No hard feelings if you want to unsubscribe (link down below because I didn’t know how to link it up here). We all get too many emails. Guard your inbox!

This post is 3 updates on my end:

1. 💪 I got a new job

2. 📸 I’m focusing on content again

3. 🔵 New course incoming

Alright here we go. 3 updates. Gotta keep this email short and sweet or you’ll think I wrote it with AI.

Update #1 - New job!

As of January 13, I have been working in my dream job at my dream company.

😍 I am the Director of DevRel at Laravel

I feel like my entire career has led to this point:

• Started using Laravel v3 in 2013

• Built and sold a company on Laravel

• Spent 4 years talking about deploying Laravel apps at DigitalOcean

• Built 2 SaaS on Laravel that have paying customers

I’m very grateful for the opportunity and I understand how valuable and amazing the Laravel community is. Big 2025 incoming with Laravel Cloud and a new era for shipping Laravel apps.

Update #1.5 - Kap’s new job

Also big update, my wife (Kapehe) also got her dream job

😍 She is the Head of Developer Community at Vercel

Laravel and Vercel in the same house!

Update #2 - Focusing on content again

I’ve been focusing on building SaaS in the past couple years. Going back to focusing on content creation again in 2025. (I’ve said it before but I mean it this time)

Check out these spots for updates:

• 🔴 Reviving my 20k YouTube channel

• Laravel YouTube

• Chris and Kap (my wife and I, our podcast)

• BeginnerTailwind.com (more below)

Update #3 - Beginner Tailwind v4 course is coming

Over 5,000 people took the original Beginner Tailwind course back in 2021.

Tailwind v4 is out and the a new course deserves to be out. Style trends have changed in 4 years!

More to come on this soon. I want to make this course bigger and better.

• More types of styles

• Building components

• Writing maintainable Tailwind

• Customizable themes

• Creating real websites

👉 Join the waitlist for an early discount

Update #4: Side Projects

I’m still chugging away on side projects like Video Tap.

I also randomly started a new one a few months back with my neighbor. It’s called Answering Agent and is the most niche and non-tech focused thing I’ve ever done. It’s about to get its first customer!

Both built on Laravel of course.

That’s all for this update. Just wanted to say I appreciate you. I know we haven’t talked in a while but thanks for still being here.

Drop me a comment or a reply and let me know how you’re doing! Love keeping up with you all.

Hope 2025 is an absolute tour de force for you!

Chris Sev

I hope you all had a fruitful and zen end to 2023.

I’m trying something new; gonna keep these short and sweet. This way, the barrier to writing will be lower and hopefully I will write more of these.

2023 Year in Review in Bullet Points

The main things going on in my life have been:

• 👪 Kap and I continue raising the family. ‘Ailana is 2 next month and Koa is 8 months

• 🟣 Growing Video Tap. We just passed $6,000 MRR

• I left my job at DigitalOcean after 4 years

• 🤖 I joined Sourcegraph to help make AI coding tools better

• 🚵 Moving to Colorado next month!

  • I am born and raised Las Vegas so this will be a good switchup into a place that has seasons

My new AI Game

In December, I went to visit some family and showed them how to play around with DALLE and ChatGPT. We had a blast, but my big takeaway was that most people don't know how to use AI to generate images.

And so the idea for my new AI game was born and I built the MVP in 1 day thanks to Laravel Livewire.

This was a good way for me to play around with AI image generation and to build something for fun. Whenever I get burnt out on the day job or side project, switching gears to build something silly is a great way to recharge.

👉 Play the Game

It’s called Twin Pics and it works like this:

1. A new image is generated daily

2. You have to write prompts to create a matching image

3. You get a score from 0 to 100

The real fun is when you take a look at the leaderboard to see what other people are creating.

AI Images are Fun and Unpredictable

Since AI image generation is kind of unpredictable, you’ll get hilarious moments like these:

4,700 visitors in 3 weeks

And some project stats since I launched on Dec 22, 2023.

• 4,700 visitors

• 10,000 views (people are refreshing to view the leaderboard I'm guessing)

• 3:35 time on site (great number for a site with only 1 page)

I’ve made the site analytics public if you want to check them out.

I might go bankrupt from this

I’m using DALLE through OpenAI’s API. The cost for images generated is $0.04.

