Discover the latest journal entries posted by members of Sunshine Social.
Update 11 for Open Makers: New Commenting Feature
We have finally pushed out updates to Open Makers that allow you to post comments on Milestones and Articles.
Come read more about this new feature and look at maker posts and reply: https://openmakers.io/product/open-makers/update-11-for-open-makers-comments
As a freelancer, I regularly save the links that I think might be useful. Thanks to this constant and steady habit, I saved thousands of bookmarks related to design & development over the years. I will share my Free design resources and tools collection with you. You'll find a bunch of free and freemium tools that will make your design process more straightforward. If you think there are some helpful links you don't know before, please respect the work and like the post.
Addressguru serves as a link between purchasers looking for sellers and makers of a product, allowing them to conveniently find their favorite business in their neighborhood. For sellers, address guru provides a platform to showcase their business, allowing them to reach out to potential buyers and get new clients and consumers. This, in turn, aids businesses' growth and popularity in both the online and physical worlds. https://www.addressguru.in/ Buyers and sellers may effortlessly interact and transact business with each other using Address Guru. Address Guru verifies purchasers and strives to only list accurate information.
With http://OpenMakers.io we are planning to highlight minority founders and solo/small teams as much as possible, this checkbox in your profile will be the first step towards that goal.
Here is what a "Maker Card" will look like on OpenMakers.io
There is a similar card for "Products" as well. Clicking on a card will take you to the product or maker details page.
Excited to announce our new Sunshine Social embeddable widget for your site!
There is now a new icon in your sidebar to access the settings, you can choose up-to 5 flares for your widget. Then simply copy the embed code and add to your site and you are set!
View an example widget in the bottom right corner of our homepage: https://sunshine.social
Twelve things I have learned / relearned while running an interior house painting company that you can apply to any business (especially local services)...
Customer service / relationships are as important, if not more important than the painting itself. The more you can connect with your customer, the easier it is to discuss issues that arise. Clients often say to me "Wow, you showed up on time."
Respond as fast as possible, show up when you say you will, be reliable and ethical. Clients appreciate quick responses and don't forget to write well and in relatable language.
Don't cut corners, it seems like an easy way to get ahead and be faster, but in the long run it bites you in the butt and takes twice as long and adds stress.
Find great referral partners, build relationships with people who compliment your business. For house painting, I work closely with realtors, flooring people and handymen(women). I closed 3 jobs in the past 2 weeks worth $11k gross from 3 realtors I know.
Join every local Facebook group and have all your friends recommend your company when someone posts a request for your type of service, 50%+ of my work comes in this way.
Hire great people, take time to find them and get rid of the bad ones as quickly as possible. This has been hard this year since I'm so busy, I have needed anyone I could get. I can tell which ones add stress to my life and which don't.
Are you a new local service provider? Join Home Advisor, turn off all leads except for "Opportunity Leads" pick and choose the best jobs that fit your skills. Respond to leads immediately, goal is to win as many jobs as possible your first year for referrals for year 2.
Have an amazing brand, website, business card and marketing eye candy. I have a cool Fox pin I add to every business card when I do an estimate. EVERYONE loves them, especially their kids. I also have a stuff fox mascot named Chip.
Set 1, 2 and 3 year goals, for me my first year was to get stable financially. 2nd year was pay down/off debt, 3rd year is growth. I'll be out of credit card debt, school debt sometime in July. This week I'll do my 89th estimate, which is how many I did ALL of last year.
Do the small things, the detail work. 95% of your competitors don't want to do them, this is your way to high quality referrals from your past customers. Don't penny pinch, do that small "extra" thing to win over your customers, it will pay off long-term.
Think long-term, a small $300 job that my competitors turn down almost always turns into thousands of dollars in future work and referrals. Don't gouge your customers to get a big onetime paycheck, price fairly, it will lead to referral after referral.
You are the center of everything in your business, work super hard, but take breaks to get refreshed. Work as little as possible on weekends, work standard business hours, keep your evenings for you, family and friends. When they go to bed, work on loose ends.
Excited to share our first official screenshot of the #OpenMakers project we are working on. It's just a simple manage profile page, but it's the start of something very large and can't wait to share more updates.
If you want to customize your profile a bit more than the defaults, you can do so on the settings page.
When you register, we pull a few things for you... Profile Picture, Header Background and Short Bio. Feel free to change or update these items if you want something different than what you have on Twitter.
Your profile also has some SEO related content that you can change such as your page title, page description and open graph card. By default we populate these fields with some default information that we already know about you.
