# robhope.com — full content dump for LLM ingestion Generated dynamically on each request from the current published posts. Author: Rob Hope. Site: https://robhope.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Yo! Podcast now powered by Bold Video Published: 2026-01-15 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-bold Since joining Bold Video as a co-founder, I’m excited to share the new Yo! Podcast website experience (yo.fm), powered by the platform. With the integration into Bold Video, you can: Find episodes or topics quickly (preview) Generate key takeaways from each episode, via sidebar chat (preview) Ask me to extract insights, compiled across ALL EPISODES, into a concise format (preview) Note: Bold is not primarily targeting podcasts (our ICP is coaches/educators with hundreds of videos recorded for their private online community) but it has 10x’d my previous static podcast experience. I’m so chuffed! Here are some screenshots, demonstrating the integration: New Yo! Podcast home page Pretty straight forward home view (yo.fm) with newest episodes at the top but now with suggested questions to ask in the hero: ‍ New header search: quick-find episodes or topics After steering to the top-right search bar, you can search for people interviewed (eg. Derek Sivers) or topics mentioned (eg. Burnout). Note how it surfaced how Rasmus, Jeff and Gal all talked about burnout: New video sidebar chat: ask questions or summarize conversation points Here I ask why Gal Shir stopped posting on his YouTube. This is great for recaps once you’ve listened to the podcast on-the-go or need a refresher months later. Ask Rob: the true Bold Video magic ✨ Bold indexes all our interviews then adds its secret sauce to each conversation, to help the answer engine work faster and more accurate. You can demo it here: yo.fm/ask Bold also has settings to customize the AI chat dialogue. As you can see I’ve added some casual tones. Also note the useful citations and even an option to follow up questions at the bottom: Let’s try another: Exciting right! We are still in Beta, so please send as much feedback as possible (rob at boldvideo dot com) – hope you have fun with it 🙂 ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## All-in on Bold Video Published: 2026-01-14 URL: https://robhope.com/all-in For over two decades, I’ve juggled many side projects. It’s been fun, energising, and taught me a whole range of skills. I’ve now joined Bold Video as a co-founder and made the decision to go all-in on building something ambitious in the AI video space. From January 2026, my audits, workshops, and services are no longer operating. It’s an exciting shift, and I’ll share more soon. Who? How? When? I never had this on my roadmap but it all organically fell into place. After Marcel helped power the video behind my Show Them course in Oct 2023, he started demo’ing all his ideas for the Bold Video platform. An 8km run around London, some fish ‘n chips at the Ted Lasso pub, a late night of demos and a few months of comms later… I asked Marcel if he’d take on a cofounder… and the rest is history. ‍ So, what exactly is Bold Video? If you know me, you know I loathe a vague or verbose description. Let’s break it down by starting with who it is for: Coaches or educators with hundreds (or thousands) of videos recorded for their private online community. Bold comes in two forms: Hosted – where you upload/import your videos into Bold, then customize our pre-designed template (see: yo.fm). Headless – where you upload/import your videos into Bold, then use our API to pull videos and our chat experience into your existing platform. Bold does these things well: Serves fast, high quality video with no branding. After bulk uploads/imports, it auto-generates titles, descriptions, chapters etc. (customized to the settings/tone you define). Provides quick search for videos or topics. Helps answer questions for your users, while you’re offline. The chat can summarize a video or compile answers across your entire video library. ‍ See a need for Bold for your business? Let me know and we can create a custom demo. The first order of business is integrating my Yo! Podcast into Bold. Then, we’ll likely integrate my Show Them course, so you can get interactive answers for your Landing Page queries. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## More cowbell Published: 2025-10-03 URL: https://robhope.com/cowbell Took about 20yrs but I’m finally a laptop sticker boi. I’m definitely going through a phase in life where I’m seeking more wild and wonderful art, people and experiences. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Can a home page be a Landing Page? Published: 2025-09-30 URL: https://robhope.com/hp Simply put, yes. But let’s break it down to fully understand why… There are 3 prerequisites for Landing Pages to be effective: The user “lands up” at the webpage after a marketing effort eg. a Tweet The targeted user is specific and not everyone on Earth eg. Developers The webpage has a single objective for the targeted user eg. Enroll in a course Combining the above would create a classic Landing Page scenario: A Tweet sending a developer to a course Landing Page. Wonderful. Now that we have context on when Landing Pages are most effective, let’s compare the Apple home and product pages. Based on the above requirements, the Apple home page is not a Landing Page as it promotes several products targeting different people: ‍ ‍ ‍ But Apple’s iPhone 15 promotions send users to the iPhone 15 product page and not the home page. Furthermore the webpage hides the main navigation as you scroll focusing the experience purely on a single product. The iPhone 15 product page is a classic example of a Landing Page: ‍ What about One Page websites? Now what happens if Apple bought the domain iphone15.com and the above identical Landing Page sat on that dedicated domain? This is the home page of the iphone15.com domain. This is where Apple send users after their marketing efforts. There is one objective: buy the iPhone 15. The home page is the Landing Page. A dedicated domain with only a single home page promoting a product/service is also known as a One Page website. Fun fact: I have been collecting One Page website references since 2008. I was fascinated with how people where promoting their products/service in such a brilliantly simple and direct way. 8000 One Page websites later I’m still collecting references daily. What about SaaS website home pages? To help get to the bottom of this one, let’s take a look at some SaaS big dogs; Shopify, Stripe and Notion. Taking into account our earlier Landing Page requirements, here is the Shopify home page: ‍ ‍ Is this Shopify home page a Landing Page? The user “lands up” at the webpage after a marketing effort. Shopify send a ton of their marketing to their shopify.com home page. The targeted user is specific and not everyone on Earth. Shopify are targeting someone wanting to start an online store. The webpage has a single objective for the targeted user. Shopify has clear focus in this webpage on a first-time visitor starting a free trial. So technically yes the Shopify home page can be considered a Landing Page. But taking into account their big navigation promotes other areas of the website along with a Log In link – I do not consider this a classic Landing Page, this is a home page. A better Landing Page example would be Shopify promoting how they are a great solution to sell your products linked from Facebook or Instagram – targeting those more-specific audiences: ‍ ‍ Same goes for Stripe, based on the earlier requirements, their home page could be considered a Landing Page but it is targeting multiple user groups with several solutions: ‍ But their Payment Links webpage is a classic Landing Page. It is where their no-code marketing is sent. It contains everything you need to know about creating payment links all in a long-scrolling webpage. The objective for this page is to give Payment Links a go. A clear single objective Landing Page promoting a single product: ‍ And lastly Notion offers up unlimited use-cases covering productivity, collaboration and organization. Their home page narrative is broad but they have Landing Pages tailored to more specific use-cases. Here is their personal use-case Landing Page with the “Write, plan, & get organized in one place. Now free for personal use.” narrative: ‍ ‍ ‍ Also note how they have trimmed down their weighty pricing table to only include the personal pricing tiers on this tailored Landing Page: ‍ ‍ ‍ In summary, the home pages of big SaaS services with multiple use-cases are not Landing Pages. Their subpages located on the same domain domain, targeting more specific use-cases or audiences are Landing Pages. If any of this (text, images or refs) didn’t make sense, please hit me up on Twitter or email – I’m here to help. Also let me know what Landing Page areas you are struggling with and I’ll try my best to point you in the right direction:) — Rob ‍ ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Trading Dark Chocolate with Seth Godin Published: 2025-09-22 URL: https://robhope.com/seth I knew Seth Godin was big on dark chocolate, so I carried a slab of the best from South Africa all the way to Webflow Conf NYC. By pure luck, I bumped into him at the elevator. I pulled it from my top pocket—where it had been waiting all day—and said, “Seth, this is the best dark chocolate from South Africa.” He lit up. “Wow, incredible!” But lightning struck twice. After his talk, as I rushed off to a meeting in Brooklyn, I ran into him again. This time, he reached into his blazer and handed me his own dark chocolate. ps. the best dark chocolate from South Africa is Honest Chocolate (the original 70% one) ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Oceanside, California Published: 2025-09-16 URL: https://robhope.com/california California. Legit good out there. Didn’t take many pics. I talked at least 3 dozen ears off. Ton’s new friends made at Valio Con. Literally not one person there trying to sell you anything. Real ppl looking for connection outside of screen. Parenting. Travel stories. Cooking. Music. We also laughed soo much. ‍Drew Wilson – it was a huge effort from you man, 1000 thank you’s brother. You live in a special place. Too many others to shout-out but need a special one for Demian Borba  for the surfboard hook up – legend. ps. Michael Flarup wrote a solid reflection of Valio Con 2025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## No customers? 