference, consequently you feel frustrated when the next email comes. It is easier to just delete the emails than spend time to search for how to unsubscribe, but that is only a temporary solution.

A handful of senders (who shall remain nameless) seemed to have ignored my unsubscribes. They do this at their own risk -- I know of examples of companies in Australia being fined significant amounts of money for not unsubscribing people when requested. In the US the CAN-SPAM Act prohibits such behaviour, even if policing it can be troublesome.

Leave Me Alone has reduced the number of interruptions in both my work and personal life, allowing me to focus better and be more productive

When looking at the total volume of emails for each period, I was surprised. My total number of emails was roughly double in the most recent period. Not the way that I expected it to go. However, it turned out to be easy to explain; over the last 6 months I’ve been working on a contract which resulted in a large number of GitHub emails. This was a new phenomenon because previously these emails had gone to work addresses.

After being spammed daily I eventually changed my GitHub settings to send the contract emails to my work address again.

The raw numbers

Here are the raw numbers for all the emails that I’ve received over the two periods, as counted by Leave Me Alone:

First 6 Month Scan (22st June 2018 - 21st Dec 2018)

3,433 emails

Second 6 Month Scan (22nd Dec 2018 - 21st June 2019)

2,828 emails (plus an additional 3,138 from GitHub which have been discounted, for the reasons above)

Ignoring the GitHub subscriptions, that’s 600 fewer emails than the 6 months prior to the 21st of December.

I also decided to check the numbers on my side. This proved to be a little tricky without resorting to code. The way that Google counts is by conversations rather than emails. By Googles count I had received 667 “conversations” from GitHub. This makes sense because GitHub sends multiple emails following Pull Requests and the like.

After deleting the GitHub conversations, here are the numbers from my side.

First 6 Months (22st June 2018 - 21st December 2018)

2,881 conversations

Second 6 Months (22st December 2018 - 21st June 2019)

2,265 conversations

Regardless of whether you count by distinct emails or by conversations, the results show 605 and 596 fewer emails, respectively. This is a distinct improvement to the volume of emails that come to my inbox.

The conclusion

Using Leave Me Alone has resulted in approximately 3 fewer emails to deal with a day, or a ~17% drop in emails.

"We created Leave Me Alone to help people take back control of their inbox and to reduce the impact of spam emails on the world. We loved helping Luke explore his data and being a part of this case study. Luke managing to save more than a entire work day of time, showing that we are providing real value and making us very happy!" - Danielle, Co-founder of Leave Me Alone

If we estimate that you spend 1 minute per email, then over 6 months I’ve saved myself 10 hours of effort. More than a full work day saved each 6 months is pretty incredible. Although it can be hard to quantify, reduced overall volume of email means spending less time classifying and categorizing emails.

There are few conclusions that I’ve drawn from this. I was uncertain whether I would ever need to clear my inbox again after the first scan. I was wrong on this count. It’s something that needs to be repeated periodically or the numbers start to creep back up.

Leave Me Alone could save a 10 employee development team ~$10k a year

The $8 is fantastic value. Less than $1 per hour saved (by my estimates).

It’s very clear to me that this is a product that is providing value. If it can provide value for individuals, how much more value can it provide a company, where it is estimated that employees spend up to 28% of their time on emails.

The cost for a mid-level software developer is between AUD $600-800 a day. This takes into account things like computer equipment and the cost of running the building. Leave Me Alone could save a 10 employee development team ~$10k a year. My previous employer with nearly 400 technical staff could potentially save a cool $400k a year.

Reducing the volume of emails has other benefits too. Leave Me Alone has reduced the number of interruptions in both my work and personal life, allowing me to focus better and be more productive. As a result, I receive fewer notifications, I have more time to engage with the emails which will benefit me, and my inbox is no longer a vortex of distraction.

Leave Me Alone will continue to play a big part in my mission to reduce interruptions from technology and take back control of my time.

Leave Me Alone are in the process of making it even easier to clean your inbox. Their next release will bring several changes including; attaching all of your email accounts to a single LMA account to unsubscribe from all your spam emails in one go, shifting the pricing model to credit-based instead of time-based so you only pay for what you want to unsubscribe from, and a ranking system they call Subscriber Score to determine which emails are worth keeping. Plus, a they are rolling out Leave Me Alone for Enterprise!

Update: Leave Me Alone has now released a huge update to the service with all of the above features and more - check out what's new.

Originally published at makermag.com on July 1st, 2019.

Teaching new languages to our bot

Danielle — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 11:26:50 +0000

We're always making improvements to Leave Me Alone, but one thing that has stayed roughly the same since launch is the Unsubscriber Bot.

If you're not familiar, how Leave Me Alone works is that we scan your inbox and show a list of all the subscriptions that you receive. We then give you the option to unsubscribe from these by clicking a button.

The Unsubscriber Bot is the part of the system that goes off and performs the actual unsubscribes on behalf of the user when they click that beautiful unsubscribe toggle.

The unsubscriber is in essence quite simple, it follows a URL and reads the output, performs some actions if needed, and finally determines if the unsubscribe was successful. If it failed we tell the user and they can intervene manually.

However, when we built it we made some pretty naïve assumptions, and as we grow it's clear that these definitely need to evolve.

This article will deal one of our biggest complaints, let's see if you can figure it out from a brief description.

When performing an unsubscribe, a number of things can happen and it's up to the unsubscriber to determine if the result is a successful or not. It has a number of hard-coded basic phrases to help it to understand what is going on.

For instance if it sees the following words it knows things went well;

[
  "success",
  "successfully",
  "unsubscribed",
  "you have been removed"
]

Or if it sees a button with the text Confirm then it knows to click it, and so on.

If you're a non-native English speaker then it's probably pretty obvious where I'm going with this. As I am British, of course I bore little thought to the languages that the unsubscriber would encounter when we unleashed it upon the real world, and regretfully taught my child only English.

However, unlike me it can learn from the world.

Disclaimer - I'm a web-developer, not a data-scientist. If I've used the wrong words below or said anything else stupid, please correct me and I'll make edits.

Thankfully when the unsubscriber was born I decided it would be a great idea to gather data on it's failures in case we ever needed them in the future. Although I didn't know it at the time, this is probably the best decision I've made.

After an unsubscribe (successful or not) we offer the user this screen;

The Leave Me Alone feedback screen

This allows us to gather information of exactly what happened. Given this beautifully rich data, surely the unsubscriber can learn something from it.

Unfortunately before we can get started we're struck with a problem, we've been saving this data as images when all we really need is the text (yeah past me is an idiot). So first we'll need to get the text out.

To grab the text from the images we'll be using OCR software Tesseract. Tesseract seems to work better when the text is bigger, so we'll also enlarge the images using the popular image processor Sharp. Finally, Tesseract wont detect the language for us, so this will be the job of langdetect.

const Tesseract = require('tesseract.js');
const sharp = require('sharp');
const fs = require('fs');
const langdetect = require('langdetect');

// read all image filenames from path
const path = __dirname + '/images';
const images = fs.readdirSync(path).filter(p => p.endsWith('.png'));

let languages = {};

const { TesseractWorker } = Tesseract;
const worker = new TesseractWorker();

(async () => {
  // process images one at a time
  for (let i = 0; i < images.length; i = i + 1) {
    const image = images[i];
    await new Promise(resolve => {
      // resize image
      sharp(`${path}/${image}`)
        .resize(1200, 900)
        .toFile('output.png')
        .then(() => {
          worker
            .recognize(`output.png`)
            .progress(message => {})
            .catch(err => {})
            .then(result => {
              // result.words stores the metadata
              // dertermined anbout each bit of text
              if (result.words.length) {
                // use the first identified language
                // and add to the count
                const language = langdetect.detectOne(result.text);
                console.log(language);
                const currentCount = languages[language] || 0;
                languages = {
                  ...languages,
                  [language]: currentCount + 1
                };
              }
              fs.writeFileSync(
                'languages.json',
                JSON.stringify(languages, null, 2)
              );
              resolve();
            })
            .finally(resultOrError => {});
        });
    });
  }
})();

After a long while processing our images we have a nice overview of what languages are present.