I’m using Cloudflare AI Gateway to track expenses. I didn’t have any plans to monetize this thing but it looks like I might have to soon 😅

Onward!

Hope you all have a great 2024. Thanks for sticking around to read my sporadic and constantly changing updates.

Appreciate you 🫡

It feels like the world has changed so much! AI is everywhere you look and summer is coming to a close (although it doesn’t feel like it’s ending in this Las Vegas 110° heat).

I could go through a bunch of updates but it all comes down to these two updates:

1. Video Tap is gaining traction! I’ll share revenue numbers

2. My wife and I had baby #2!

Video Tap gaining traction

😁 Before we dive into all the updates, here’s a 50% off coupon for your 1st month of Video Tap if you want to try it out.

If you tried it in the past, rest assured it’s had 1,000 improvements and is soooo much better now.

Traffic is growing nicely from a bump in SEO and referrals:

One big win we’ve had is we were able to help PlanetScale turn their 64 video MySQL course into a written course. Check out the PlanetScale course:

Almost $2,000 MRR

We were making about $1,000/mo on the pay-as-you-go pricing. I made the scary switch to turn us into monthly subscription pricing.

Pricing with pay-as-you-go feels like you are purely a transaction to a customer. There isn’t a strong bond or relationship that you’re building.

We switched to monthly subscriptions and it’s taken us 5 months to build up to almost $2,000 MRR. The beginning of the road is slow, but we’re finally seeing traction build.

It also helps that our pricing is 25/80/150. Easier to grow MRR when you price higher and target prosumer/business markets.

I’ve targeted the consumer market at $12/mo in the past and it was much harder (and more complaints) to grow that customer base.

Look at this growth chart. Some good acceleration happening.

I attribute the acceleration to our increasing SEO presence, more referrals from current customers, and our free YouTube Chapters Generator tool getting more usage.

LOTS more marketing to do but I’m happy with how it’s going so far.

Added Social Media Clips feature

Our goal is to let you turn any video into multiple types of content. Chopping up a video to create social media clips is a giant feature I’ve wanted to build. It took 3 months but we’ve finally done it!

Here’s the technical overview:

• We transcribe the video w/ start+end times for every single word

• We use OpenAI and Anthropic to figure out the most engaging sections

• We use remotion.dev (A video editor built with React) to let a user edit the clip

• We render the video using AWS Lambda

See clips in action and you can try them out for free at videotap.com

Vercel’s AI Accelerator

Video Tap got accepted into Vercel’s AI Accelerator. With a 2.5% acceptance rate, we were 1 of 40 that got accepted.

We got to present to 20+ investors which included the CEO of Vercel (Guillermo) and the ex-CEO of GitHub (Nat Friedman).

Watch me present to this superstar panel:

Baby #2!!!

Our baby boy was born in April. Our baby girl is now 1.5 years old.

Being a parent is the best. Two kids is a whole different game. Definitely less time to get to the computer to turn off the lights and code in a dungeon. But even though I have less time, I’ve learned to be far more efficient with the time I have.

I’m using Session to block apps (Discord) and the Block Site Chrome extension to block sites (X). I don’t even bring my phone into the office anymore. 0 distractions!

Here’s some pics of the little dorks, myself, and my amazing wife, Kapehe.

Other notable things

• My VS Code tweet went gangbusters to 1,300 retweets + 9,500 likes

• We’re moving to Colorado!

• My favorite AI tools: Cursor Code Editor and Phind and Claude

What’s next?

I’d like to build Video Tap to $10,000 MRR. To do that, we’ll need much better marketing. I’ve fallen into the “build it and they will come” trap.

If I don’t focus on marketing, we’ll never grow.

• We need:

  • Blog posts

  • SEO focused product pages

  • SEO focused use-case pages

  • Email flows

  • Tutorials

Let me know what you want me to write about while we go through this journey. I’m learning and making mistakes. Iterating every day.

My 1st Product Hunt launch

Let’s start off with the big announcement: Video Tap is on Product Hunt!

It’s my first one so I’d really appreciate if you could check it out and support.

The Busiest March

Video Tap was stale the last 6 months while I waited for the ChatGPT API. We finally got it and then got GPT-4 access! Improved the Video Tap features literally overnight.