5 ways to boost social proof Published: 2025-09-11 URL: https://robhope.com/no-social-proof No customers? Landing Page SOCIAL PROOF is tricky to get right at the start. A bit of chicken ‘n egg 🐥🥚 Here are 5 ideas to help boost Social Proof in brand new Landing Pages: This tutorial was extracted out of the bonus how-to section of my Show Them course. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## What (exactly) is a website Landing Page Published: 2025-07-16 URL: https://robhope.com/what A Landing Page is the webpage where a user “lands up” after marketing efforts. Imagine Airbnb have an Instagram Story promotion saying “Swipe up to win the trip of a lifetime”. You swipe up and land up on the Airbnb competition Landing Page, not the Airbnb website home page. 🚫 airbnb.com ✅ airbnb.com/competition ‍ Another classic example is Apple’s well known product Landing Pages. Imagine the difference in bounce rate (people leaving the webpage) if Apple linked all their iPad mini promotion to their home page: ‍ or the actual iPad mini Landing Page: Landing Pages are effective as users arrive to content perfectly aligned with what they are looking for. If any of this (text, images or refs) didn’t make sense, please hit me up on Twitter or email – I’m here to help. Also let me know what Landing Page areas you are struggling with and I’ll try my best to point you in the right direction:) — Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## My first trip to America — Valio Con! Published: 2025-07-08 URL: https://robhope.com/valiocon Stoked to share I’m speaking at Valio Con in San Diego this Sep 11-14 🌊 This will also be my first trip to the United States. Wild right. Having filmed the Yo! Podcast remotely at the tip of Africa, I cannot believe I’m going to meet so many of my guests IRL like Dann, Rogie, Drew and Pablo — woot! If you’re keen to get involved/surf with me, use the coupon ROB for $500 off (FYI: there are only 200 total tix – this will sell out). ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## What makes a good Landing Page? One goal. Published: 2025-06-17 URL: https://robhope.com/good A good Landing Page has only one goal and all the content within the page is relevant to it. Let’s take a look at the DesignKit Landing Page sitting deep within Rafal Tomal’s main website. Every item within the page relates to the digital product he is trying to sell. Also note how he has hidden his main website navigation to prevent users wondering: ‍ Here are a few other Landing Page goal examples: Submit an email address eg. enter a competition Download a free digital file eg. iPhone Wallpaper Purchase a physical product eg. Book Sign up to a SaaS service eg. Netflix Enquire about a product or service using the provided contact details eg. a wedding photographer with email/phone number Using every element to persuade the visitor to do one thing Stepping into a competition use-case, the goal for the Landing Page is for a user to successfully enter the competition with their details. So the user inputs their email address, hits the CTA (call-to-action) button and booyah they are now in the database. Take a second to imagine how the copy, images and call-to-action buttons would differ on these two Landing Pages: 🚫 Enter our competition + find holiday accommodation + we’re hiring ✅ Enter our competition or how about these two: 🚫 Buy the iPhone 13 + discover the latest Apple TV shows ✅ Buy the iPhone 13 See the beauty of a Landing Page is the single canvas to persuade the visitor to do one thing. And a good Landing Page contains only the elements needed for the visitor to make an inform decision. Without having to ever leave the webpage. Takeaway lesson: Set an goal for your Landing Page. Do you have items within the Landing Page that do not align with your goal? If so, remove them. If any of this (text, images or refs) didn’t make sense, please hit me up on Twitter or email – I’m here to help. Also let me know what Landing Page areas you are struggling with and I’ll try my best to point you in the right direction:) — Rob ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## How I custom-built my online course (tech stack, onboarding, costs, screenshots) Published: 2025-05-29 URL: https://robhope.com/show-them-stack A lot of people ask what platform I use to “run” my Show Them course – the answer? I custom-built it. Why? Because it’s my own corner of the internet, and I want full control over how people experience my work. Plus, building things is fun! This article breaks down the exact tech stack I use – from payments to authentication, video playback, progress tracking, to automated 30-day follow-up emails. It’s not a step-by-step tutorial, but I hope it inspires your own custom build 🙂 ‍ Article contents: User Journey Experience Webflow – CMS, Landing Page Outseta – Authentication, Emails Bold Video – Video Playback, Progress Zapier – Automations, Emails MailerLite – Marketing Emails Lemon Squeezy – Payment Total monthly cost ‍ User Journey Experience From first visit, to payment, to setting a password, to watching their first chapter video. These are all broken down in the screenshots below. If you have a digital product, I’d highly recommend taking screenshots of your onboarding user flow – it can surface so many little (big) issues. 1. User visits ShowThem.com – the Webflow-built and hosted course website: 2. They click the big pink button and unlock access to the course using the Lemon Squeezy payment provider: 3. Upon payment, the success message says they are almost there – there are two emails: A receipt and another to set up account. Note that my email is provided for support. I’ve refined this message a dozen times. Right now, we’re at a sweet spot of minimal support: 4. An email receipt is sent from Lemon Squeezy and a second email is sent from our authenticator platform Outseta, asking them to create a course account. Note how it reuses the first name (Robert) from the payment step, into the greeting: 5. The user clicks the Confirm your account button and is taken to an Outseta-hosted website page to set a strong password: 6. Once they have set a strong password, they are automatically logged into the course and taken to their dashboard. Note how it greets them by first name. Also note the 3 types of Netflix-style lesson states: View (first time), Resume (mid complete), Watched (complete) 7. Clicking on a lesson takes them into the single-lesson view featuring a big central video (hosted with Bold Video) with course pagination below including a chapter complete CTA button: 8. Lastly, note how the top navigation populates if that lesson features bonus visual references or useful resources. Most chapters have them. These are displayed below the video area, further down the page: Ok, that’s pretty much the experience, let’s break down the software costs and why I chose each over others. ‍ Landing Page, CMS: Webflow Primary use: course home (ie. landing page), course progress dashboard, course chapters and all misc webpages like Help, Roadmap etc. Cost: $23/mo (paid annually) tl;dr why Webflow over others? Webflow offer a powerful platform to help build out your ideal website experience for your audience. There are dozens of reasons why I chose Webflow for the course but I’ll narrow it to these top 3: Being able to build/manage the website all within a browser (no software) on any of my 3 computers I switch between. Collaborating with my developer Matt Evans by simply adding him to the project using his email address. The price point: $23 a month for an all-in-one platform for caching/speed, security, content management and quick change deployment. Here are some screenshots of the Webflow UI, starting with the Design editor view. Note how you can edit CMS content within the designer, if needed. Those FAQs are all CMS items: Then here is the neat CMS view, featuring the Visual References collection I mentioned earlier. Note the CMS collections on the left for Lessons, Visual Refs, Resources and FAQs: Lastly, here is the single CMS item edit view. Note how I can easily import content from other CMS categories. This is really useful if I want to mention a Visual Reference or Resource in more than one lesson. Shout-out to Matt Evans who made this Webflow CMS experience a dream to manage. He also used MAST for the CSS foundation and VisualDX for a lot of the JS magic around the site. ‍ Authentication: Outseta Primary use: Authentication for users, creating a paywall to the course content, sending user email updates Cost: $39/mo (paid annually) tl;dr why Outseta over others? Authentication is tricky during the research phase. Once you commit, switching providers is tough. That’s why I took my time, and Outseta stood out with some of the best tech support I’ve seen in two decades online. It’s a great fit for Webflow users, and an underrated bonus is the built-in email marketing and segmentation. You can target students based on actions – such as not creating an account yet or becoming inactive. Here is a view of the activity of my test account. These user logs are incredible for tech support: Here is my automated drip that goes out 1hr after sign up with 5 things to know. Note how it reused first name: And lastly, here is an email broadcast when I tell course customers I’ve added fresh content: ‍ Video CMS/hosting: Bold Video Primary use: Video CMS/management, video hosting, video playback, chapter progress tracking* Cost: $29/mo tl;dr why Bold Video over others? Bold Video is a new startup offering fast, high-quality video playback in a completely unbranded player — perfect for embedding in my Webflow site. All of that is super