{
  en: 6438,
  fr: 1153,
  it: 503,
  nl: 346,
  ...
}

But what we really want is the keywords.

From the English corpus we can tell that the most frequently used phrases are those that represent the status of the unsubscribe; "unsubscribe successful", "sorry for the inconvenience", "your email has been removed", etc. We can assume this will be the same in other languages, so even though we can't understand them we can be relatively sure of the accuracy. We are also helped by the user feedback that was provided within the app.

What we are looking for in language processing terms is the top highest occurring n-grams. An n-gram is simply a contiguous sequence of n terms, in our case "unsubscribe successful" is a bigram, and we want to determine if this occurs a lot. The higher the frequency, the more relevant that n-gram is to the action...probably.

By modifying our Tesseract script a bit we can store all the text into language files for later (this is known as a corpus).

let language;
if (result.words.length) {
  // use the first identified language
  // and add to the count
  const language = langdetect.detectOne(result.text);
  const currentCount = languages[language] || 0;
  languages = {
    ...languages,
    [language]: currentCount + 1
  };
}
// add text to the corpus
fs.appendFileSync(`${__dirname}/corpus/${language}.txt`, result.text, 'utf8');

And after all the images are processed we have quite a substantial number of lines in various languages.

$ wc -l ./corpus/*
    138 ./corpus/af.txt
     87 ./corpus/cs.txt
    492 ./corpus/da.txt
   4958 ./corpus/de.txt
 277388 ./corpus/en.txt
   1507 ./corpus/es.txt
    325 ./corpus/et.txt
    130 ./corpus/fi.txt
   5553 ./corpus/fr.txt
     71 ./corpus/hr.txt
    215 ./corpus/hu.txt
    169 ./corpus/id.txt
   2602 ./corpus/it.txt
     17 ./corpus/lt.txt
      7 ./corpus/lv.txt
   1342 ./corpus/nl.txt
    393 ./corpus/no.txt
    755 ./corpus/pl.txt
   2377 ./corpus/pt.txt
   3411 ./corpus/ro.txt
    258 ./corpus/sk.txt
    153 ./corpus/sl.txt
    902 ./corpus/so.txt
     19 ./corpus/sq.txt
    292 ./corpus/sv.txt
     53 ./corpus/sw.txt
     94 ./corpus/tl.txt
    743 ./corpus/tr.txt
    129 ./corpus/vi.txt
 304580 total

So lets run an n-gram frequency analysis on our new corpus. For this we're using natural language processing library natural.

const natural = require('natural');
const fs = require('fs');

const LANG = 'fr';

const text = fs.readFileSync(`${LANG}.txt`).toString();

// find ngrams of 5 words 
const ngrams = natural.NGrams.ngrams(text, 5);
// count ngram occurrences
let out = ngrams.reduce((o, ng, i) => {
  const str = ng.join(' ');
  if (o[str]) {
    return {
      ...o,
      [str]: o[str] + 1
    };
  }
  return { ...o, [str]: 1 };
}, {})

// sort ngrams by count
out = Object.keys(out).sort((a, b) => {
  return out[a] - out[b];
}).reduce((o, key) => {
  return { ...o, [key]: out[key] };
}, {})

// write sorted ngrams out to a file
fs.writeFileSync(`${LANG}.analysis.js`, JSON.stringify(out, null, 2));

Using French as an example we can see that some of the highest frequency phrases are pretty good;

[
  "désabonnement réussi", // unsubscribed successfully
  "vous ne recevrez plus", // you will not receive any more
  ...
]

Unfortunately there's also a lot of garbage. A frequent screen to see after unsubscribing is the Mailchimp "why did you unsubscribe" page that looks like this.

So we get a lot of phrases from screens like these, which are not very useful.

[
  ...
  // I never subscribed to this list
  "je ne suis jamais abonné à cette liste", 
  // if you have a moment
  "Si vous avez un moment",
  // why you unsubscribed
  "pourquoi vous vous êtes désabonnement"
  ...
]

Conclusion

Despite being a fun and interesting experiment, is this better than just translating our English phrases into native terms for different languages?

Probably not.

In most languages we don't have enough data to do a decent analysis, and even in the ones prevalent enough to get enough phrases I still had to manually intervene to translate them and make sure they were valid.

So what's next?

We'll continue to work on adding multi-language support, but it's likely we will have to translate the phrases properly, not rely on automatic translation like this.

With the newest version of Leave Me Alone we will be giving users rewards for performing various actions such as referring their friends. This recent tweet by Guilherme Rizzo has got me thinking that perhaps users might be willing to provide their own translations in return for a decent enough reward.

Guilherme Rizzo from CSS Scan

@gvrizzo

Hello, world! 정석원 just translated CSS Scan to 🇰🇷 Korean, and @Habbe to 🇸🇪 Swedish!

📊I created a simple Google Sheets where anyone can translate CSS Scan to their own language - we'll credit you on our website 👉 docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

👉 CSS Scan getcssscan.com

20:44 PM - 01 Jun 2019

3 34

Thanks for reading this far! Subscribe to our blog to see where we take this in the future and hear about other Leave Me Alone decisions and improvements!

Special thanks to my French friends Baz and Anne-Laure for double checking my phrases actually made some sense, and for teaching me some French curse words!

How we use a popup for Google and Outlook OAuth

Danielle — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 11:33:08 +0000

At Leave Me Alone we use Google and Microsoft OAuth for user sign in. To do this we redirect the user to the relevant login page, the user input their details, and is then directed back to our site and logged in. An unfortunate result of this is that our analytics report a great deal of referral traffic coming from “accounts.google.com” and “login.microsoft.com”.

To solve this problem, instead of redirecting it would be better if we could open a new window or popup for the OAuth flow. Also this is probably a better experience for the user than being redirected around.

How we implemented it

We use Passport for our authentication so when the user is directed back to our app after signing in the URL contains some parameters we need, including a token we use to authenticate them on our server.

Since we want to use a popup we need an additional step in the middle of the flow to catch that redirect, retrieve the URL parameters, close the popup, and use the token in the opening window (not the popup).

We allow users to sign in with Google and Outlook and the implementation is the same for both. For ease of reading the example will use Google.

Step 1: Open the popup

To open a new window we use Window.open() with the passport login URL (/auth/google in our case) which opens the “Sign in to Leave Me Alone with Google” page in a new window. We also give the window a name and pass the requested features we want it to have.

We assign the window reference and record the previous URL so that the same window will be used or focused if the user tries to click the sign in button again, even if it’s for a different provider. We don’t want two popups for different providers floating around causing confusion.

Finally, we add an event listener for messages as the popup is going to send the URL parameters and auth token when it’s finished.

