The summer is coming

Soooo May 2021 is finally over. My life is quite an adventure right now. Big news first: I am leaving Klarna and joining another company (in August). More on this in a separate blog post this month. I will write down my thoughts a bit, what I have learned and what I am looking forward to in the next company. For now, this means, I have a bit more time left to work on side projects so that’s good for I guess.

Another unrelated thing. COVID-19 numbers are dropping rapidly in Germany and even I got vaccinated around 1.5 weeks ago with the first dose. It was quite a surreal feeling at the vaccination center but I am feeling great, like a superhuman right now.

So let us look at my development over the past month. And what is expected from June 2021.

May 2021

Lots of things happened this month, so quite interesting. Growth is finally seen in the side projects. Conversions are lacking but I am optimistic that this all will work in the future. SEO is a long-term gamble that will pay off hopefully. Nevertheless, I am not so happy with the conversion rate so I will start another idea next month. More on that later.

This Blog

This month for the blog was quite slow I have to say. No major improvement but I got featured by the official dev.to account on Twitter:

Quite amazing, just redistributed the article on their platform.

Create one blog article on the blog

• Goal: Create one blog article in May 2021
• Status: ✅ 1/1

I stayed consistent and created another article called “11 Things experienced Software Engineers would have done differently”. It summarizes my and other people’s opinion on what you can do differently in your career. I have not started distributing it but will start probably within this week.

Bookmarks Page

• Goal: Get to 99 tabs on my mobile
• Status: ❌

I have not reached that goal. I have not submitted any bookmark I believe. I was just too lazy to do the mundane tasks, lets see if I will do it in the following months.

caseconverter.pro

Growth for caseconverter.pro is slow but stray I have the feeling. I feel that SEO is just getting into account now and I plan to improve the platform still. It should be the place to go to if you need a conversion of case types or have any other questions about case conversions.

Blogging

• Goal: Create 1 new blog article
• Status: ✅

I created the blog “How to convert any string to camelCase in JavaScript”. It is not yet indexed by Google but I am sure it will be at some point. It simply lists the different ways on how to convert a string to camelCase. With or without external dependencies. It is especially targeted for long-tail keywords. Probably not bringing a lot of traffic but a high-quality one.

Features

• Goal: Replace current converting functions
• Status: ✅

I have migrated the internally written functions to use change-case. They work quite amazing and I have got to hold off a lot of other cases now. A big advantage is also that the code base shrunk because of this quite a bit. That is something positive at least.

• Goal: Create at least 2 Feature pages
• Status: ✅

I have created to focused feature pages:

• Convert JSON Keys to snake_case online
• Convert JSON Keys to camelCase online

I think these are great examples of how the tool is useful. There are still bugs inside these pages which I will have to fix, but again. It is not critical.

• Optional Goal: Create at least 2 competitor comparison pages
• Status: ❌/✅ (1/2)

This goal is partially done. I have created the basic structure of a feature page and created one alternative page to caseconverter.com that you can find here. Have a look. I think these pages should increase the general SEO rank of caseconverter.pro somehow I hope.

In general, this project seems to grow slowly. I still have two features in my mind that could improve the SEO score somehow, but it is difficult, to be honest. Most people just look for “caseconverter” and that’s what is important only. On top of that, I also saw on a website that caseconverter.com is getting a lot of visits, around 30k people per month. And the website’s value was estimated to be around 30.000 USD. If I could grow caseconverter.pro a bit and sell it, it would be a huge plus for me.

getworkrecognized

Some growth for getworkrecognized as well. The articles I have been writing and the career ladder explorer finally pay off I have the feeling. With a bit more marketing I am sure I could reach even more growth. So let us check what I have done this past month.

• Goal: Finish onboarding tour
• Status: ✅

I have finished the improved onboarding tour within the app. I have not heard any feedback on it yet but you can find it in the tweet here:

A learning from integrating this is definitely that the documentation of react-joyride leaves a lot to wish for. I struggled a bit with the integration, especially with focusing on tours throughout different routes within Next.js and also figuring out how it works with server-side rendering. I will probably write a blog article regarding that because it is helpful to other developers.

• Goal: Improve call to action on the landing page, feature pages
• Status: ❌

I have not implemented the feedback yet. Might do it in the next month.

• Goal: Mention free trial, create a widget for the blog, and integrate it
• Status: ✅

I have created a nice-looking widget actually for this. You can see it in the following:

I plan to eventually open-source this widget or even sell it. Might be helpful for some people.