important to me, and I feel lucky to have known the founder, Marcel, back when I was deep in stack-hunting mode. They’re still in private beta, but let me know if you’d like an invite and I’ll hook you up. Here is a screenshot of the Bold Video single-video edit view: ‍ Automation: Zapier Primary use: automations, follow up emails Cost: $19/mo (paid annually, when sales spike I buy more credits) tl;dr why Zapier over others? Zapier is invaluable for me as a maker who can design and code but prefers to avoid the deep technical stuff. It acts as the glue between my software stack, keeping everything in sync while giving me visibility into each step. Here is an overview of my main course Zap: Sale in Lemon Squeezy, extracts first name and capitalises it (fallback is “Friend”), create Outseta account, send my Slack a ping, add to MailerLite and assign to “paying course customer” group (one level deeper: I use this to remove this user from marketing emails to the general course newsletter), now delay for 30 days and then send a follow up email: Here is that last part zoomed in. After 30 days, a text-only, short email is sent from my Gmail account using their first name. I even have these in my sent items. There is no Zapier branding at all: ‍ Marketing: MailerLite Primary use: non-customer marketing emails and user segmentation Cost: $30/mo (I’ve extracted this number out my bigger subscriber base, based on course customers) tl;dr why MailerLite over others? I have a love-hate relationship with email service providers. But MailerLite’s chat support has been fantastic and probably the primary reason I still use them. What’s neat is I have set things up so that when someone buys my course, or ebook, or any other product I offer, they’re segmented into groups. That way, I can offer targeted coupons, see who’s bought what, and tailor communication accordingly. It’s been super valuable. Important note: I use MailerLite for email to people who have not bought the course and I use Outseta for people who have. So it’s worth noting this part of the course software stack is optional. ‍ Payments: Lemon Squeezy Primary use: taking payments, handling merchant of record Cost: 5% + $0.50c tl;dr why Lemon Squeezy over others? I’ve been using Lemon Squeezy since the beta days and have always been a big fan of the team. So it was a no-brainer to use them for the course. Over the past couple of years, I’ve moved my entire network of digital products from Gumroad to Lemon Squeezy and have no plans to explore alternatives. Here are 3 highlights: They act as Merchant of Record (saving me tons of accounting admin hours) They have a built-in affiliate platform (at no additional cost) The interface, designed by Orman Clark, is simply beautiful. Their design really aligns with how I want my customers experiencing my products. Here is my product list dashboard with the course edit modal open: And here is the order dashboard where I can pull up details like when emails were sent. It’s worth noting that I’ve applied the Lemon Squeezy payment setting to pay the tax on behalf of the user. I clear less but the final amount they pay is always aligned with what I’m marketing. I’m unsure if I’ll keep this, but for now it feels good 🙂 ‍ Total monthly cost: $190 Without getting into too much detail (some payments are annual, some monthly, some based on sales), the approximate total cost of my custom-built course website experience is $190/month. Now would I move to an out-of-the-box course solution if it cost less? Absolutely not. I’m super proud of how this course website and experience came together. Let me know if I missed anything in this visual breakdown. A follow-up article with a deeper technical breakdown and code snippets is on the way. ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Can a Landing Page reuse the main website navigation? Published: 2025-04-15 URL: https://robhope.com/header Sure it can but I would not encourage this. Even Apple’s iconic product Landing Pages all have their main website navigation displayed when you first land: but note how it disappears as you start scrolling: Hiding your main website navigation will prevent a potential customer from wandering. Your Landing Page has only one goal — sending visitors to another page is not it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Preserving my (old) home office Published: 2025-04-14 URL: https://robhope.com/home-office “Rob, what gear did you use to rec your Show Them course and Yo! Podcast?” Made this fun 3-min video below preserving my old home office. As the camera whizzes around the space, I spotlight the gear: I really loved this space but it’s time for my next chapter in a real office. ps. here is a screenshot from the vid of all gear mentioned: ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Home is home. Work is work. Published: 2025-02-01 URL: https://robhope.com/e7a 2025 took an unexpected turn… I bought an office! Feels like the reverse of everyone else but after 20yrs working online – I finally commute to work and man, it’s so good! Home is home. Work is work. Going to take some months to soundproof for filming and customize backdrops but excitement levels are high. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## How to improve SaaS landing page conversions Published: 2024-12-20 URL: https://robhope.com/saas-conversions Paying SaaS conversions are tough 💳 A smart move: capture leads on your SaaS landing page with a free trial or limited service. 📬 But what should your page include to persuade them to try it and share their email? Here are a few tips… This tutorial was extracted out of the bonus how-to section of my Show Them course. ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Show Them has soft launched Published: 2024-12-04 URL: https://robhope.com/soft-launch Quick blog to share I’ve invited all the presale people to create accounts and start experiencing the course. Right now there are 22 videos in the main Core track and a handful of Bonus lessons. I plan to add a new Bonus lesson every 2 weeks for about 6 months. So much to do still but I’m confident this course will become an incredible tool kit to strengthen your Landing Pages. Learn more: showthem.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Side-project motivation vs time Published: 2024-11-14 URL: https://robhope.com/motivation With everything on, I was struggling to find time to produce podcasts (2021/22). A good friend suggested: “just create them when you have time and feel motivated, no one cares if there are gaps”… it felt so good not having this pressure, still working full days on all my stuff… but then I blinked and I hadn’t recorded an ep in 18 MONTHS. If you *really* want to create something, you have to set aside strict time to do it and not wait for motivation or the universe to gift time. Furthermore, and this is a tough pill to swallow, often I could only move the needle (and actually ship) when I said no to paid work and social life. Saying yes to a good gig, would eliminate the chances of a side-project shipping for several months. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Camping at Trouthaven Published: 2024-11-01 URL: https://robhope.com/camping Just got back from a solid work trip in the UK and straight into the good stuff back home. ps. Trouthaven has become quite a reliable spot to see the infamous Cape Eagle Owl. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## The Yo! Podcast soundtrack is on Spotify Published: 2024-04-23 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-podcast-soundtrack ICYMI the Yo! Podcast soundtrack (since 2019) is on Spotify with all the intro/outro gems in a 2hr playlist to work to: →  Yo! Podcast soundtrack on Spotify ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Webflow Conf London talk Published: 2024-02-27 URL: https://robhope.com/webflow-conf-london There was a technical recording issue, so this is a re-enactment of my Webflow Conf London lightning talk (scripted off the salvaged audio) on how to improve your Webflow landing page conversions. We start by trying to understand what your visitor needs to see and read to be persuaded to act — then we integrate the perfect amount of content to achieve the conversion, and discuss why less is always more. Hope you enjoy the presentation! ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Oli’s first twitch Published: 2024-01-29 URL: https://robhope.com/twitch Got my little guy his first rare bird (Abdim’s Stork not found in Cape Town) over the weekend.   Was my 330th bird on my reset Southern Africa life list. Aiming to get around 600 in my lifetime, so we’re kinda half way but the journey is all that matters to me. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Project Graveyard Published: 2023-12-12 URL: https://robhope.com/graveyard It’s ok to fail at something you planned to succeed. I hope this graveyard inspires you to take risks and work on those passion projects.  