To get the window to open as a popup instead of a new tab we had to request the features menubar=no,toolbar=no.

Step 2: Get the OAuth callback parameters in the popup

When the OAuth flow is complete Google redirects the user to a callback URL. Usually this would be a server route which would perform the Passport authentication. Since the auth is happening in a popup we use a page in our app, which when which when loaded grabs the search parameters and sends them to the parent.

This callback page uses a React Use Effect Hook which executes when the page loads. We fetch the URL parameters which will include the auth token and send them to the opening window (the parent) using Window.postMessage().

Step 3: Authenticate the user and redirect to the app

The OAuth flow is almost complete the and the popup is now closed, we just need to authenticate the user on our server.

The receive message function needs to check the origin of the message to make sure it’s from the same domain for security. While coding this we realised that several Chrome developer tools use postMessage() from the same origin so we also check the source before trying to extract the payload.

Once we have the OAuth parameters, we redirect to the user to our own authentication endpoint o that we can use Passport to authenticate and login.

Finished!

The process is quite simple and all we have done here is add an intermediary step in the OAuth flow to pass through the callback parameters.

There are probably lots of implementations but this was the quickest and simplest for us using React.js.

Hopefully this helped you or provided some inspiration for your own solution.

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

How to unsubscribe from spam emails in Gmail and Outlook using Leave Me Alone

Danielle — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 16:16:01 +0000

Managing emails is a huge drain on time and productivity. Spam emails plague most of us daily and it’s not easy to unsubscribe from the ones you don’t want.

This is why we created Leave Me Alone. It makes it super simple to see all of your spam, newsletters, and subscription emails in one place and unsubscribe from them with a single click.

Here is how to use Leave Me Alone to clear your Gmail or Outlook of spam.

Getting started

Simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account to Leave Me Alone

Sign in with Google or Outlook
Scan your inbox for spam received in the past 1 week, 1 month, or 6 months. The longer you scan for the more spam you’ll be able to clear out! You can also scan the past 3 days for free. Sit tight, if you have a big inbox this might take a few minutes!

Purchase a scan
When your scan is finished you can start unsubscribing. Just click the toggle on any emails you no longer want to receive and we’ll take care of the rest for you.

Start toggling!

How does it work?

We never read the content of any of your emails but we do have access to some metadata - information about an email which you don’t usually see. This metadata contains information on how to unsubscribe from the mailing list which we can use.

Most of the time there is a link at the bottom of an email which you can click to unsubscribe. This link is often in the metadata and we can use this to unsubscribe you.

Successful unsubscribe using an unsubscribe link

When you click to unsubscribe we use the link to remove you from the mailing list and determine the success rate by analysing a screenshot of the unsubscribed page. We can usually tell if it worked or not, but if we are not sure then we will let you know and ask if it worked so that you can still unsubscribe manually and tell us what went wrong.

We think this unsubscribe failed and we show you the response to ask if it worked

Sometimes there’s no unsubscribe link or the sender didn’t add the link into their email. In these cases we can also send an email to the sender and ask them to unsubscribe you.

If the sender is behaving themselves then you won’t receive any more emails from them!

Successful unsubscribe using mailto

We’ve got you covered. All you need to do is click the toggle to unsubscribe and we’ll figure out the best way to get you out of that mailing list.

Why should I use Leave Me Alone?

Although not unique, Leave Me Alone is different from our competitors in two main ways:

When we scan your inbox we NEVER sell any of your data for marketing (it's been reported that Unroll.me sold user data to Uber). Since we never store any email information, we couldn't do this even if we wanted to, which we definitely don't!
We actually unsubscribe you from the lists rather than just moving them to trash or applying a label. Those subscriptions are gone forever, even if you decide to stop using our service your inbox will remain sparkly clean.

Leave Me Alone is a paid service (so that you know we don't need to sell your data to keep afloat), but we've tried to keep our pricing as fair and affordable as possible.

If you have any questions or suggestions we would love to hear from you - you can reach us on Twitter or send us an email.

Thanks for reading!

A Couple of Nomad Makers: burnout, challenges, and lessons learned

Danielle — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 08:48:47 +0000

This article is the last in a three-part series. Read the previous one here.

We had now been on the road for two years, and had spent a large portion of 2018 in cold countries and climates. Finally fed up with wearing five layers each day we headed for the surf town of Huancacho, Peru.

The beach was dirty, and there was only one cafe with good wifi, but it was hot enough for shorts and we had something important to do. We finally launched our side project Leave Me Alone - a service to easily unsubscribe from spam emails, on Product Hunt!

You can read about our hectic launch and the lessons we learned from it here https://blog.squarecat.io/successful-product-launch.

Celebration beach beers

Narrowly avoiding burnout

The successful launch of Leave Me Alone was incredible, but as that project was taking off we were still doing client work to keep travelling. We calculated that if we took on the extra work then by March we would have earned enough money to keep us alive for the rest of the year. Three months working and then nine months off sounded great!

We finished the work but not without sacrificing our physical and mental health. We hadn’t taken on more than we could actually complete, and we had enough time, but working on so many projects affected our productivity, sanity, and even impacted our relationship a little.

We had to remember a lot of information about each project and switch between them often which takes time and effort, and it’s not an efficient way to work. We also worked longer hours than normal and did client work on the weekends, which would normally be reserved for passion projects. This meant that we were both mentally tired, irritable about skipping work on Leave Me Alone or MakerAds, and had less patience for each other. Nothing too serious, but we had shorter tempers and didn’t have time to enjoy the places we were visiting.

Desert oasis work vibes | Fluffy office guests | Sea views

In addition to stacks of work, for the first time in a while we had a travel deadline to adhere to which added to the stress. We needed to be back in Europe for the first weekend of April (for a wedding) and now had to decide which places to visit, and which to skip, as well as plan our journey back cheaply.

Our breaking point came at the end of February. We were putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to meet our 2019 goals and James had his own goal of launching one product a month. We didn’t really have time but James wanted to launch MakerAds (makerads.xyz) so we made a launch plan, created the assets, and went live on Product Hunt on February 28th!

The launch went really well and we were overwhelmed with the positive response. Launches are exhausting and in the days that followed the amount of ad submissions surged and it became too much to cope with. I was also worried about the reduced number of Leave Me Alone sales impacting our revenue goal, and struggling to find time to write two blogs and read two books. Even though we were super busy neither of us was doing enough physical activity and we were struggling to sleep!

We recognised that we couldn’t carry on working this much or this hard without following the unfortunate recent maker trend of burning out. You’re supposed to work smart, not hard, and we were failing at this. If we hadn’t taken a step back then our work and mental health would have suffered even more. Leaving ourselves untreated (where treatment can be as simple as taking a break) could have affected our capacity to work for much longer, lead to missed opportunities, and further impacted our overall health.

We wanted to scuba dive in Honduras before flying back and decided to take two entire weeks off work and spend them doing some serious rest, recovery, and reflection before starting a long journey to Europe. Our clients were understanding about our break, it’s easy to forget that even remote workers take holidays.

Lots of diving in Utila left little time to think about work and the internet was so bad that we couldn’t have worked even if we wanted to!

Our vacation was much needed and helped us narrowly avoid the dreaded burnout. We left Utila feeling refreshed and excited to code again.

Several makers have suffered burnout this year and it’s really important to step back and take note of your health. We all pushed ourselves hard in the last quarter of 2018 and set a lot of goals for 2019, myself included. Goals are great but they’re only worth pushing for if you’re not going to hurt yourself doing it.