You also have some visual updates you can make to your profile, from here you can upload a custom background image, or go back and search for an Unsplash image. If you like, you can blur the background image so that it's less of a distraction behind your content. You can also remove the image completely.
When you remove the background image, we display a solid background color, you can change this color as you see fit. Keep in mind, collection titles are always white, so using a white background could cause issues.
First off, a Flare is simple a link that you add to your grid as a "card". A Flare can link to any publicly accessible URL of your choice.
We provide 50 default flare types that you can choose from with a preset icon, accent color and sub-title. Default flares require either a username or an URL depending on they type of service you want to link to.
If you want to link to a custom URL, simply use our "Website / Link" flare type and update the settings accordingly.
As you can see below, for free profiles, these are the settings you can define per flare. (Title, Sub-TItle, Username or URL, Accent Color and Icon)
If you have a premium account, you can also add an image to make a larger more interesting flare.
To add a new Flare, simply click the "Add Flare" button at the top of the Grid, a panel will open up with a list of all the Flare types to choose from. The quickest way to find a specific flare is to search for it, if we don't have the option you need, add a "Website / Link" flare instead.
We have made registering and setting up your default profile as easy as possible.
1. Twitter Authentication We use Twitter as our authentication system to make it super fast to get started, secondly it allows users to get the username they are known for on Twitter. This prevents username squatting and no you cannot change your username.
2. Social Profiles After you have authenticated with Twitter, we take you to a page called "Social Profiles", here we list 11 different services that are common services to make it easy for you to quickly enter your username in for services you use.
3. Profile Background After you have saved your Social Profile information, we take you to a page where you can search the photo service Unsplash to find a background image to use for your profile page.
If you do not want to add an image at this time, you can simply click "skip" and we'll add a default image for you that you can change later.
3. Flare Grid After you have set your background, you are then taken to your Flare Grid, this is your primary page and where you add all your links.
You'll notice, the Social Profiles you added earlier are added to your grid for you. You can now click the Gear icon to edit or delete the "Flare". If you click and drag a Flare, you can move it around the grid and place it wherever want.
In our next post, we will talk about how to add a new Flare, edit your settings and customizing your bio.
4. Collections By default, every user has one "Collection" or group of Flares. Premium users can add multiple collections to organize flares in a particular way.
Every collection has a title, by default the first collection is simply your username, when you are in edit mode, you can simply click on the title to change it if you want.
Due note, you cannot currently move flares between collections, you must add flares directly into the collection you want it in.
In approximately 8 hours we will be launching Sunshine Social on Product Hunt! We hope you will help support our goal of reaching the #1 position on Tuesday 04.20.21
We'll be posting additional content throughout the day, stay tuned!
This year my wife and I have lots of big house changes we are making, I have already talked about re-doing baseboards and doors and basically all the woodwork throughout the house. However, before we can finish that other big project, we are replacing our big built-in entertainment wall.
This wall right now is about 18 feet long, but a whopping 24 inches deep, which is way deeper than it needs to be. So we are taking the entire thing out and replacing it with new cabinets and shelving that is only 12 inches deep.
The bottom row will simply be pre-manufactured "upper kitchen cabinets", each has one floating shelf and two doors, there will be six of these across the base.
On top of the cabinets will be a simple counter top made out of nice plywood, with a nice front frame and the whole thing will be painted a dark greenish/gray.
On the left and right side of the wall we will have two sets of bookshelves (see picture below), this will hold books, completed Lego sets, etc. Between the two shelves will be a space for our stupidly large TV.
It's a fairly big project, but making good progress on some of the harder stuff, need to get it done so we can move on to other tasks.
We talk a lot about "Flares" for Sunshine Social, but what actually is the anatomy of a Flare? We have 50 default flare types and you can add your own as well using the "Website / Link" type.
Our premium users can add a large image to Flares to make it even more unique. View the image below to learn more about Flares.
Flare: A Flare is a card that links to a Social Media account or URL. Image: Premium accounts can add a large, custom image to any Flare. Title: The Title of a Flare can be anything you want, up-to 40 char. Sub-Title: The Sub-Title of a Flare can be anything you want, up-to 40 char. Icon: An image representing the service you are linking to, this can be changed. Accent: Visual element to help relate the card to the service you are linking to.
Release Notes - 04.11.21 Excited to announce a few updates to Sunshine Social this week...