The cool thing about having worked the last year on it is that we were already well positioned with SEO and brand awareness to capitalize.

Success is just hard work and being 🍌 bananas 🍌 lucky in the right place at the right time. Or something like that.

It truly felt like an indie-hacking month. Coding day and night and having a blast. It felt great to focus on coding a project I've believed in for a year. Finally, it's gaining traction, and that's exhilarating.

Here’s my March timeline:

• March 6: ChatGPT API released

• March 8: Video Tap 2.0 announced

  • Switched from monthly pricing to pay-per-video

  • Redesigned/streamlined the site

  • Free YouTube 👉 Blog demo on the home page

  • Added ability to do coding videos!!!

• March 9: Landed PlanetScale as 1st enterprise client

• March 10-20: Tons of coding + improvements

• March 15: GPT-4 API released

• March 21: Released a free tool: YouTube Chapters Generator

• March 23: Video limit raised from 12 min to 25 min

• March 25: My wife made a 1-minute demo video

• March 29: Added affiliate program. Get paid 25% for referrals

• March 30: Product Hunt!!!

Live content published with Video Tap

We’ve turned almost 4,000 videos into blog posts now! Here’s some highlights:

• PlanetScale’s 64-video MySQL Course

• Gary Simon: Spinning Text w/ JavaScript

• Colby Fayock: Exploring GitHub Copilot X

Revenue for March

Video Tap made like $200 in the entire past year. In March, we broke the $1,000 mark!

AI is here… and I’m excited

With GPT-4 out and ChatGPT getting into the hands of non-coders, it’s been so fun to watch. We’re at the beginning of something amazing. I’m here for all the creativity and am happy to shirk off all the negativity.

Ok, maybe some negativity:

There’s been many times in history where technology usurps an industry. Typewriter, printing press, cars, internet. Every time, we’ve found ways to be more creative and to generate more jobs.

If you asked somebody 20 years ago if kids streaming video games would be a job, they’d tell you to get back to work crunching numbers accountant! That “job” was only created thanks to the internet.

The demos showcasing GPT-4’s power are incredible. Coding with just our voices. Writing creatively. Making the Pope have swagger. Destroying Google’s hold on search.

The amount of time Copilot has saved me has been immense. The amount of time more AI things can save me is exciting.

I want to focus on building, not coding.

A personal note

2nd baby is due next month in April! I’m prepping all my projects so that I can truly take a step back and enjoy paternity time.

Not sure if I’ll write the April newsletter. Might talk to you next month.

Either way, have a productive zen April friends.

This is a big update since the product that myself and my cofounder Samuel have been trying to build is finally ready for open beta.

In this newsletter we’ve got:

• Devtr.ee open beta

• Fighting insomnia

• Personal updates

🎊 We’re live!

Devtr.ee Open Beta!

We’ve made it! Exactly 100 days after starting, I can happily and confidently say come and try our new project!

Try out Devtr.ee!

Create your portfolio in 5 minutes.
Make it 🎨 beautiful, 📱 responsive, and 🌑 dark mode ready.
We display your data from GitHub, Twitter, YouTube, Dev.to, and Hashnode with more coming soon.

Big shoutout to all the beta testers. Since we started private beta, there have been hundreds of new features and fixes added. Devtr.ee looks monumentally different than it did just 1 month ago.

I’m sure with more of your feedback, we’ll take another leap forward.

We also added a slick onboarding experience so you can truly build your portfolio in less than 5 minutes.

Other project updates

Video Tap now has 1,060 signed up teams and 1,729 processed videos. Gotta figure out a plan there. People are signing up and trying the demo, but only 4 have upgraded to paid. Every video is costing money 🫰. Might switch to rev.com style of payments where you pay before a video is uploaded.

Sean’s Score has been steadily updated. 15 new movie trailers added in February. Starting to be a solid place to get movie news.

🐑 Thought of the Month

I’m not bad at sleep, I’m bad at not thinking

I’ve always had trouble with sleep. As soon as I wake up anytime in the night, my brain immediately goes 0 to 120.

“What do I need to do today?”
”How do I make a better Devtr.ee?”
”Should I get Twitter Blue?”
”Ohhhh that’s how I can fix that bug!”