I’ve found that my key to success is setting measurable and achievable goals. I have a 2019 goals dashboard on Airtable which allows me to see my progress, provides motivation when I see I have already completed some of my goals, and gives me encouragement to keep going. The most important thing is to realise I do not fail if at the end of the year I haven’t completed everything. Having meaningful goals and making progress towards something you really want to achieve is valuable in itself.

It’s easy to see other makers success on social media and compare. I was tweeting about another successful launch, posting blogs, and seeming to have it all under control. I tried to remain open and share the downs and bad days too to avoid becoming part of the problem. Your health is more important than a shipping streak. That project, goal, and community will still be there if you take a break. Plus you’ll be more focused and productive when you return! I’ll be taking more of my own advice from now on!

Quote - “Having meaningful goals and making progress towards something you really want to achieve is valuable in itself.”

The importance of wellness is starting to be recognised by developers. Sergio Mattei, the creator of Makerlog has recently added wellness features into the platform which encourages makers to take a break without worrying about losing their streak. Anne-Laure Le Cunff created a browser extension Teeny Breaks which provides mindfulness tips and encouragement to take a break.

It would be great to see more of this attitude as we all struggle to keep a work-life balance trying to find time for the things we love, and still earn money from the things some of us don’t, in an ever more connected and demanding world.

😍

It’s you and me, babe

Not only are James and I a couple that travel together, but we also work together. We are each other’s solace, drinking buddy, emotional support, and sounding board. We agree that we are each responsible for our own happiness, though we still provide almost all of the support we need for various aspects of our physical and mental health to each other.

I am incredibly grateful to have met someone with whom I can share every aspect of myself, and experience this amazing lifestyle. Some people think that because I am the extroverted and loud one that travelling was my idea and I dragged James along for the ride.

The truth is quite the opposite. Before we even started dating James began questioning his life and started drawing conclusions about how to be happier. When we met he shared his ideas with me and I immediately came over to the dark side. We didn’t want a mortgage or to climb the career ladder, we wanted to sell everything we owned to travel and work for ourselves.

Travelling with your significant other comes with its own set of challenges. We argue very rarely, and arguments only really happen when we are both hungry, especially for breakfast! James becomes indecisive about where to eat and I develop this need for us to agree before we enter a restaurant. This results in us wandering between places, snapping at each other over the not quite perfect menu choices, and adding anger to the hunger. It’s a deadly cycle! We have now learned to recognise this happening and we rush into the first place we find without looking at the menu. Once we’ve had some coffee and eggs we both cheer right up!

Understanding and identifying each others’ needs and emotions has been absolutely key to our relationship success on the road. It sounds cliché, but we really do talk about our problems before they become an issue.

Now, this isn’t a relationship self-help book (subscribe to be notified of my upcoming e-book release haha jk), but it really is that simple. For want of a better description, James is an extroverted introvert, and I’m just a big ole extrovert. I do a lot of thinking out loud, but a lot of social interaction will tire James out and he needs some recharge time. It’s important for me to realise this and give him that space because otherwise I’ll just keep on mindlessly talking through my thoughts at him and it causes tension between us.

Conversely, I do need to be able to vent some of my thoughts. When James’ batteries are full he gives me additional time and attention so that I can feel satisfied that I’ve shared what’s going on in my brain.

Understanding each other better has improved our emotional intelligence, sharpened our perceptions, and had a positive impact on our ability to socialise - on those rare occasions we spend time with other people!

You’ll learn as you get older

Two and a half years on the road has taught us so many things about the world, allowed us to experience different cultures, and provided plenty of opportunities for self-reflection and realisation. Here are a few things I feel are worth sharing.

F**k everyone else

Not literally, but it’s so important to do what is of interest to you, and not everybody else. There are hundreds of travel blogs, Lonely Planet guides, and people in hostels who will assure you you’re missing out if you don’t do x, y, and z in that city/country.

Recommendations are excellent ways to find awesome things to do or the cheapest way to visit an expensive tourist attraction, but if you’re not interested in museums, don’t go to a museum just because someone told you it was great.

James and I aren’t into hiking and don’t like the cold, so despite it’s incredible beauty in photos and recommendations by many people, we didn’t visit Patagonia in South Argentina because we knew wouldn’t enjoy it. For the same reason we took the bus to Machu Picchu instead of the five day hike because we hate camping, couldn’t afford to stay in hotels along the way, and it was the rainy season in Peru - no thanks!

This recommendation extends to our nomad and remote work life too. We have tried co-working spaces in a few locations and each time the experience confirmed that we prefer a constant change of environment - it helps us stay productive.

Do what you like, not what you think you should like!

You don’t have to be a tourist

There are so many places we have visited where we stayed for anywhere from a few days to a month without visiting any of the tourist attractions. That is ok. Sometimes we stay for a month to live in a nice apartment, recover from travel, and get some work done.

This is an important part of the way we travel. Constantly moving can be tiring, so to combat travel fatigue we travel slowly and we like to “live” somewhere, buy groceries, cook dinner, watch some TV, and drink some cheap wine. When possible we use our free time to learn and develop our skills but sometimes an entire Saturday watching Netflix or playing video games is needed to recharge.

Do what you need to do to make long-term travel viable and sustainable for you - even if it means spending a day on the sofa like you would have done “back home”!

Budget smudget

Sticking to a budget is important to make your money last and so that you have some idea of how much more time you have before you really need to take drastic action - such as flying home and getting a “real job”!

I have a much loved spreadsheet where I track all of our daily expenses to make sure we aren’t spending over our budget of €50 a day. Sometimes we spend a little more, but that’s ok so long as it evens out at the end of the month.

If you’re as excited by spreadsheets as I am, or just want to have a nose at our expenses you can see our current 2019 budget here, and if you’re interested check out 2018 and 2017 too! We’re quite over budget this year with higher cost of living in South America, expensive flights and lots of scuba diving, but we will get it back under control when we’re back in South East Asia soon!

That said, it’s definitely okay to treat yourself occasionally and spend over budget, or make big purchases. After all, what’s the point of working hard if you can’t spend some of that cash sometimes?

South America tourism and excursions cost us a lot more than we anticipated (several hundred dollars more), but we decided it was worth the cost for the one-off experience. A visit to the Amazon and Machu Picchu were experiences we would likely not get the chance to do again, so we decided to accept the extortionate cost.

Something we definitely don’t begrudge spending money on at all is scuba diving. On our vacation to Utila, we did loads of diving and completed our Rescue Diver certification! We learned that we are much happier spending hundreds of dollars being under the ocean on a tropical island and will be spending more money diving in the future :).

Dive by day... and night!

You can’t phone home

Long-term travel or the remote work lifestyle is a different mindset to even the longest of backpacking trips. You’re not packing for a trip, you’re packing for your life.

It’s easy to forget the little things you take for granted, like next day delivery from Amazon and Uber in every city! Every time we are back in Europe I order a bunch of stuff online and restock my essentials from cheap clothes stores but if we weren’t in Europe we would have survived and found the same stuff in the countries we were in. You can almost always get what you need, or something close enough, regardless of your location.

We are about to downsize our two bags each to one carry on per person. We are sick of hauling a backpack and day bag around - I am beyond excited! In preparation for this change, I’ve been watching a tonne of minimalist packing videos on YouTube. While these are great inspiration, it’s important to remember that you can pack whatever you want if it fits in a bag you’re comfortable carrying around.