Every side project I launched, no matter the outcome, provided lessons for the next and in turn helped me quit freelance. ‍ AudioNotes 2017 →  2023‍ Free macOS menu bar app to quickly record and send audio messages. I used it to send landing page feedback when people asked via email and DMs. The response was always super positive hearing my voice over text. More recently though I’ve been sending video feedback with Loom, so no longer needed the app nor wanted to grow it. AudioNotes was acquired by AudioPen in 2023. ‍ Email Love 2019 →  2023 Email resource featuring design inspiration, html templates and newsletter discovery. After quitting freelance and going all in on One Page Love, I had the confidence to apply everything I learnt from a website inspiration gallery into an email inspiration gallery. Leading up to the birth of my son, I decided to focus on less projects to free up time offline. Email Love was acquired by Andrew King in 2023. ‍ Chlst 2020 →  2021 Interactive checklist side-project started with my friend Calvin to go alongside my Landing Page Hot Tips Ebook. Once you completed the book, there were 6 checklists to ensure your landing page was ready to ship. Was quite stoked to nab the chl.st domain for this one. Calvin has now taken over the project and Chlst has rebranded to Interact List. ‍ ‍‍‍Email Love Newsletter Discovery 2019-2021   The dream was to connect someone with a newly found hobby/career with a professional within the niche, delivering exclusive content via email newsletter (removed – debrief) My People aka Yo! Friends 2020-2021 Private supporters club for the Yo! Podcast accessing exclusive behind-the-scenes content and bonus questions (discontinued – debrief) Gvouchers 2020-2020 Gift Voucher webapp to help small businesses with cashflow during Covid. Gvouchers was a free service enabling anyone to sell digital Gift Vouchers to their loyal customers. Upon transaction, a digital Gift Voucher was emailed to the customer, while the funds are deposited directly into the owners PayPal account. The service took no commission. I wanted to try to use my (very limited) development skills during lockdown for good. Think I had around 50 businesses that sold vouchers. Felt good. When businesses went back to work and interest waned, I closed the service down. Wasn’t interest to try turn it into a serious business. Yo! YouTube Show 2018-2019 The Yo! weekly YouTube show (about design, dev, productivity) was a creative outlet for me while learning new skills. I had never used a camera pre-2018 and on 01 Jan 2018 challenged myself to launching the YouTube show I’d want to watch in 30 days no matter what. Still to this day I’ve never been so creatively stimulated than Jan 2018. It was incredible. After 30 episodes I hit burnout and called it a day. Each 5-7 min show took ~40hrs from script →  film →  edit → launch →  promo. The season finale Yo! Halloween was definitely my favorite ep. Yo! Namibia was a fun vlog too. Yo! has now pivoted into the Yo! Podcast. Hustle Panda 2016-2017 Curated startup dot com domains under $1k. Had so much fun with the branding on this one. My cousin Jake illustrated the Panda. Landing up selling the site including all the domains bundled in. Currl 2015-2017 One Page WordPress theme company with my friend Manu. We came to terms WP wasn’t a great solution for ultra simple Single Page websites (without blogs). Landed up closing it all down and giving the domain to a young UK doctor who worked at the NHS. He wanted the acronym-matching Currl.com domain for the Clinical Undergraduate Research and Remote Learning – kind of a weird but wonderful result. Hit Delete 2006-2016 Digital agency that hosted my freelance work. Shut down once I took the leap to work on One Page Love full-time. ThemeCobra 2012-2015 WordPress theme company with my mate D Rock. Sold using Flippa. Pear Hosting 2006-2015 Small hosting company, more to service my freelance clients needing space and domains. The prices were silly cheap. After deciding it wasn’t worth the admin, I didn’t want to “ditch” my loyal clients with one single dodgy hosting company, so manually moved around 200 domains and 50 hosting clients. Took 100s of hours over 18 months. Definitely my biggest business regret in the graveyard. Landing up selling the .com to Pair Networks. Footer Love 2014-2015 Ultra niche collection of unique website footers I curated with my mate D Rock. I coded it up in WordPress and D handing all design. We had such a hoot with the “footer” branding. The side-project was basically an online playground for us with no intention to monetize. It was all for the fun. Full credit to D for bringing it to life with his design skills. You can see he had a great time and his talent shows with the textures, gradients, (shoe) stitches, footprint heart logo and more. We landed up giving the site away once the traffic semi-plateaued. ‍ mmminimal 2011-2014 Blog about minimal design with my mate D Rock (sold – pics soon) res.ponsive.com 2013-2013 Responsive webster tester (sold – pics soon) Rock Sampler 2011-2012 Indie music discovery website, I was a co-founder (closed – pics soon) Rock Lifestyle 2010-2012 Music social network and blog, We got investment and I was a co-founder. Full debrief soon. (closed – pics soon) Design Dosage 2011-2012 Blog about good design (gave away) Bands on Twitter 2009-2012 Curated list of new bands signing up at Twitter. When Twitter was still young I started an acc @BandsToFollow and just tweeted when big bands signed up on the platform. It got 12k+ followers in no time as discovery was so bad. Just dug these up screens from way back machine. Landed up selling the site to a friend, who deleted the account it seems. Case Converter 2008-2011 Simple online text converter I built to help convert poorly edited client copy. The domain was perfect (caseconverter.com) and had around 21k unique a month purely from SEO. Note how the tool didn’t have much SEO baited copy either. But after a few years I stumbled upon Flippa and thought why not put it up for auction as an experiment. Landed up going for $880 and the indie hacking bug officially bit for me. In hindsight I absolutely should have kept this going passively. Modern Optimist 2006-2009 Positive South Africa news portal (closed) CardPanda 2006-2008 Business card inspiration gallery (closed) BoardFlare 2005-2006 Surf, skate, snow board inspiration gallery (closed) CardFlare 2005-2006 Business card inspiration gallery (closed) Man in Suit 2005-2008 Post-hardcore, rock band I played bass for DIJIT 1997-2001 Melodic punk-rock band I played bass for with my good friends Steve and Dunx. We played our first live gig at age 15 in 1997 and had 2 releases (now preserved on Bandcamp). Countless lessons learnt from recording music, designing artwork, production of CDs, being on stage.. you name it. ‍ If you got this far – thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane. I think the common thread here is hundreds (probably thousands) of hours into things I was passionate in exploring. There was so much money left on the table – not doing these things – and solely working for someone else. But what’s the fun in that. Got a fun side-project idea? Ask yourself how small-of-a-version of it can I ship. Then give yourself a no-matter-what timeline to hit publish. This constraint will help get it out the door. Trust me. You are the only one in the way of yourself shipping. Just like I was the only one in the way of myself shipping the above. Step aside. Have fun. You got this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Adobe Enhance Published: 2023-11-03 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-audio Dropping this here in case there are creators who don’t know about Adobe Enhance yet. It’s honestly incredible. Here is a before-after applied to a listener podcast question (sent via Twitter DM voice note) for the Traf Yo! Podcast interview: The free tier is 30 mins of processing at a time, for a max of 1 hour a day. Premium is 4hrs a day and bulk upload. ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## My Virtual Desktop Published: 2023-08-26 URL: https://robhope.com/desktop Maybe helpful to someone… a big productivity/focus hack I did recently, was create a very simple Virtual Desktop section in my Notion for all my “currently sorting” stuff. My machine desktop is blank/clear These misc items are available on my 3 devices (Mac Studio, MBAir, iPhone) all within Notion app Why not iCloud/Drive/Dropbox? Already have Notion installed, prefer their pages for storage/screenshots & Notion search is so damn good IMO 🔍 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Break your rut with a small promise Published: 2023-08-24 URL: https://robhope.com/promise Working solo online, the only way I can truly move the needle is if I’m held accountable. Promising 100 Landing Page Hot Tip Tweets in 100 days, resulted in an Ebook, resulting in several workshops and talks around the world. I remember being on a weekend away, somewhere inland South Africa and sitting stuck refining tip 40-something. I spent 3hrs on 3 sentences. But got it done. If you are reading this, I know you know this feeling. “I’ll just skip it.” “I’ll just do it tomorrow.” If I skipped that Tweet. I would have done it again. And again. Now I’ve promised a weekly newsletter. 27 in a row so far. No dips. Even in difficult weeks 🍼 Results are showing: more sponsor revenue, more submissions/MRR on One Page Love, more community interaction and it’s forced me to build better systems to help get them out. These systems don’t get built without the promise. Respect to anyone who can do it silently, but personally without making the promise and being held accountable… I overthink, stall and don’t ship. Feeling stuck? Start with a small promise, do whatever it takes to deliver and you will start to see the needle move. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Forty Published: 2023-08-01 URL: https://robhope.com/forty Forty, not out! Spent the morning introducing Oli to Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck and a few of my favs. Photo by Meg Stander ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Meet Oliver Published: 2023-06-14 URL: https://robhope.com/oliver Meet my son, Oliver Robert Hope aka Oli. Born Sunday, 11 June 2023 at 18h53 weighing in at 3.86kg and 56cm tall. Lots to share about how his birth officially kicks off the 14th generation of “Robert Hope’s” dating back to the 1600’s… but for now all I want to say is Oli and his mom are happy and healthy. ps. check out his scans over the 40 week pregnancy ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## AudioNot.es was acquired by AudioPen Published: 2023-05-23 URL: https://robhope.com/audionotes AudioNot.es is now owned by Louis Pereira and AudioPen. AudioPen is a brilliant new app to help convert messy thoughts (via audio) into clear text. The original AudioNotes macOS app has been shelved and all audio data has been deleted. Will post a solid debrief on this fun project one day. So long, here is the original 2017 PH launch 🙂 ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Email Love has a new home Published: 2023-04-23 URL: https://robhope.com/eml-sold I’ve sold Email Love (EML) to my good kiwi friend Andrew King. Andy had his own email inspiration gallery (that will merge into EML) and has 10yrs experience designing, coding, & curating emails. He is undoubtably the right person to take EML to the next level. Man, I had fun building the site features… but ultimately I had to let it go. Here is a quick reflection on why: 1 – Competition When I first started planning EML, Really Good Emails had a ton of room for improvement. As soon as I started working in public, they really got going and levelled the site up into an incredible resource for email inspiration. I have zero energy to try make something better. Kudos to them. 2 – Motivation Its not this black & white, and more intwined with the 3rd point, but curating email is nowhere near the top of the things I could/want to do in my work day. I have unlimited motivation curating One Pagers – I honestly love it 14yrs in – and I really enjoy getting creative with the Yo! Podcast (audio and video). 