What is a Now page?
Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.
You can learn more about Now pages here.
What is Ivan up to now?
Hey it’s me, Ivan, the guy who you are reading about right now. Today it’s October 14th 2021. The world is still slowly opening up, but I heard a rumour concerts may be back soon based on leak news from the Ontario government. I don’t think I’d want to go for quite awhile yet though.
Disclaimer
If you are researching for your VC fund and think I still actively run Will Pwn 4 Food, may god have mercy on your fund. Despite this warning, the requests just keep coming in! Spam is still alive and well in the world.
Home & Life
The weather is still at that point where I can wear shorts and leaves are starting to fall. We take daily 40 minute walks which help break up the day and let my wife disconnect when she’s done working. She’s gone down to a 4 day work week which is pretty awesome, but it also means the week for me feels particularly short and starts on Tuesday.
We lived through about 5 months of renos, which was not fun and really killed some momentum. Project managing all the contractors, most of which turned out to be huge duds and sources of frustration, was very draining (and costly). Our entire main floor looks nicer at least, but still certain things make us mad all the time. Our house is definitely worth a lot more, but I feel like the market is starting to cool off a bit and we may not move for another few years. Still waiting on our new couch, which has been pushed back a few months. We kind of wish we didn’t throw out our other one too!
Been playing a whole lot of Hades, almost have 100% achievements and pretty close to being ready to move on, but what a great game, kudos to the dev team for keeping it interesting enough to go through the 93 runs I’ve done.
Work & Biz Stuff
We’re in the calm before the storm as Christmas busy season approaches. We feel like things should be picking up, but we’re still at least 1-2 weeks before that’ll pop, which is making us anxious. We are more prepared this year and now Stubforge is turning into a big revenue driver, so we’re excited to see how this season goes. On the flip-side, Cult of Echoes has probably seen the end of it’s large sales as most of our bigger items have been ripped off and are being sold for half-price or less. We also had to deal with a huge amount of Chinese scammers using our pictures and products everywhere online. To top it off, wood prices nearly tripled, but at least the quality went back up.
Been working heavily on improving the new Stubforge site and doing lots of SEO work and optimizations, preparing for the arduous task of non-stop content writing on every band in order to start ranking. I’m not sure yet how to tackle this and my mentors say it’ll take 9 months before I see results. Yay!
We’ve made a number of sales on the new Stubforge site, but it’s been slow as I need to drive more traffic there. I tried some Facebook ad campaigns with a friend, but it wasn’t working out and I think we picked the wrong audience. Once again, I’ve got a very divisive product that people either love or just hate, which I guess is good, but is frustrating. Been getting tons more custom ticket sales on Etsy, which is wonderful as it’s what I built Stubforge for. Those folks tend to really appreciate the end product and leave awesome reviews.