The optimal packing list is great on paper, but we know the things that we can’t live without. I’m sure Merino wool is fantastic, but I prefer my $2 t-shirts, especially when the Vietnamese laundry places seem to enjoy losing my clothes.

Also, who on earth honestly travels with only 1 or 2 pairs of underwear?!

The lesson here, is pack whatever you need in order to live comfortably and be happy.

Save water, drink beer (in moderation)

James and I like to experience the local culture by tasting the food and drinking the beer. Sometimes we drink too much beer. This tends to happen to me significantly more often than James.

Not much of a lesson here! Hangovers definitely get worse with age and if anyone else has a solution to this then let me know!

What’s next?

We intend to travel for as long as we still have the money, capacity, and desire to do so. We will keep working on our passion projects, shipping new features, and opening them up to new markets. We are not ramen profitable yet but we made $470 last month (March 2019) and so far this year we have averaged over our goal of $1000 a month.

Cheese and craft beer are our most missed consumables when we are away from Europe so we are super excited to be spending a month in Budapest. We have only been here for two days and we already have six different types of cheese in our fridge!

Our plans are never definite but we are desperate to head back East to cheaper prices, our favourite foods, and the best scuba diving. You’ll probably see us in Thailand and Bali this summer. We’d love to grab a beer with you so send us a DM!

I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series as much as I have loved writing it. It’s been really fun to reflect on our entire journey. It’s been valuable to remember the good and the bad parts, and the effects travel has had on us, both physically and mentally.

The best thing we’ve done is to join maker and remote work communities and be open about our experiences with a group of passionate people like us! We look forward to many more years of travel and hopefully, there will be enough excitement to write another blog series!

Interested in learning more about our travels? Follow us on Twitter at @dinkydani21 and @JamesIvings!

This article is the final in a three-part series. Find the first previous one here.

Originally published at makermag.com on April 12th, 2019.

A Couple of Nomad Makers: finding friends and side project profits

Danielle — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:03:32 +0000

This article is the second in a three part series. If you want to read the first one you can do here.

Spending Christmas on the beach in Australia was the perfect way to celebrate surviving a year of travelling together.

James’ childhood friend emigrated to Australia a few years ago and had been badgering us to visit ever since. We kept telling him it was too expensive, but since our Estonian e-residency cards were there we ended up with no choice but to hop on the cheapest flight we could find. I guess he was pretty happy that we’d finally made it halfway around the world as he surprised us at the airport!

Living and working in a campervan

We were unsure if we could afford to travel Australia and weren’t particularly interested in doing so if it was going to cost a fortune. The original plan was to spend a couple of weeks with our friend Dale, visit Canberra to collect our identity cards, and then leave.

At some point in the first two weeks, the constant sunshine and beach life changed our minds and we decided to buy a campervan in which we would live and work while we travelled some of the East coast.

I guess it was easy to fall in love with this lifestyle!

Almost as soon as we decided this we were lucky enough to land our second freelance job. We were recommended as reputable developers by a mutual friend which resulted in a contract for three months work.

This contract was another perfect fit for us; the client had an idea and wanted us to architect, design, and build the product. Another job meant we would need to have power and internet available (despite still living like hippies)!

We found a van with solar power so we could charge our laptops (and a fridge to keep the beer cold) and solved the internet problem by splashing out on a SIM card with 40GB of data.

Our first coffee in our home on wheels!

We drove and worked our way from Sydney to Adelaide, back to Sydney, up to Brisbane, and back to Sydney again. The route was a little weird, but we didn’t want to drive all the way to Perth and our visa meant we could only stay for 3 months at a time.

The wifi in Australia was not great. Outside of the big cities we struggled to find places to work but our SIM cards were fantastic. With the sun charging everything for us we were able to work from our van most days using our 4G.

With the exception of the terrible wifi, the public services in Australia are incredible. Every beach and park has clean toilets and showers (some of them even have hot water but a cold shower is often welcome), BBQ’s, seating areas, and drinking water stations. I despise camping so I was surprised how much I loved living in a van - I think the facilities and weather were huge factors in this!

And they say digital nomad life isn’t just laptops in the sun :P

We worked when and where we could, often sitting outside the van or using picnic tables at campsites. On long drives whoever wasn’t driving would usually try and get some work done, at least until our laptops overheated in the non air conditioned cab!

Living and working in a car

After 3 months our visa was up and we had to leave Australia. As we were so close to New Zealand we decided it would be the perfect time to visit. With our new found love for van life we hired a campervan. However, we didn’t have an equally amazing time...

The internet was practically non-existent even with expensive local SIM cards we were without signal for days at a time. This was frustrating as we were trying to work, but luckily the project was coming to an end and we were able to put on the finishing touches without good wifi.

Our van, (which was basically a family car with a mattress in the back) was one of the cheapest rentals we could find. Despite this it still put us way over budget - at the time of writing NZ is the most expensive country we’ve visited. Even though we were trying to save money our daily expenditure doubled our budget to €100 a day.

A bit colder than we’d like | Queenstown was beautiful

We really enjoyed visiting New Zealand and we did some amazing things; took our first helicopter ride to hike a glacier, white water rafted the highest waterfall, bathed in hot springs, and visited the wettest place on the planet.

However, though the landscapes were absolutely breathtaking at every turn, we visited at the wrong time of year - it was cold and the days were short. Van life is no fun when you’re freezing, damp, and in the dark!

First time in a helicopter! | First time hiking a glacier!

Back to Europe

Whilst we had been away our friends had been busy. We were invited to four weddings in the summer!

I would never have missed my two best friends’ weddings, and luckily for us they were only a week apart (though unfortunately 850km apart too). We were also seriously starting to miss Europe after 18 months away and decided this was a perfect chance to spend the whole summer there.

We spent one more month in Australia which we ended with a scuba diving liveaboard in Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef, and then started our journey back West. To round off our time in the east we spent a few last days in Bangkok, where it all began. It also meant we could avoid spending an entire 24 hours on a flight back from Sydney 😅

Berlin is one of our favourite European cities, and we have visited several times but only in winter - and Berlin winters are brutal! We wanted a travel break had some client work to finish off so we decided to spend a couple of months there. We spent a month in Neukölln and a month in Wedding - two of our favourite districts.

For the first time working on the road we tried out a co-working space. It was a novelty for the first few days, but we found it too much like getting up and going to an office - we even brought our own lunch a couple of times! We confirmed our suspicions that we prefer a constant change of environment to stay productive.

We have a couple of friends from the UK who live in Berlin and when we weren’t working we did a lot of eating and drinking! Berlin has a reputation for fantastic all night (or all weekend), parties, but there is also an incredible bar scene if you’re not a club person.

I love the music in Berlin (mostly techno and deep house) but in our 2 months we only went to one club and I am still not sure if I felt cool for getting home at 10am, or like an idiot. Especially after suffering through the 3-day hangover.

Park BBQs, lots of kicker, and touristing!

Four weddings and no funerals

Our journey back to the UK for the first time in 18 months was less than smooth. Our flight was delayed by long enough that when we landed in London the car rental shop was closed and we had to sleep on the floor of their office until they opened! It took us longer to get from Germany to the UK than our flight from Bangkok to Berlin.

A typical Ryanair experience, but we just can’t resist the prices!