I’ve done all the things. ✅ Blackout curtains ✅ No screens ✅ No water ✅ Eye mask

I’ve finally found something that works:
Write down everything I need to do the next day, before I go to sleep.
Empty the brain!

I’m constantly in planning/action mode. I rest during the day and in the evening.

The goal is to get my brain to be in rest mode when it wakes up in the middle of the night.

Now I wake up at 4am and can tell my brain “hey dork, chill. we already planned out what we’ll do tomorrow”

At least it’s working for the last week I’ve tried it 🤷‍♂️.

🤟 Personal Update

Paris trip successful!

Trip to Paris was a success. Saw all the touristy sights. One thing that struck me is how intricate everything is. I thought the Eiffel Tower wouldn’t be that impressive. We even have a small Eiffel Tower here in Las Vegas!

I was wrong. Tower was way cool in person. Louvre was awesome. Mona Lisa is tiny but still reverential.

I never travelled as a youth. Good thing Kap is getting this Vegas kid out into the world.

It’s been a busy January. My 3 side projects each have fun updates and I’ll end this month’s newsletter with a personal update.

🌴 Devtr.ee beta invites are finally going out!

I’m really excited about Devtr.ee. I think the UI and UX are coming along :chefskiss: nicely. Beta invites are finally going out 72 days after starting work on it.

Join the waitlist now and you’ll be invited within the next couple weeks. You’ll be able to claim your username and make a developer portfolio for free.

If you’re already on the waitlist, sit tight!

The first batch of beta invites went out and we’ve found bugs and flow changes to make. No app survives first contact with the users.

Definitely lights a 🔥 fire under the butt to have real users poking around your app. Launch early. Get feedback early.

Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard:

🍿 Launched Sean’s Score 2.0

Last year, I built my cousinbro (Sean) a movie reviews site on Next.js 12 and Airtable. He never really took to Airtable so he never updated the site.

For this year, I did a big upgrade:

• Switched it to Sanity.io + Next.js 13

• Added movie news

• Let users add their own reviews like Rotten Tomatoes

Tons to learn with Next.js 13 but overall, I like what the app folder is bringing. More server-side rendered and less JavaScript shipped to the client.

After the switch to Sanity, Sean has been updating the site every day! It’s a great feeling seeing a site you built for someone actually getting used.

Check out the site. Bookmark it for news. Add your own reviews.

🤖 Video Tap was featured on Fireship (1.8M subs)

Got on a 🔴 Fireship video for 15 seconds. In one week since being on that video, we’re at:

• 9k pageviews

• 572 users registered

• 2 paid users (need to work on conversion rates)

• 💥 1,264 videos turned into blog posts

• 😅 $250 in AI processing fees

👶 Personal updates!

Our baby is turning 1 next week! It really has been the most fun, most rewarding, most perspective-giving year of my life. When I usually talk about ‘Ailana turning 1, I’ll hear “hardest year of your life I bet?!” I prefer to take the positive outlook.

I’ve been building 3 projects and when I talk about launching them, nobody says “I bet your fingers hurt from coding so much!?”. It’s exhausting we take the negative approach with parenting.

Days are long but the years are short. I’m gonna take the positive perspective through every day.

With that in mind, Kapehe and I are blowing it out for bday #1. In Filipino (mine) and Hawaiian (Kap’s) cultures, it’s customary to C E L E B R A T E the 1st birthday.

We’re going to Paris for a week! My first time in Europe so I’m stoked. Big jacket ready for some 🥶 chilly.

Happy January friends. Let’s keep building into February!

I wanted to say 👋 hey before the end of the year and to give you some updates on what I’ve been working on.

🤓 What have I been doing for 8 months?

1. Being a parent! Our baby is now 10 months old today. Parenting has been a blast and this kid is way cooler than me already.

2. Learning the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire) - Seriously the world’s most productive stack. I may put out a course next year

3. Building 2 side projects. I’ve been heads down building on these. Finally emerging from the cave and getting to the marketing stages

🌴 New SaaS #1 - Devtr.ee

What is it? A super simple developer portfolio creator. It’s like Linktree, but not ugly. And geared towards developers.

👉 If you need a personal site, join the waitlist!

I’ve never had my own portfolio site where I show off all the things I create. I found out building a personal site is not easy. Doing all the API calls to get data from dev.to, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc is so annoying!

