The Week I Finally Left North Carolina

This Week:

The big setback I hit in my new software MVP.
My last days exploring Asheville and the North Carolina mountains.
The last minute pivot I made in Boone, NC.

July 2024

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30	7/1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31	8/1	2	3

Where In The World Was I?

Asheville, North Carolina
🌳 North Carolina
Grandfather Mountain State Park
Boone, North Carolina
🌳 Virginia

Live Travel Map 🌎

Metrics From The Week

Business Progress Update

This week I had a bit of an unexpected setback, but more on that in a second.

I revamped my landing page and made some tweaks to my algorithms to return better results – more search queries, comparing new videos to your channel titles, tweaked scoring functions, reducing quota usage.

I finally got the results to a good enough point that I started on the next biggest mover: applying for more API quota.

But in reading through the YouTube API Terms of Service to ensure my app is in compliance before applying (unlike last time with CommentCompass.co, lol), I realized that it IS violating a couple clear clauses. One of those was prohibiting creating custom “scores” for channels, which, is EXACTLY what I’m doing 😅

Unfortunately the scoring function is pretty fundamental to finding relevant channels in the user’s niche, so I had to take a big step back and re-think how I could do this without scoring.

I ended up changing the niche page from basically auto-selecting relevant channels based on my algorithms, to more of a search page with helpful filters and sorting, with user-driven selection of channels to your “watchlist.” One benefit from this refactor is that I actually like this feature of being able to select your own desired channels better than being restricted to the channels that my software chooses.

In addition to this refactor of the flow of the app, I’ve also been adding clarity to any and all the metrics and values that the user sees, ensuring I’m in compliance with other parts of the API ToS.

It was a little bit of a step back, but I was able to get it back to a point that I feel confident in the results and usefulness again.

How’s It Going?

This week was a bit of a rollercoaster finding out that I basically needed to scrap the fundamental algorithm that spawned this whole project. My fear was that in trying to be in compliance with the ToS, I would end up only being able to build another one of these channel search sites where you can search for channels between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers! Wow! That’s so…. not helpful.

But like I said, I’ve gotten it back to a point where I feel confident again.

All that said, I’m not out of the woods yet. I still haven’t gotten the ‘ok’ from the API team. I’d say there are a couple of grey-area parts of my software that they might not like, but also might be okay. My strategy now is that I’m going to try to play in the lines, but also try to be as valuable to the user as I can, and expect a rejection/violation response from the API team. Then, I’ll take it from there.

Last Days Exploring Asheville

Last Sunday I took a nice little lunch walk around the downtown area! I found this great little cafe called The Rhu and got a breakfast sandwich (delicious!). The cafe environment reminded me a lot of SE Asia – wifi, outlets, a couple people working on their laptops, people bringing out food from the kitchen. Ahhh the memories 🙂

I’m still really impressed with the downtown area of Asheville! Great energy, lots of shops, tons of people (that I didn’t get any pictures of, lol).

I stumbled across this gallery, which sparked my interest, something I’ve loved doing as I travel the country. It didn’t have much photography, so after making some rounds, I left, and one block away found ANOTHER gallery and OH BOY.

This art gallery was all photography and the EXACT type of photography I love (mountains, layers, landscapes, sunsets, fall colors). It felt like bliss in there as I stopped to admire each photo. There’s something about that feeling that I can’t quite pinpoint. I talked about this during the first part of Why I need to leave my comfort zone to address my next constraint

Leaving Asheville

At this point I had realized that I had more work to be done on my software than I could reasonably get done in the final couple days of the week, so I decided to start driving north. The plan was to slow down, do a lot more camping in national forest, recharge, and just put in some work here and there rather than have it be the main focus.

I made it to this beautiful campsite in the North Carolina mountains!

And as I was doing dishes, doors wide open, cool (but humid) mountain air, totally private, bumping some tunes, I thought…

“THIS is van life…”

One day I’m going hard working all day, the (literal) next day I’m camped in a forest, surrounded by trees, listening to the birds chirping, wind rustling the leaves, seeing the late afternoon sunlight poke through the branches.

It’s moments like these that make van life worth it.

The next morning I woke up and just had a nice peaceful morning.

However, I had noticed that while getting ready in the morning, I had this quick vision of sitting down in a coffee shop, grinders buzzing, the aroma of coffee beans in the air, people chatting over coffees, and putting on my headphones and opening my laptop to make more progress towards my goals.

Some combination of the habitual nature of my life, waking up and immediately driving to a coffee shop, with that pleasurable experience seemed to surface this vision.

But it seemed a bit out of place.

Here I was, camped in the middle of the forest, totally peaceful and quiet, peak van life, yet my brain is serving me this vision of something else?

I thought this is what I wanted?

I took the morning slowly, taking it all in and being as present as I could. I meditated (twice), journaled, and just sat and thought for a while. I thought about this moment and what it meant.

That’s when I made this video: Why do we always want something we don’t have?

Shortly after, I decided to continue heading north.

I stopped at Grandfather Mountain State Park to check it out, a recommendation from the girl working at the gallery in Asheville.

It was $26 to get in, which gave me a bit of hesitation knowing absolutely nothing about the park and what was there, but pretty soon driving up the mountain I knew it was worth it…

The views were beautiful. But not just the views, the layers of mountains were

U N B E L I E V A B L E.

I took so many pictures. The only phone photo I have to share here is this one:

These may be the best layered mountain photos I’ve ever taken… (I’ll get around to editing+posting them… at some point)

The Pivot

After Grandfather Mountain I stopped in Boone, NC to spend an hour or two in a coffee shop, chipping away at this ToS refactor of my software.

And it turned out… horribly.

Some combination of an afternoon session, post-lunch, and a big lack of clarity on how to approach this refactor, I couldn’t focus and felt a lot worse about where my software is at than previously. I felt really frustrated from this…

I had planned on continuing to drive north to find another forested camp site, but I started to question that plan. It felt like another peaceful slow evening/morning camped in a forest would actually make the problem worse… More hours behind the laptop is what would fix the problem.

I was listening to a video from Alex Hormozi (Brutally Honest Advice for Men To Win In Their 20s) and part of the way through, he says this:

Whenever you feel like things should be happening faster, make ACTION your coping mechanism.

Action. Alleviates. Anxiety.

I knew what I needed to do, I just felt friction in going against what I had said I would do.

So I did a quick search, found an Anytime Fitness in Boone, and some places to camp overnight, and decided to call an on-the-field red zone audible at 5:30pm.

A good night’s sleep, double espresso, and 5 hours on the laptop later…

It is actually amazing how much this morning’s progress changed my mindset. I got a LOT more clarity on what to do and just made a lot of progress refactoring it back to a good state. It felt as if a literal weight was lifted off my mind and shoulders.

Am I done? No, but I’m in a much better place than I was when I got to Boone.

Side note, this coffee shop was FANTASTIC. Maybe a top 5 of all time. Good wifi, tons of outlets, tons of places to work, great decor, great vibes, great coffee.