Thankfully we had finished all our client work and were free for the summer. This was perfect because it required meticulous planning (obviously by me) to ensure we could see all of our family and friends and attend all the weddings without backtracking and covering the same ground.

Finding the maker community

Even travelling and working as a couple can be a lonely experience. Hostels always look so amazing with a beautiful pool and cheap bar etc, but they are almost always more expensive than an entire apartment on Airbnb or a local hotel. Plus, when you have to work the next day you don’t want to sleep in a bunk bed and drink shots until 5am.

Sometimes it’s difficult to find people who share the same interests as us. We are never short of backpacker friends and drinking buddies but it’s rare to find long term travellers and fellow developers.

James had seen a new community on Twitter called Makerlog. He wanted to be more accountable for development tasks and needed help seeing a product through to the end rather than continually jumping between new ideas. Makerlog looked like the perfect place to do this, so he joined the Slack and our journey into the maker community had begun!

Lacking fellow female developer support and communication I joined a community on Telegram I had just discovered called Women Make. Both of us found everyone super friendly and supportive and we joked that we had our own groups of online friends now.

Joining these groups made us both realise how much we relied solely on each other for emotional support, encouragement, and feedback. It was suddenly really obvious that if we could get some of that support elsewhere it would benefit our business, and potentially our relationship.

Being held accountable and having friends ask how we were getting on was a big motivator for building our products. It was also great to be a part of such a diverse community of people, with experience in a wide range of topics, all helping each other.

James already used Twitter but we both started to become more active. I thought there were some barriers - such as unwritten rules and expected etiquette, but I soon realised that I just needed to be myself.

24 hour startup challenge

There was this crazy idea circulating Twitter called the 24 hour startup challenge. Pat Walls was the man behind it. After building and launching a product live on stream in 24 hours he decided to encourage some other makers to do the same thing.

As something completely out of our comfort zones we immediately signed up. Disclaimer, I took a LOT of encouragement and secretly hoped our internet would not be good enough for me to take part.

Committing to the 24 hour startup challenge was a really big deal for both of us. I regularly struggle with imposter syndrome. The idea that everyone would see how little I really know and how terrible I am at coding, live on stream, was my idea of hell.

James was not as stressed as me, but as an introvert, he was concerned about how he would talk through his problems and explain what he was doing while streaming to keep it interesting for viewers. Most of the time I am an extrovert, so babbling about my code was one thing I was not worried about!

Our biggest challenge for the streaming was finding a good enough internet connection. We would be taking part from Salta, Argentina. We had been staying in a shared house but thought it would be best to have our own apartment and internet connection. I booked an Airbnb but I failed to notice that the property didn’t list wifi as one of the facilities…

The day before the stream we went to our new place for all of 30 minutes before realising there was no wifi. Panicking about not being able to participate we spoke to our previous host and luckily we were able stay there another couple of nights. The accommodation shenanigans meant we had wasted a good chunk of our day for preparation and I was even more stressed.

Bed time! 😴

When I wake up it's going to be STREAMING DAY 😱😱😱

Come and say hi to me and @JamesIvings at 12pm UTC! #24hrStartup

— Danielle 🇨🇴 (@dinkydani21) November 17, 2018

Stream day was incredible. There was no reason for weeks of nerves as it wasn’t at all scary and was actually really fun! With a couple of hundred other people taking part I wasn’t sure if we would get any viewers but the audience was super supportive. It was incredible to have people watch us build our product and provide help and encouragement.

I am a developer who needs to talk through code problems, often known as “rubber duck debugging”, which is often frustrating for James when he’s trying to focus. Coding on stream was a perfect solution as the audience (or just the camera) made excellent rubber ducks!

Our internet was not stable enough to support us two streams so we used just one laptop and sat next to each other so any viewers would be able to hear us both. We also switched laptops a few times so everyone would get to chance to see each of our faces!

We managed about 18 hours of coding before our eyes started giving up on us and we crashed. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to finish or launch our startup, our idea was incredibly ambitious to build in 24 hours, but we were very happy with the results!

🌎🌴 Roam ✈️🗺 was a very ambitious project to build for the #24hrstartup challenge with @JamesIvings 🔥

We didn't finish 😭 and it's not QUITE ready to be shipped ⛵️ but we still built something cool and took part which is what counts right?! 💪

Check out the progress 👇 pic.twitter.com/IRiLHBaYBf

— Danielle 🇨🇴 (@dinkydani21) November 18, 2018

Imposter syndrome

Taking part in that challenge was so far out of my comfort zone it could have been on another planet.

I attempted to lower my stress levels by preparing as much as I could (as much as was allowed in the rules). I researched the tools we would be using, estimated the core tasks, and planned what we would be doing each hour.

2 hours down 💪

✅ Project setup

✅ Login with Twitter

✅ API routes written

✅ Seeded fake datums

✅ The first page started (see below for all it's glory!)

Up next:

◻️ Connect Explore, Roam & Profile pages

◻️ Create Roam preview cards

◻️ Get a map on a page! #24hrstartup pic.twitter.com/7GYohFYHiX

— Danielle 🇨🇴 (@dinkydani21) November 17, 2018

In the first few hours the app took shape relatively quickly which helped push the imposter syndrome out of the way as I was able to see results. This is a theme I see in my everyday coding - if I am unable to complete a task within my time estimate then this is when the doubt about my abilities starts creeping in.

I am attempting to solve this by measuring how much I get done in a larger period of time, such as a week, rather than agonising over a 2 hour task taking 4 hours - I’ll let you know how this goes!

James managed to talk a lot more than he expected while coding, but this contributed a lot to his tiredness and fatigue. If there was a particularly difficult problem he did tend to go quiet for an hour or so while he worked through it. I don’t think this is necessarily an introvert issue, but something which would become easier to do with more live streaming practice.

Self-improvement cannot be made without action. A lot has changed in a year and I am continuously working on pushing myself out of my comfort zone every day. Currently, I am trying to say yes to podcasts and interviews, because “doing it live” is something which scares me.

Participating in the 24 hour startup challenge would not have happened if we hadn’t found the maker community. We are incredibly thankful to have discovered a group of such friendly, supportive, and wonderful friends all around the world.

Making our first $5

After the failure of our first startup, we had been sustaining our travels with client work but we hadn’t given up making stuff!

We launched our first native Mac app UptimeBar - a menu bar app to get notifications when your websites go down. People bought it! When we made that first $5 it was such an incredible feeling. We felt like we were finally on the right path.

UptimeBar wasn’t super successful but we made a couple of hundred dollars and learned a lot of important lessons; build products which solve your own problems, build and ship an MVP for validation, and be open. This was the first of our products to be an open startup with a super basic open page and we got a lot of positive feedback about sharing these stats.

This small success gave us the motivation to keep on building and we decided we wanted to be even more open and share more stats than just revenue (if we had any!) for our next startup.

A possible winner

Sticking to solving our own problems our next project was [Leave Me Alone][link] - a service to easily unsubscribe from spam emails with a focus on privacy. We were both spending so much time sorting through our emails we went searching for a service which would help us find and unsubscribe from ones we didn’t want.

We found a few which would help us for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge for their service because they were selling all of your data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of our data being exploited, we decided to build our own solution, and Leave Me Alone was born!

We took a new approach to building this startup by being completely open and were delighted to start seeing some success. We released to beta users first, who gave us lots of great feedback and within a few iterations, we had something ready for the wild.