3 – Time I’ve got a little boy arriving in June (f me that’s next month) and I’m looking to spend way less time online. Like *way* less for at least a year. Right now One Page Love is doing great but I still have so much to do there. Every second into EML was a second not improving OPL or growing the Yo! Podcast (which I really want to do). Ok, think that’s just about it. A huge thanks if you ever shared the love about Email Love or dropped me a kind message. I’m super proud of it, hence why I could only sell it to a friend I trust will take it to a good place. You got this Andy! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## A moment with Rob Hopkins Published: 2023-04-08 URL: https://robhope.com/hopkins Been sorting out my old iMac files as I’m selling the machine for a recent Mac Studio upgrade. Stumbled upon this hilarious screenshot of an email exchange I had with a Rob Hopkins. My wife forgot to add the e at the end of my surname (Hope) in my email address, when sending our Airbnb trip details. Rob Hopkins got it and kindly forwarded it back to me: Brought such a smile to my face, I’m so glad I preserved this moment. A few added thoughts at this time in my life: The 27″ late-2015 iMac was and still is an incredible machine. It was a total pleasure to use for 8 years. The only reason I’m upgrading is the need for more CPU power to edit and export video faster. For design and development it’s still excellent. I should have made a faster call on if I should stick with the Hey.com email provider. I spent too long debating and once I reverted back to Gmail, I had lost months of email exchanges within the platform. Today, this still stings me with the odd conversation I can’t recall easily in Gmail search. Try not bury these fun moments multiple folders deep on old computers or drives. Upload them in Dropbox in a ‘Moments’ folder, drag them into Notion in a ‘Moments’ page or even blog them like this. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Deeper Published: 2023-02-12 URL: https://robhope.com/deeper Back in the day I would have said I should have taken off deeper. But nearing 40 I’ll take it:) Definitely been enjoying more of what each day brings. We have our issues down here but are lucky buggers to not live in a place of real war or natural disasters. 🎥 Chris Bond ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## A new chapter Published: 2022-12-28 URL: https://robhope.com/boy Wow, where to start. Actually let’s just get right into it… Klaud and I are expecting a baby boy in June 2023 (update: he is here). Here are some extracts from the 8, 13 and 15 week scans. It’s all quite mind boggling to conceptualize how fast things are growing but we are really starting to enjoy the journey now that the gynae is stoked. ‍ Feb update – 22 week foot and face: March update – 28 week snug close up on face with hand on side: ‍ ‍ April update – 32/33 week kinda grumpy but healthy boi: June update – meet Oliver. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## A short story (of hesitation) behind the yo.fm domain Published: 2022-12-27 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-fm Behind every domain acquisition announcement is always a lot of doubt. Let’s peel back the layers a bit. I’m a huge advocate for dot com domains and spent small fortunes on emaillove.com, uxlove.com and lovecurated.com. No regrets. So naturally I first tried to grab the yopodcast dot com domain. Taken. And now redirected to the GoDaddy domain marketplace. Meh. Enter a bid starting at $20 and wait? Or buy-it-now for $120. Worth it. Paid full. 60 days and a refund later, the GoDaddy team simply could not get hold the domain owner. Fast forward a few dozen alternative domain searches, eliminating everything that didn’t sing, I landed up at yo.fm – available for $643.50 and renews at $110/year. Ouch! At this point you question everything. You dive into play stats. You search the name of podcast to see if it’s even ranking. “The podcast isn’t even monetized…” “I haven’t released an episode in over a year..” “Dot FM domains?… will people think this is a radio station?” The doubt really starts to compound. Ultimately, I really enjoy speaking to creators and the have a lot of fun with the show, even if I bleed a little with each edit. It’s also something people keep reminding me I’m really good at and I know it’s a smart move for my online journey. This all contributed to my gut saying yes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Announcing Lemon Squeezy as the exclusive 2023 Yo! Podcast sponsor Published: 2022-12-24 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-ls Lemon Squeezy has locked in an exclusive Yo! Podcast sponsorship deal with 10 episodes in 2023. I use Lemon Squeezy as my primary payment provider for the entire Love Curated network and our audiences pair so well, so the collaboration is perfect. My three big draws to Lemon Squeezy are: The team – all industry pros and a great bunch. The UI design – simply beautiful. Merchant of Record – they handle tax compliance (especially needed in the EU). I’m hugely grateful to have them as a supporter for a full year and they have given me full creative control to have a blast with the show. Visit Lemon Squeezy → ps. tell them I sent you;) ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Ultra-Trail Cape Town 2022 Published: 2022-11-27 URL: https://robhope.com/utct Having previously raced UTD (DJ21) earlier this year, I naively decided to crank up the goals and enter UTCT (TM35) this year. It was brutal. So for the 35KM race we start and finish at Gardens Rugby club: The total ascent is just under 2,000m: Painful laughter after climbing to Blockhouse More pics to follow, just dropping these here as a reminder to myself. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## We bought a plot Published: 2022-11-23 URL: https://robhope.com/romansbaai An incredibly long story short, Klaud and I bought a plot in the Romansbaai eco-estate, just outside Gansbaai in the Western Cape. It’s about 2h20 South from where we live in Cape Town, South Africa. We’ve been looking for “our next chapter” and were previously set on relocating to Hoekwil (inland Wilderness) up the East Coast. After 18 months of scouting places and a failed plot offer, the stars realigned to Romansbaai. With Romansbaai being way closer to Cape Town (2hrs) than Hoekwil (5hrs), we have decided to stay in the City and treat this as a second property and holiday and rental investment.Right now I can’t afford to build anything, literally not a brick, but this has given me incredible drive and direction working online again. I can’t wait to document building our dream place from scratch too. With Romansbaai being way closer to Cape Town (2hrs) than Hoekwil (5hrs), we have bold text to stay in the City and treat this as a italic text and holiday and rental investment. Right now I can’t afford to build anything, literally not a brick, but this has given me incredible drive and direction working online again. I can’t wait to document building our dream place from scratch too. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Is Pinterest worth investing in as a content creator? Published: 2022-10-27 URL: https://robhope.com/opl-pinterest As of October 2022, the One Page Love Pinterest account gets 3,473 website visits per month from 1.6m pin impressions, seen by 660k unique pinners. Here is what our long-scrolling One Page websites look like as pins: For a bit more context, we have 20.7k Pinterest followers and post ~2 pins per day. Each pin has a title, custom review text (by me), a long-scrolling screenshot and link back to the review: The real kicker is that posting to Pinterest is fully automated via a custom RSS feed that extracts all our existing efforts. So based on our 3k website visits per month via full automation, I’d recommend setting up a Pinterest account (via RSS) if you have a niche resource with good visuals in your content ✅ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## How I made my first side-product Dollar online Published: 2022-10-19 URL: https://robhope.com/dollar Recently got interviewed by My First Dollar Online who of course asked the burning question. It was fun to dig up the old memories. (I had made a few dirty dollars through Google Adsense but this was my first real first dollar made online) Back in 2008, freelance clients used to send me ALL CAPS copy to integrate into their websites. Frustrated at the noisy, sluggish, ad-layered online solutions out there to convert case, I bought caseconverter.com and built a minimal, nippy One Page web app. I didn’t know how to code other than HTML, so ask my dev friend Nic to help with the PHP code. I paid him ~$20 for 2hrs work. The result was exactly what I needed back then: Click image to open up higher resolution 3 years of use later, I was intrigued by a marketplace called Flippa where you could sell your side projects. Case converting also started to become more native in apps like Word, macOS, etc. – so I thought let’s try this out and put it up for sale with no reserve. The site had zero revenue and 21k visits per month all through organic search. After 2 weeks I was flabbergasted to witness a last-minute bidding war that landed $805 USD – there was no going back to freelance after this. What a rush! How did you make your first Dollar online? Lemme know on Twitter or hello@robhope.com ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Married Published: 2022-09-12 URL: https://robhope.com/klaud After dating for 13 years, Klaud and I decided to make things official! We also decided to avoid the headache of planning a big wedding. Instead, we used the money towards paying more into our Romansbaai plot bond and go on a dream trip to Portugal & Spain. On Saturday 10 September 2022 we had a wedding officiant (Neil) come to our Lakeside home and, along with my mom and dad as witnesses, marry us. It was lovely and took about 20 mins. Us 5 then drank bubbles (non alcoholic bubbles for my naughty parents) and shared heartfelt stories of when they were once married (in Knysna) back in the day. The next day we celebrated our vows with only a handful of close family at the beautiful Casa Labia in Muizenberg, 5 mins from our home. The venue also overlooks the waves I spent most of my youth surfing. All photography by Meg Stander unless stipulated. My parents My new sisters (and nieces) A re-enactment for the nieces, of course (pic by Mark Pearce) It was perfect. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Ultra-Trail Drakensberg 2022 Published: 2022-04-28 URL: https://robhope.com/utd The Drakensberg Rockjumper Run (DRJ21) was my first trail race ever. The route is 21km in length with 990m of vertical climb and occupies an altitude window between 1,500m and 1,960m. This post is far from complete but a reminder to myself I need to add photos to it… ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Love Curated dot com Published: 2021-12-24 URL: https://robhope.com/lc-parenting Loads to share soon but the tl;dr is I’ve finally decided to clean up the “love” website estate (3 sites now) and house them under an official parent brand called Love Curated. In the past it’s also been a mishmash of income and expenses out my personal accounts so wanted to create structure going into 2022. So I’ve secured the lovecurated.com domain and @lovecurated Twitter handle. Paid WAY too much for the domain but TBH I’ve spent years brainstorming names for this play and Love Curated really sings for me. To be updated soon. Excited. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Black Friday 2021 LPHT Experiment Results Published: 2021-11-30 URL: https://robhope.com/lpht-bf2021 For Black Friday 2021 I wanted to try something different… To say thanks to my top Ebook affiliates (all legends!) I wanted to give them 50% of the Black Friday sale price. The results are at the bottom but first a little context on what the deal looked like and how it was launched: Deal context Launch Tweet Results BF 2021 Deal Context Using the links under each affiliate, the Ebook purchaser could support a creator/friend they admire with 50% of the $20 Black Friday sale price. So they get $10, I get $10 ❤️ That’s only $20 (normally $49 – saving 60%) for 100 actionable Landing Page Hot Tips in Ebook, Kindle, Audiobook, Notion formats including bonus pre-launch checklists. The deal page was on the URL robhope.com/bf2021 and looked like this: Clicking a red button would take the user to the Gumroad product page with the Black Friday 60% discount actioned plus the relevant affiliate code applied. BF 2021 Launch Tweet Instead of competing with the masses on actual Black Friday, I dropped this Tweet on Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 4PM Central Africa Time, 9AM Eastern Time: Here are the Tweet analytics up until end Cyber Monday, 30 November 2021: BF 2021 Results Here are the experiment results up until end Cyber Monday, 30 November 2021: 📊 143 sales📬 $3,228 rev ❤️ 143 new friends with Hot Tips🙏 $1,614 to my top affiliates A huge thanks to everyone involved and to everyone who spread the word, very happy with the experiment 🙂 Interesting addition 10 days later: 3 of the 4 “Hot Tips” Ebook refunds this year have been since the deal. “I expected a much better ebook” “I was expecting 18x pages of content that delved deep” Got to be tough in this online game but also remember refunds are just part of process. So if you ever get a refund, remember it simply wasn’t for them. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Discontinuing Email Newsletter Discovery Published: 2021-09-20 URL: https://robhope.com/eml-nd I’ve removed the entire Newsletter Discovery section on Email Love and refunded all the publications that paid to be there. After hundreds of hours (and $) trying to get this right, I came to the reality Newsletter Discovery is a problem I’m no longer passionate about solving in my life. For some background context the dream was to connect someone with a newly found hobby/career with a professional within the niche, delivering exclusive content via email newsletter. The Newsletter Discovery section was launched in 2019 and was received well: This post-mortem debrief really helps me document and learn from the failed experiment but I’m hoping there is something in here to save you time on a related project. Here are 4 takeaways that ultimately led to me moving on: 1. Blogs and Newsletters are merging and it’s confusing This sounds so obvious but trust me, after inspecting 1000’s of “newsletters”, it was a huge breakthrough to discover there are actually two different types: Website-first newsletters – the content is published first online, then delivered to inboxes to subscribers wanting to be notified of the latest content. These newsletters often contain snippets of longer pieces, where you click to read more. A good reference to a website-first newsletter is Arch Daily: Newsletter-first newsletters – the full content is exclusive to newsletter subscribers and only readable via inbox. No clicking to read more. These are often personal digests or curated newsletters. A good reference to a newsletter-first newsletter is Trends.vc by Dru Riley: Only after a couple of years confusing the two, I realized the real value of email newsletters was in the latter and the type I was now after curating. Enter Substack. Substack has really blurred these two and I personally feel the exclusively (read delight) of an email newsletter is diluted when it is blogged first and shared on social media for anyone to read. Substack has really helped people share their voice but I feel they are facilitating a noisier inbox. 9/10 Email Love newsletter submissions were Substack publications wanting help with distribution. Some are brilliant but the majority are rants within a niche and somehow I became a part of promoting this. This was eating away at me slowly. 2. You cannot outsource without good data to input My goal for the Newsletter Discovery section was to position myself against the other discovery websites with an uncluttered newsletter profile design, clear CTA buttons, unique written overview (good for SEO too) and a transparent preview of the actual newsletter. This is exactly what I’d want when discovering newsletters: After hitting dips several times questioning point #1 I hired a friend to help speed up publishing by writing reviews and adding screenshots. I built a brilliant system to capture newsletter screenshots from a preview URL, but I discovered preview URLs are scarce if you are not subscribed. Especially for newsletter-first publications, the ones I wanted to feature. This led me down a road of subscribing to 100’s of publications just to capture 1 edition each. I had created a severe bottleneck, waiting for editions to arrive hoping for read-online links. A nightmare system that’s difficult to scale and ultimately broken to outsource. 3. Paid-for curation needs high leverage to work A paradox of sorts but something I’ve got right on One Page Love because I have the leverage (traffic) in the exchange. You submit your website for free, if I think it is a good fit for the community, I send through a payment link to be featured. Once paid I continue to inspect, review and feature your website. You then receive a ton of traffic and exposure. Win win. With Email Love there was definitely demand for Newsletter Discovery (read distribution), I was getting at least 1 submission per day (for years). But there was little leverage to negotiate a decent price as traffic is currently low compared to One Page Love. I experimented with several pricing points from $10/year subscription, $20/year subscription, $29 lifetime, $49 lifetime, $10 for 12 months, $20 for 12 months… but learnt the majority of publishers with an un-monetized newsletter could not justify paying much at all. I spent days speaking to publishers and even made a knowledge base extracted from the FAQs. 4. When passion is lost, it’s time to move on Sidestep to One Page websites, I’m 13 years in and still excited when I get new submissions on One Page Love. UX Love is now in the pipeline and a topic I’m a lot more passionate about than newsletters. In a final attempt to make Newsletter Discovery work my next step was to pivot to a listicle format within niches. Here are some examples I was curating: 10 founder newsletters failing forward as they build in public 5 typography newsletters to discover new fonts 7 market analysis newsletters to stay on top of business trends The plan was to kick off Twitter threads introduced by my favorites (so adding value first) while asking others what their favorites were within the niches.  I’ve seen this work and bet it would have surfaced brilliant newsletters but at the end of the day this final play would have taken 100’s more hours. Truth is I’m trying to optimize my time online on subjects that excite me. And here I was encouraging Newsletter Discovery when 99% of my personal email newsletters are sent to their death via my Gmail filters. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Buying Happiness Published: 2021-09-09 URL: https://robhope.com/happiness I’m super stubborn with certain things. I won’t blink to pay for a pricey item that improves my work productivity but I will sit with old surf gear for years. Surfing brings me so much joy and it’s a brilliant escape from working online. It’s honestly invaluable to my quality of life. Recently, after a few pep talks from friends, I splashed out on a new wetsuit and this awesome Rocket Wide Al Merrick board: Literally one surf in, I was surfing better and felt like a completely different person. The board is really forgiving when you bog rail and holds a ton of drive when you need it. Absolutely everything about this purchase made surfing more enjoyable. Yes, happiness is temporary but this exchange for money changed everything in a positive way. I need to be less stubborn on buying gear for activities that enrich my life. This week I got to take it for a spin at one of my favorite waves Elands Bay (West Coast, South Africa) and it was a blast: Thanks John Wilkinson for the pics! ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## The Martial, the Badger and the Secretary General Published: 2021-06-18 URL: https://robhope.com/secretary Last Sunday heading back solo to Cape Town from up the coast, I hit a dirt road detour just after Swellendam (down toward Infanta) to try to see a Secretary Bird. For a little context, on my recently reset SA bird list, this bugger has been eluding me. Gotta be 2 years trying now. Maybe 3. So I’m many many km down, totally out of reception and pass “an area” that just feels right. I park the Duster on an embankment and start scanning the hills with my binoculars. All of a sudden about 30 Helmeted Guineafowl hurl out of a field, screeching. What’s flushing them? Quickly lowered by binoculars, to take a faster 360 degree scan, I catch a juvenile Martial Eagle nearing the field. Raising my binos again, I lock in tight watching it soar. Absolutely majestic. All of a sudden it missiles down towards the same field and SMASHES a Denham’s Bustard right before my eyes. Two nearby Cape Crow‘s go mental and repeatedly scream “BLOODY MURDER” while the Martial simply sits firm on the Bustard, waiting for it to die. Shortly after I hear a 3rd crow screeching, except this time behind me. I spin around to find ANOTHER juvenile Martial Eagle gliding in the background. As I spin back to return to the murder scene I realize there is literally no one in sight. Not even a farm house in view. The hair on my neck stands up. I even start shaking a little from adrenalin. After a few more minutes locked in on the sitting Martial – and just as I thought my luck could not get any better – a… wait for it… a freaking Honey Badger came to take a look. The Martial Eagle raises it’s wings while sitting firm on the Bustard. The Badger raises it’s tail but then simply hobbles on past. It all happened up on a hill and I unfortunately had no long lens camera to capture it. Hence the reason for this blog post to preserve the moment. 1km drive on were no less than 30 Cape Vultures circling and then 1km past were these two magnificent Secretary Birds feeding in perfect light. Years of trying to see these two and wow they delivered. Taken with my iPhone through my Nikon Monarchs ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Discontinuing the Yo! Podcast supporters club Published: 2021-05-21 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-club Early in 2021 I discontinued the “My People” aka “Yo! Friends” podcast supporters club and cancelled the recurring subscriptions. For context the pay-what-you-want supporters club offered bonus questions plus fun behind-the-scenes podcast content like these research notes for The Couldwells episode: It was a healthy experiment for me as I got to interact with wonderfully supportive people but also learn a lot about myself. Here are my 3 main takeaways reflecting on it: 1. Subscriptions vs Freedom The income vs the pressure to consistently interview new Yo! Podcast guests was not worth it for me. For better context, the Yo! Podcast is one of my many side-projects and the club was only earning around $500 ARR. Not a lot but covering podcast costs and growing slowly. I’m fully aware I don’t owe anyone an episode on any timeline but having people pay – on subscription – made me feel considerable pressure to deliver. This could be very different for you but for me: freedom > small subscription income. 2. Monetization vs Creativity You don’t have to monetize your every side project. This sounds like a stretch but Yo! has been my creative outlet (since YouTube days) and pressure chomps away at my creativity. This is also the reason I’m not ready to take podcast sponsors despite the requests. I have full creative control to rock ‘n roll. 2023 update: Lemon Squeezy has locked in a new sponsorship package (10 eps in 2023) and granted me full creative control – read more. 3. Is hiding bonus content a smart play? It’s always beneficial to reflect on hard work. Sharing what it took to create a Yo! Podcast episode was both healthy for me and interesting for listeners. But I was sharing this to ~30 people vs the 1000 that listen to each episode… Additionally, orchestrating the bonus question with the guest was always awkward. I’d either extract it mid-interview or ask it once the interview was finished. I’m a flow guy and neither of these felt right. Here is the Derek Sivers bonus question about good vs bad judgement extracted for club members only. The interview still came out great but should this content be held back? So what happened to the club content? The behind-the-scenes content and bonus questions now live on the episode pages below the topic link blocks. Here are the quick access links to them: MDS The Couldwells Oliur Derek Sivers Steve Schoger Jess Eddy John O’Nolan @AJLKN You would have noticed most of the takeaways above are based on feel and not metrics. I’m starting to learn after a decade of side-projects online, my gut is where and how I making most of best decisions. Hope you got a little takeaway for your next side project:) ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## What happened to the Yo! design/dev show from 2018? Published: 2021-03-16 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-s1 Yo! started as an experimental YouTube show covering design and development news including inspiration, laughs, beats and more. The show has evolved into the Yo! Podcast. Here are the 30 episodes forming Season One: Yo! S1 Credits Season 1 Music Credits 🔥 Yo! Halloween Season 1 Finale Yo! Announcement Seasons announcement and how-to Aeropress Yo! S1 E28 Win a Yo-Yo, GitHub Actions, Doodle Addicts, CSS-Only Parallax Scrolling Yo! S1 E27 Framer X, Gutenberg Stats, Design Systems, Augmented Reality Yo! S1 E26 Typography Resources, Generative Artistry, Free Signature Font, Productivity Apps Yo! S1 E25 Free UX Sketch Pack, Picular Color Schemer, Framer X Drawing Yo! S1 E24 Ui Goodies, Books for Designers, APIs with Laravel, Flexbox Alignments Yo! S1 E23 Free Vector Icons, The Doodle Library, CSS Stack Game, Streamline Icons v3 Yo! S1 E22 Font Memory Game, Scrolling Gradients, Epicurrence is back! Yo! S1 E21 Digital Design Tools, Gutenberg Update, Augmented Reality 🔥 Yo! Namibia Had to drop everything to chase a massive West swell hitting Namibia Yo! S1 E20 Dribbble Hiring Platform, Free Instagram Stories Kit Yo! S1 E19 World Cup Kit Designs, Google Analytics Competitor, AR Business Cards Yo! S1 E18 UI Design Trends, Whimsical Wireframes, Github Acquisition Yo! S1 E17 Scratch n Sniff Stamps, Dank Mono Coding Font, Cool Backgrounds Yo! S1 E16 Adobe XD Free, FF59 Blocks Notifications, Interface Lovers Yo! S1 E15 Sketch 50 Bug, Bulma CSS, Google Material Theming Yo! S1 E14 Francine Horror Story, DuoTones, 2000 Free Flat Icons, .App Domain Launch Yo! S1 E13 Design App Shortcuts, Record Label Logos, UI Faces, Google Grasshopper Yo! S1 E12 Gmail Redesign, Free JavaScript Course, Mobile UI Inspiration Yo! S1 E11 Free LGBT Icons, Dieter Rams Doccy, macOS UI Library Kit, Instagram Guideline Yo! S1 E10 Braille Fonts, Win Nerdy Cards, Coke’s 3D Billboard, Webflow eCommerce Yo! S1 E9 Sketch for Windows, 300 Free Icons, 2018 State of Email Yo! S1 E8 Variable Fonts, Free Icons, Sketch in Adobe XD 6, New Productivity Section Yo! S1 E7 Failed “Vlog” Attempt, Vertical $10 Note, Google’s Mobile UI Framework Yo! S1 E6 Conversational UI, Sketch Prototyping, CSS Puns, @AJLKN Identity Revealed Yo! S1 E5 Free CSS Variables Course, Design Decisions, 500 Mockups for Sketch Yo! S1 E4 Worlds Blackest Black, Captcha Fail Stats, Techno Timelapse, Tooltip JS Library Yo! S1 E3 Design Trends 2018, Cheapass Parallax, PixelSnap, Yo! Inspiration, Lisa Tegtmeier Yo! S1 E2 Free iOS11 UI Kit, SVG Background Generator, Flexbox Course, Rogie King Yo! S1 E1 Dark Scheme for Sketch, Bootstrap 4, Gutenberg v2, Epicurrence, Kim Goulbourne ‍ ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## A disposable camera selfie with Fat Mike Published: 2021-02-15 URL: https://robhope.com/fluke Digging up old photos and found this fluke. Taken 17yrs ago and Fat Mike was exactly my age (37) then. Still cant believe he got this right among all the chaos with a R100 ($8) film camera 🤳 ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Not seeing an Osprey Published: 2021-01-06 URL: https://robhope.com/trying Birding is lame right? Resetting my local SA bird list was one of the best things I’ve done in recent years. I’m currently on 281 and hoping to get to around 600 in my lifetime. Truth is, if I don’t get near that it’s ok. What non-birders don’t realize is seeing a sought-after bird is a fraction of the fun. It’s all about the adventure trying. It gets us researching and learning. It gets us planning and traveling. It gets us outside and exercising. It get us together with old friends, sharing stories of recent twitches. There are so many similarities to chasing waves that it’s no surprise so many surfers appreciate birding too. Here I am trying to see an Osprey in Stanford. We didn’t see it but it was awesome trying. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## My workspace is really coming together Published: 2020-12-08 URL: https://robhope.com/office This is where it gets done friends. Every item on my shelves has a story. A simple glance instantly tops up my inspiration and gets me motivated to create more memories through hard work. I am the only one going to make it happen and I am the only one standing in my way. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Yo! Podcast Artwork Illustrations Published: 2020-10-21 URL: https://robhope.com/yo-artwork There are two main problems I find with creating podcast episode artwork and form the two parts of this case-study: Standing out in a sea of podcast episode covers within streaming platforms Incorporating mixed guest imagery into a consistent square cover design Part One: Standing out To set the baseline of a perfect image, here is the photo Derek Sivers sent for his episode. Note how the image crops on the shoulders, featuring a ton of whitespace to the side. The background has no distracting element but also a great color ie. not white: Problem: How do I create a Yo! Podcast cover design that is consistent between episodes? Solution: Create a reusable template. Here is my typeset (Sofia Pro) and logo template designed in Photoshop. As simple as this looks, it took me hours to get here. I dig it: Integrating the text with the image, with generous whitespace, was just breezy vs the others. I’m a self-taught designer so not sure the rule here but tried to keep the text away from eyes and not chop off the top of their head:) The result: Problem: Note the light meta text (Yo! Podcast #010) getting lost in the light background. Solution: Add a duotone overlay on the image (or a dark opacity overlay). For consistency this red is derived from the red I use on most of my projects (Yo!, One Page Love, Email Love). The result: This duotone aesthetic really helps the Yo! Podcast stand out among the episode masses: Ok, so I’m stoked with how these look. But as you can see from the results above, it uses the same image of Adam Watham as he sends everyone. I want to further experiment with a unique illustration style to make the covers truly unique. Part Two: Custom Illustrations For this task I used the Steve Schoger image he sent, as it was a more difficult one to incorporate, so wanted to see the difference an illustration would make. Here is Steve’s image he sent: .. and here is Steve’s final episode artwork: The orientation (square) wasn’t as convenient as Derek’s (horizontal) but made it work by adding some fake blurred background elements to the left. These make the image look more real but take way more time (via failed experimenting) than I’d like to admit. For further context, here are examples of the mix of images I’ve been sent: Problem: Inconsistent image angles, inconsistent color grades, difficult crop, background objects clashes with text. Proposed Solution: Illustrated character portraits. So I took to Fiverr to outsource $5 designs from 6 different designers using the same brief. The results are fascinating! The Fiverr Brief Hello from South Africa! I’m after a face/portrait sketch to include in my Podcast artwork. My problem is artwork design consistency and I’m considering a sketch per episode. This route could work better than random images they send. I’ve attached some images for references. The image to sketch is Steve. I would integrate your work into my Photoshop duo-tone artboard afterwards. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Rob Designer A – @herubalax Designer B – @ontavontav Bonus cover concept they sent: Designer C – @nexoarts Designer D – @vectorbali Designer E – @nexoarts Bonus cover concept they sent: Designer F – @yudhidarwan Designer G – @psycomedy It’s so fascinating how unique each is! All of these look different within my artwork template but here is the result of the last one for an example: .. and here is Steve’s current artwork again to compare: Conclusion So yeah, here we are… I don’t love em… I don’t hate em. The photo might be better. What do you think? Hit me up on email or Twitter with some feedback, thoughts, ideas… I’m all ears. Hope you enjoyed a peak behind-the-scenes on the way my mind works:) ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Being a tourist in your own country Published: 2020-09-21 URL: https://robhope.com/gondwana Klaud and I were meant to be cycling around Tuscany right now but we are alive and well so really can’t complain! With our leave we decided to be tourists in our own country (South Africa) starting at Gondwana game reserve. Damn it was rad to see animals again but also incredible to be offline after months of hard work. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## 100 Tweet Thread Published: 2020-09-03 URL: https://robhope.com/thread Today marks the end of a monster 100 Tweet thread (and email drip) featuring micro Landing Page tips over the past 100 days: It was quite a wild ride for me with some difficult moments, especially working away on weekends. But ultimately lead to an Ebook I’m proud of and something I honestly never expected before starting this. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Don’t be the victim Published: 2020-02-16 URL: https://robhope.com/victim While growing up Steve and I always used to quote this mantra “Don’t be the victim”. I love it. So short. So direct. When I sometimes share it with other people in a pickle, I get the death stare 9/10 times. Ha! It’s so difficult to accept. So there I was today feeling sorry for myself getting skunked on a surf mission, when all I gave myself was a 3hr window out a full week of surf in Cape Town. What a little bitch. Spent 10yrs designing my life online so I don’t have to be a Sunday morning “weekend warrior” surfer. Time to be better. Don’t be the victim. Surfing HT’s in Mentawai ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## The 2008 moment I thought up One Page Love Published: 2020-02-02 URL: https://robhope.com/opl-moment Aside: I’m so glad I preserved this and want to encourage you to do the same for motivation. Each side-project I have has a Journey folder I quickly drop screenshots of stats, Tweets and comms into. 14 March 2008 – Idea The name was based off CSS Mania and a niche Moveable Type website collection 20 March 2008 – Soft Launch 31 March 2008 – Launch And finally here the 2008 design of One Page Love o_0 ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Back from surfing Mentawai Published: 2019-11-14 URL: https://robhope.com/vhs Back to reality after 11 days completely offline in the Mentawai, Indonesia. What an experience surfing the waves I’ve grown up watching as far back as crusty VHS. We managed to nab 24 surfs, scoring the majority of the spots uncrowded and pretty damn good. Hugely grateful to be in the position to do this and got the offline reset I was after. A huge takeaway was how we’ve lost our way with our mobile phones. I’m massively guilty of this but we also don’t have to be productive all the time either. It’s time to put that phone down and be more present. Shout-out to the legendary crew of frothers who where all shredding. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## “A tale from Witzenhausen” WCEU 2019 Talk Published: 2019-06-23 URL: https://robhope.com/wceu In the light of the WordCamp event being held in Germany, I decided to adapt my talk into a tale about Yannick from the quaint town of Witzenhausen – hope you enjoy the story! Full article + slides → ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Getting back into birding Published: 2019-04-10 URL: https://robhope.com/birding Been incredible getting back into Birding in my 30s. It’s difficult to describe but all your senses are fully dialed up when hiking. I also get the proper reset I need before returning to the matrix 👾 ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## How I negotiated the $5k Email Love dot com domain Published: 2019-01-28 URL: https://robhope.com/eml-domain Hope these tips help save you some cake when hard-balling that perfect domain. Man, the squatting game is diiirty – just remember to keep your cool! ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Yo! Halloween (YouTube finale) Published: 2018-10-31 URL: https://robhope.com/halloween Wow, what a rollercoaster – I blinked and we are 30 episodes on YouTube later! Yo! Season 1 episode list → ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Fractured my elbow… Published: 2018-10-08 URL: https://robhope.com/elbow Fractured my elbow chopping wood… safe to say the Internet is where I belong. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Yo! Namibia Published: 2018-07-05 URL: https://robhope.com/namibia Had to drop everything to chase a massive West swell hitting Namibia. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## 3 Lessons Growing One Page Love from Side Project to Full Time Job Published: 2018-03-31 URL: https://robhope.com/opl-leap Yoh! What a milestone, One Page Love turns 10 years old today! I never would have imagined One Page Love could be my full time job when I started it back in March 2008. Here are the 3 takeaways reflecting on what it took to grow from side project to my full time job. Thank you so much for the feedback and encouragement over the years – it meant and still means the world to me. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## How One Page Love Monetizes (2018 Edition) Published: 2018-03-28 URL: https://robhope.com/opl-cake “What do you mean it’s your full-time job?” It is incredible how often I get asked how One Page Love makes money, often from a very puzzled face. I’m grateful the website generates enough income for me to live in Cape Town and form my full-time job. I hope this break down of current, failed and future income channels helps you find new areas to monetize your side project and take the leap like I did ? June 2022: This article is unfortunately so out-of-date, everything was inaccurate, so I removed the content. Look forward to a fresh rewrite soon. ‍ ------------------------------------------------------------------------