• Goal: Lower prices
• Status: ✅

I have done that. Still, no one has decided to sign up. Let’s see how it goes in the next month.

• Goal: Integrate live chat functionality
• Status: ✅

You can see the live chat in action on the website now. I have used tawk.to to implement the chat and with a bit of initial support I got running quickly. Just took an hour or so. I love that their platform can be used for free and that it just works. Super impressed.

• Goal: Have 50 people sign up for the trial
• Status: ❌

Failed miserably. Ok, I have 8 people signed up which is kind of positive but I still fail to get people signed up. I wrote a bit on LinkedIn but convincing recruiters to sign up is even more difficult. I will invest some time into actually creating more content and marketing which should help with bringing people to the website.

• Goal: Optimize the example self-review
• Status: ❌

Have not done that because traffic to that page went down.

June 2021

For the next month, I have set a lot of goals. So let us jump into detail.

The Blog

I will not focus a lot on the blog this month I guess and do the bare minimum to keep it alive. Focusing on other projects this month.

Create one blog article on the blog

• Goal: Create one blog article in June 2021
• Status: ❌ 0/1

The blog article I want to write this month is about covering up what I have done at Klarna and what kind of company I will join. Maybe I will split this also into two parts, but let me see.

caseconverter.pro

With the growth of the past month, I am a bit more motivated to build some features and create some content in the hope search traffic will rise even more. Doing marketing for such a project is quite difficult because you do not really have to sell something to improve human’s lives but people look for a solution in most cases on Google.

Integrate all case conversions of change-case

• Goal: Integrate all case conversion types of change-case
• Status: 0/1

change-case supports many many case types. Supporting them all will be quite easy and might make this tool even more practical for many other use cases.

Fix Use case sites

• Goal: Fix bugs for pre-selected target case on the use-case pages
• Status: ❌

Blogging

• Goal: Create 2 new blog articles
• Status: ❌

To increase the position on search engines, I plan to create 2 more blog articles this month. Ideally without a lot of effort.

getworkrecognized

getworkrecognized experienced some growth the past month which is good to see, but converting users is still a big pain for me. I can see why such a project is difficult to actually bring to people when it is not sold directly to companies, but I will keep trying a bit more.

Features

• Goal: Implement all career ladders from the explorer in the production app
• Status: ❌

Currently, not all career ladders in the explorer are shown within the app and are kind of duplicated in code. I need to make sure this is not the case and unify the different code paths. This should also enable the future case to make some parts of the content open-source.

• Goal: Create a lifetime deal
• Status: ❌

The lifetime deal should be for limited slots only and priced around 1.5 years of a subscription. Maybe people will like it and sign up more. Based on this I am also planning to do some giveaways on Twitter and LinkedIn. Maybe that will bring some more but also paying users.

Launching the project in communities

I will also officially launch the project in all developer communities where you can launch it.

• Goal: Launch on Show HN
• Status: ❌

A Show HN thread might resonate with the people I want to have as a customer quite clearly.

• Goal: Launch on r/webdev showcase on Saturday
• Status: ❌

That subreddit is drifting more and more into clickbaity title collection but I will try to launch it there as well. Not hoping for a lot of traction from there, but better than nothing.

• Goal: Launch on ProductHunt
• Status: ❌

This is probably the biggest event for this project up until now. A ProductHunt launch always requires a lot of marketing work before but I am sure I can do it. If it fails, I will at least have some good backlinks.

Marketing

• Goal: Create 10 carousels on LinkedIn
• Status: ❌

A simple goal to reach a bigger audience on LinkedIn.

• Goal: Repost one article on Reddit in a different form
• Status: ❌

I have not tried to repurpose my content that much yet. Some posts on Reddit in text form with guides around promotion rounds or the general engineering ladder might be helpful.

New Adventures

That might explode this blog now! I will also work on a new idea this month. It will be similar to toucan in a way. I had this problem which I am trying to solve much time at Klarna with onboarding new people to Klarna. So let us see where I get this idea too. I am planning to keep it down to a minimum and start small. So let us look at the goals:

• Goal: Create a landing page for the project

• Status: ❌

• Goal: Create a waitlist functionality for the web page

• Status: ❌

I am planning on releasing the necessary bits somehow this month and will check how people will react. I will also try to build this project in public on Twitter and LinkedIn, to figure out if my target audience is there.

An optional goal would be also to have an MVP ready by the end of the month but it might be a bit difficult because it involves a web application and web extension. The last time I have worked with web extension is a long time ago unfortunately but I hope there is a good boilerplate for web extensions.