So we built a tool for making developer portfolio sites easier. I wanted a personal site and now here I am building a personal site builder. Classic engineer amirite?

I started this SaaS with my buddy Samuel exactly 16 days ago and we’re almost ready for to launch. It’s fantastic how fast the TALL stack lets us build.

Join us on Discord to see daily updates (mostly UI experiments).

🟪 New Saas #2: Video Tap

This project took 6 months to build. 85% of that was getting back up to speed with Laravel and the TALL stack. Now that I’m ready to go with the TALL stack, I can build any project within a couple weeks.

This project is in the “finding product market fit” stage, which I think is an incredibly difficult stage. I am gonna change the pricing from monthly subscription to a pay-per-usage and continue the marketing push.

Try a demo. Turn a YouTube video into a blog post

❤️ Personal Updates!

Family is doing great. We’re really enjoying life and there’s a zen calmness to it lately.

Having a kid is the best thing to happen to my productivity:

1. The important things really come to the surface

2. The non-important things get dropped

3. Big motivation to make a side project be successful and fully automated so I can spend more time with the fam

Happy 2022 from the Sevs - Me, Kapehe, and ‘Ailana!

Onward!

Hope you have a great rest of the year. I’ll try to send these out more often and start documenting all the different tools and tactics I’ve used on building these projects.

I am starting this newsletter as a way to document everything I’ve learned and everything I will learn about 🤑 making money online and 🤓 building a luxury nerd life.

I’ve been a full stack and full snack web developer for 18 years now. Started at age 14. I’ve gone from making my first ugly website for a neighbor, to working for companies, made $500,000+ from courses, and built/scaled/sold my own company (scotch.io).

I became proficient in making money online, creating written and video content, SEO, encouraging community, prioritizing user experience + emotions, and mentoring writers.

But all I’ve done the past couple of years are those things I’m already good at. I just show up, bring my previous knowledge, provide value, teach others. It sounds good but it doesn’t help me grow.

I’ve become complacent in the past couple years. Never putting myself in a scenario where I know nothing. That means I’ve been stagnant in my learning! I sold my company in 2019 at age 30 and have been coasting on that win.

In my defense, I took the personal time to get married to the amazing Kapehe, build our ultimate dream house, and start our family with our new baby girl. On a personal level, life has been fulfilling. Lots of growth in that realm.

Time to switch back over and bring that growth over to the professional side. The next things I need to do to keep growing beyond my current comfort levels:

1. Apply what I know by building another business. Prove to myself I know what I’m talking about

2. Learn something new and invest in startups. I know nothing about this world

Time to upskill and be the small fish in the pond again. I’m also learning how to draw so I can add these not so great scribbles into these newsletters for you all.

Luxury Nerd Life

I’ve talked about building a luxury nerd life. What does that mean?

Using tools like coding to build a business that makes us money that buys us freedom.

Finding the balance between working and just plain enjoying life is how I’m optimizing my next 10+ years of life. Leaning that scale to the enjoy life side would be ideal.

What it means for me may be different for you. And what it means for me now may change in the future. Maybe in 5 years, my luxury nerd life will mean no work at all!

Either way, let’s focus on building this luxury nerd life together

What you can expect from this newsletter

I am always trying to think half a step ahead. I need to evaluate what the next ideal moves in my career are and put the pieces in place to make big 🧠 moves.

🖖 My personal opinions on:

• Building and scaling a business. Content, community, coding, team building, SEO, and tons more

• Making enough money online to buy an M1 Ultra

• Making a 7-hour work week. Lazy productive ftw!

• Becoming an angel investor

• Growing as a parent (mostly around time management and education)

🖖 Interviews with smart leaders and pros

🖖 Answering your questions. Seriously, drop them in the comments below ⬇️

What you won’t get out of this newsletter

To talk about what I want to move towards, I have to talk about what I want to stop doing. Focus is important.

I WON’T be doing technical tutorials. I’ve written a lot of those. It’s your turn!

Onward

Stay tuned for the next newsletters on building cool things, solving problems, and making that money.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue and if you could, I’d appreciate you sharing with friends!

Subscribe now

💬 Let me know what sort of topics you’d like to see in the comments.

I don’t have to build my own CMS!

Stay tuned for some words about making money online and building a luxury nerd life.