Interested in improving Sunshine Social? Let us know what kind of new features you'd like to see and we'll see what makes sense to build out for the next set of improvements.
It's been quite a while since I last added a journal entry, been super busy and stressed.
My painting company has been the leading factor in my schedule and stress load, I have had some issues with the availability of my painters. They have either been busy themselves or out of town and had let to some jobs that I thought would be fairly quick, taking additional days (long days) of me doing it myself.
I also just learned that one of my painters decided to get a full-time job elsewhere but gave me no warning, which isn't great considering I have two large jobs coming up.
Lastly, in the first 3 months of 2020 I did 12 estimates; in 2021 I have done 40 in 3 months and winning 60% of them. So there has been a lot of extra time dedicated to doing estimates, plus of course all the extra jobs themselves.
It's hard to complain though, it's good to have work, very fortunate.
We are also doing a lot of house projects, new floor in bathroom due to mold we found, new woodwork throughout the house, new entertainment center built-in that needs to be done before we can do the flooring and baseboards, plus just trying to get rid of junk and other things in the house.
There are numerous other things happening too and simply struggling to keep up, slowly getting through the more stressful things though, I think.
Release Notes - 3.23/21
Today we pushed out some nice updates to Sunshine Social.
Custom Backgrounds from Unsplash: As part of our on-boarding process, you can now find a custom background image for your profile by searching the photo service Unsplash. Search for any term you wish, select an image you like and continue. It's a simple way to add some unique style to your page.
You can still upload a custom background if you wish from your settings page.
Updates to Journals: You can now edit a journal entry after it has been published, now you can fix those pesky mistakes.
Photos on journal entries can now be viewed larger by clicking on them.
Rather than only being able to link to your full journal, you can now link to or view individual entries by clicking on the "permalink" at the bottom of each post.
Tomorrow we'll be pushing out some more updates to Journals, plus updates to the homepage design to talk about some of the newest features.
I am now back in Colorado, I ended up leaving Iowa a day earlier than expected. As you can see from the weather map below, if I had left today I would have had to drive through the middle of the storm.
It's nice to be home, finally able to catch up on some emails and social media.
Some minor frustrating news though, the wainscoting wall we built for our kitchen was built 10 inches to long, doh! So I spent a bunch of time today taking some of it apart, trimming it and putting it back together and then filling in the new cut marks. So now we will have two narrow panels and 3 wider panels, not the end of the world but a bit disappointing.
Also discovered that I left some of my woodwork in Iowa, fortunately it's nothing critical, just frames for a couple access panels in a couple closets.
While I was out of town, my wife started taking off baseboards and discovered that we have mold under our bathroom flooring. So now we have to also rip all that up and put down new flooring. We had planned to redo the bathroom at some point, but not this early. We'll do the minimum for now and do full rebuild later.
Next up, get first coat of paint on the woodwork, take off old woodwork, buy and install doors, rebuild entertainment center wall. LOTS TO DO!
Today we managed to finish all our remaining pieces, got everything primed and sanded. Went and picked up the Uhaul and got all loaded up.
Originally I was going to head on Saturday, but we are supposed to get 15"-20" of snow in Colorado over the weekend, so decided I'm going to drive back a day earlier to try and beat the storm.
Either way it will be a 13 hour drive or so, hopefully all goes well.
Today I added the edge profile to all the woodwork, sanded everything and then primed everything.
Tomorrow I'll be preparing more wood, this time for the headers of all the door frames, hope to get all that finished an primed as well in one day.
Today I started working on my new Baseboards, Doorframes and few misc. things for our house.
We have 14 doorframes, 4 double wide closet frames and 375+ feet of baseboards to build.
Started with just rough cut lumber, then ripped it down close to final width, then planed it to final dimensions for all the vertical parts of the doorframes (Jambs, Door Stops, Door Casing and then baseboards as well.)
Good progress so far, but lots more to do in 3.5 more days.
I'm flying back to Iowa tomorrow (Saturday) to visit my parents but also to do a bunch of woodworking in my dad's shop. My wife and I are replacing all the woodwork in our house and I don't have the tools to do this efficiently.
I'm going to spend the entire week going from the raw wood to a finished product, I'll then load it all up in a U-Haul and drive it back. Then of course will be the tedious process of installing it all.
We are doing a bunch of other projects as well like replacing all the carpet / hardwood floors, rebuilding our entertainment center built-in, building a shed in the back yard, remodeling two bathrooms and should probably paint the exterior. Will be a very busy year, eager to have it all done.