Just before Christmas we soft launched Leave Me Alone on social media and to the maker community. The feedback was incredibly positive. It had taken us nearly 2 years but we hoped we had finally built something that people wanted and were willing to pay for.

Side project side projects

With a long stay booked in Cusco for Christmas and New Year we had a bunch of free time. James built MakerAds - an unobtrusive ad network for makers. There were discussions in the maker community about wanting to monetise their products with advertising, but not wanting to show visitors irrelevant or ugly ads served from big bad corporations.

MakerAds is a network of adverts by makers, and free for makers. James offers sponsored ad spots and plans to add categories in the future to allow sites to further specify what type of advert they want to show.

Inspired by a Tweet from Ben Tossell I built my first Chrome extension Twitter Search Fixer - to fix accidental clicks on #hashtags in the Twitter search results. I had a great evening learning something new and I even added support for Firefox!

Sadly Twitter recently updated their web app and my extension no longer works on the new version. They are slowly inviting people to try it but neither of us have been able to yet so I can’t fix it. Twitter Search Fixer is completely free and open source so if you have the new Twitter and want to help out please feel free!

A new client for the New Year

We were starting to run low on money. When we flew to South America in October we agreed that if we dipped below €5,000 without having client work we would fly have to back to Europe and contract or find a job.

Obviously, we didn’t want to do this but historically neither of us has had much success finding work on freelance websites such as Freelancer and Upwork. Applying is a big time investment and the competition for job postings is too high and the quality of clients is too low.

We looked for better places to find work and found Moonlight. The quality of developers and clients is much higher. The platform is built by two nomads Emma and Philip who encountered the same problems as us when they were trying to find work while travelling. We love their approach of getting to know their customers and they have reached out to us several times for feedback or to recommend jobs specific to our skills.

It was a dream to apply to jobs with proper specifications and upfront expectations. It wasn’t long before we found a great client and project which set us up with 3 months work and meant we could keep travelling for a while longer yet - phew!

After spending Christmas in the cold and at altitude we were in desperate need of sun, sea, and sand… Onwards to the equator!

Merry Christmas... and a Happy New year from Cusco!

Our 2018 in review!

[

View this post on Instagram

](https://www.instagram.com/p/BsEmj97HIGP/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_medium=loading)

My 2018 review in 9 photos was difficult to decide. I had to cheat a little 😅 Lived in a van 🚌 Nearly drowned 🏄‍♀️ Petted stuff 🙈 Rode in a helicopter 🚁 Mauled by huskies 🐶 Saw my 2 best friends get married 👰 Visited largest waterfalls in the world ⛲ Jumped in front of landscapes 🐸 Celebrated Christmas in Peru 🎄 Happy New Year!! 🎉🤩 #bestnine2018 #squarecattravel2018

A post shared by Traveller • Web Developer 🙋 (@dinkydani) on Dec 31, 2018 at 4:31pm PST

Interested in learning more about our travels? Follow us on Twitter at @dinkydani21 and @jamesivings!

This article is the second in a three part series. Find the first one here. The final part will be linked here when published.

Disclaimer: Some of the links are affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, I might earn commission if you click through and signup or make a purchase.

Originally published at makermag.com on February 19th, 2019.

Our first successful product launch! 🚀

Danielle — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 09:33:00 +0000

On Wednesday 30th January 2019 we finally launched Leave Me Alone - a service to easily unsubscribe from spam emails with a focus on privacy.

If you just want to skip to the stats you can find them here.

Launch Day

The best time to launch on Product Hunt is 00:01 San Francisco time as this is when the new Product Hunt day starts. Launching at this time gives your product the most amount of exposure and time to get votes, and therefore the biggest chance to bag one of the all important 1st, 2nd or 3rd product of the day badges.

We launched Leave Me Alone from Huancacho, Peru which meant we would go live at 3am. After just 2 hours restless sleep (too much excitement obviously) our alarms jolted us awake. Laptops at the ready, Product Hunt, Twitter, and analytics open we waited and then BOOM we were launched!

00:18 - incident 1

We performed a routine check of the landing page and noticed our stat suggested we join 0 users who have unsubscribed from a total 0 spam emails. Seeing as we had over 500 users, something was definitely wrong!

"OH MY GOD HOLY COW WHAT HAPPENED"

We had deployed a dodgy config file and the app wasn’t connecting to the live database! Luckily we caught this early and it was quickly fixed and deployed. Phew!

Easy like Wednesday morning

By the end of the first hour we had an incredible 100 votes. Things started picking up even more in hour 2. We hit 24 active users online and were seeing 6-10 people running scans on their inboxes at the same time.

The server held up as we frantically replied to comments on Product Hunt and Twitter. We’ve never had this much traffic on any of our sites - it was so exciting!

It was starting!

In hour 3 we got our first 5 sales and were had reached 223 votes - more than any of our previous launches have ended with! We were neck and neck with another product, and even though they had more votes than us we were still #1 for now.

We watched the sun rise and posted to Indie Hackers. Unfortunately, we also noticed a bug with our Product Hunt banner on mobile which caused the entire header navigation to bunch up and disappear. I powered through and set about fixing this while James decided it was all too much too early and had a nap - I was definitely not pleased and neither was he when I woke him up to deploy my fix!

Then the internet in our hostel died! We tried to use our mobile data but nothing was loading and I started to panic.

It was nearly 8am, so we grabbed our laptops and sprinted out in search of internet and breakfast. We had already scoped out the cafes with the best internet (and food) in our little surf town so went straight to our favourite one - Chocolate Cafe Peru if you’re ever there and in need of a good place to work!

Obviously they didn’t open on time so we were camped outside using their wifi, dying of hunger, and desperate for a coffee trying to deploy the fix for mobile.

Still battling for the most votes!

07:00 - incident 2

I had long since fixed the styling bug with the PH banner but we couldn’t find a window in the traffic to deploy. On any normal day this would have been a good problem to have, but not on launch day! As the bug was front end we could deploy the fix by building the code locally and copying it over without restarting the server.

This worked brilliantly until we realised that we had built with our local Stripe API keys and we had broken the payments.

"AAAAH OMG. I AM TOO HUNGRY TO FIX THIS. COFFEE REQUIRED"

This time it was more serious, we had tens of active users and people running scans. Luckily it was a quick copy and paste fix and the crisis was averted within 5 minutes. Phew again!

Sales rolling in

By hour 8 the sales were starting to roll in hard and fast. We were receiving Digital Ocean bandwidth alerts every few minutes and the next few hours were spent refreshing Product Hunt, watching Google Analytics, managing hundreds of notifications on both Twitter accounts, and celebrating every Stripe payment notification!

The Hacker News Effect

We planned to post to Hacker News at 9am SF time but completely forgot! We posted to a Show HN at around 09:45 and shared with a few people in the maker community to try and build some early traction. It’s notoriously unpredictable whether a post will make it to the front page of Hacker News so we didn’t expect any success. You can see the post here.

Then it started climbing. More and more users were landing on the site. Everytime the number increased I thought that would be the peak and took a screenshot. We hit the front page and watched it climb to 70 users active right now and the server was still hanging in there!

Relatively small numbers for the front page of Hacker News but enough for us!

James was excellent at replying to the comments. He was very diplomatic and actually enjoyed it! I focused my efforts on PH and Twitter, I’m not so good at dealing with difficult comments!

11:00 - incident 3

The Hacker News effect was exhilarating and exhausting. Then disaster struck! We had our first outage and the server was down for around 15 minutes.

"THIS. IS. BAD."

We aren’t sure what happened but our database crashed and had trouble restarting. This time James came to the rescue and performed some lightning fast devops to repair Mongo and bring us back online while I just twiddled my thumbs and asked repeatedly if he’s fixed it yet.

Halfway to a thousand

Thankfully that marked the end of our incidents as we reached 500 upvotes and 1,000 Leave Me Alone users. The traffic remained at a consistent 60-70 active users for the next few hours and the first support requests started coming in.

There were no big problems and most of the issues were scans not finishing or taking a long time to run because the server was under such a heavy load.

Big milestone! 1,000 users and 20,000 spam emails unsubscribed

Hacker News Demotion

It was now launch hour 14 and 5pm in Peru. The 2 hours sleep was starting to take its toll and we were both feeling slightly delirious.

We were also removed from the front page of Hacker News and demoted from position 28 to 238 instantly. Rumour has it that a post will be demoted if the number of comments is too similar to the number of votes. It may be coincidence but we had 48 votes and 47 comments when were removed. You can see our ranking progress here http://hnrankings.info/19037399 (thanks Leandro for sharing the link).

Just like that

BEER TIME

The removal from the front page of Hacker News reduced our traffic back to a manageable amount. We were slightly disappointed, but honestly also quite relieved.

It was now 6.30pm and we had eaten all 3 of our meals sat in the same cafe. It was time for a leg stretch and a technology break. One of the benefits of launching from a surf town was that we could grab a couple of local beers and watch the sunset on the beach!

Beach beers!

Bedtime

Launch hour 20 was now upon us and traffic was still steady. We stayed up in our hostel and dealt with a few more support requests but we were both absolutely wiped out. I wish we could have seen the full 24 hours through but we are definitely too old to pull stunts like that now!

We ended our day on 821 votes and #1 product of the day. We hoped we would wake up to find we stayed there!

Still quite close when we went to bed

🥇 🎉 NUMBER ONE!! 🎉 🥇

We woke up and grabbed our phones to find that we finished as #1 product of the day and had almost 1,000 votes!!

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1090979207432323072-675'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1090979207432323072&theme=dark" }

The launch went better than we could have ever imagined. Not only did we manage to sustain a huge amount of traffic and make an astonishing number of sales, but we also got a lot of incredible feedback and support for our product.

Feedback like this makes it all worth it 😍

The majority of comments, tweets, and messages were positive and we are so very happy and grateful to everyone single one of our users for trying Leave Me Alone.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1091376437335154689-283'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1091376437335154689&theme=dark" }

The love kept coming

The day after launch the traffic was still high and we were super happy to reach the mega milestone of a thousand upvotes. We were featured in the Product Hunt daily newsletter which generated a load more traffic and we made almost as many sales as on the actual launch day!

This feature pushed us over 1,000 votes!!

Then Leave Me Alone was featured in the Product Hunt weekly newsletter 5 days later as the top hunt of the week! Once again this drove more traffic and we saw another spike in sales!

An amazing launch day spike on our open page and then second #1 product of the week spike!

We hope we can keep the post launch momentum going. If we can make $50 a day (about 10 6 month scan sales after tax) we would reach our goal of ramen profitability, which would be insane!

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1092472854824865792-35'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1092472854824865792&theme=dark" }

All the data

Launch day stats

Past 5 days of stats

What’s next?

There are lots of improvements and features planned for the coming months! Our first focus will be performance and user experience improvements.

Then we’ll start on the big stuff; adding support for more email providers besides Gmail and rolling out an enterprise monthly subscription pricing plan for employers to clear their entire company of spam emails!

During the launch we had several requests from users to delete their accounts and their data. In the interest of privacy and transparency we have released a new profile page where you can see all of your previous scans and invoices, clear your Leave Me Alone browser data, and deactivate your account which will delete ALL of your data and revoke your API keys.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1092534976275456000-50'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1092534976275456000&theme=dark" }

We will continue to build Leave Me Alone in the open your feedback is more important than ever. We hope that you will continue to follow our journey!

Thank you EVERYONE who supported our launch. We’re so grateful for all the love, the tough questions, the bug reports, and for keeping us sane during a dizzying 72 hours.

So honoured to have both these badges! Huge congrats to Cleanmock for grabbing the #1 of the month too!

Why we think this launch was successful

In the past two years we have built and launched a handful of products but none of them have been very successful. We wanted our launch of Leave Me Alone to be different, so we took a different approach to the whole process leading up to, and including the launch.

Validation is key

We built the first prototype of Leave Me Alone in 7 days and asked people if they'd like to join the closed beta. We initially reached out on Twitter and in the maker community at the end of November 2018. The app was basic but the feedback for the concept was overwhelmingly positive

Clearly there was a need for this product - beta users had validated our idea. This motivated us to continue building but we were careful not to include too many unnecessary features.

Although we kept coming up with great ideas for new things to add, we made sure that Leave Me Alone performed its core functionality really well - unsubscribing users from spam emails

Everything else ended up on the “next version” task list. We wanted to keep the first version lean.

Lesson 1 : Don’t waste time building a product without validating a need for it first.

Build in the open

Leave Me Alone is proud to be an Open Startup, which means that we share all of our metrics including users, revenue, and traffic.

This also means that we build completely in the open by continually sharing our progress on Twitter, asking users for input on important decisions, requesting feedback, and being honest about the highs and the lows. You can read more about my thoughts on what it means to be an Open Startup here.

This has proven to be an incredibly good way to develop the service. Without our users there would be no Leave Me Alone so it makes perfect sense that they should be the ones directing the product.

Some people have voiced concerns about managing feedback as the product grows - here’s one specific comment on dev.to. Right now too much feedback would be a good problem to have. Ask us how we feel about this again in a year!

Lesson 2 : Ask users what they want instead of wasting time guessing and building redundant features - users love giving feedback.

Release with users

The beta users helped us find a few critical bugs we hadn’t anticipated, mostly from malformed email headers or dodgy unsubscribe links. Once we had ironed these out we considered launching but decided to soft launch first and try to get more people using the app to ensure it was robust enough for a public launch.

We posted again a couple of weeks later to Twitter and maker communities announcing we were out of beta but not quite ready to be hunted yet.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1072626323519090688-191'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1072626323519090688&theme=dark" }

Our long list of features were prioritised and we focused on improving the existing functionality. Inspired by this blog post by Maxime the founder of PixelMe, we created a public roadmap where users could vote for what they wanted us to work on next. This was a great way for us to determine what was most important to the users, and avoid implementing unnecessary features.

We started to get more interest, and a steady stream of users. Just before Christmas we received a huge boost when two customers loved Leave Me Alone so much that they purchased gift scans for their entire companies. Thank you so much Steph and Kelly!!

We set ourselves a target to launch before the end of January, worked really hard on both the app and social media promotion, and managed to reach some incredible milestones even before our official release!

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1088554519724728320-979'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1088554519724728320&theme=dark" }

Lesson 3 : Build a user base and hype on social media before launching

Over and out

We have read hundreds of articles on how to pull off a successful Product Hunt launch. Some of the tips are definitely useful, but it’s important to note that there are no magic tricks or trade secrets. A large community following can help with getting that #1 spot, but for long term success or growth the product has to be good and people have to use it!

Peace and all the love in the world!

✌️❤️

Danielle & James

Originally published at makermag.com on February 5th, 2019.