Hey @Jay_Japra!
I just sent an email to everyone who supported the guide, and I’ll also include it here for everyone who finds this topic now:
The email
Hey all!
This email goes out to the 27 people who supported the creation of the “In X minutes” guide. It’s time for me to write an overdue update and an apology.
TL;DR: I haven’t given up on the idea to make the guide. But I cannot promise anymore when I’ll be able to make it. I am very sorry that after over half a year it’s still not made and I haven’t shared anything with you. You can ask me to refund you and I’ll do it, no questions asked. Or you can trust me to make it eventually, and I’ll find a way to make it up to you (e.g. by upping your tier, offering some 1-on-1 time or a premium template for free etc.)
So what happened? In a nutshell, I hoped to get more interest in this guide. I made it affordable and hoped more people would buy into it, which would allow me to focus full time on creating it the way I wanted it. Selling as few as 100 copies would’ve already made that possible. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, so I had to take in clients, partake in the AI hackathon, and try other opportunities for a living. And this, sadly, only pushed me further from making the guide. My wife and I, we’ve had a rough winter followed by a rough spring. Now we’ve got a debt to pay and the IVF to undergo before it’s too late for us. We’ve already optimized our expenses as much as we could but there’s still some grind for us — especially since another winter is coming and our power grid will most likely be bombed again. I need to do as much client work as I can before that — I’m dependent on my desktop PC and can’t work efficiently on a laptop. There’s a silver lining though; when all of that happens I’ll finally have plenty of time to work on the guide.
The guide I have in mind cannot just be done in spare minutes between tasks. It requires full focus and commitment. I believe that such a guide only then will be helpful when it’s very focused and concise, and comes with very precise illustrations to go with it. One can’t just dump their brain into a tome of text and expect people to learn from it — this would be unbearable to sit through. I’ve already been there with my 5-hour-long youtube videos and improvised lectures, and I can see it very well that it’s good for nothing. (speaking of YouTube, I am planning a serious relaunch there as well, as soon as I have a dent in my grind — stay tuned!)
So yeah, I am not disappearing anywhere. I’m lucky to still be safe; life is stressful but at least we’re not being bombed here in Uzhhorod. The guilt for this guide still keeps me awake at nights. But I am still committed to the desire to ditch client work and make more educational content as soon as I can afford it.
All that said, if you’d like a refund, just reply to this email and I’ll send the money back to the PayPal you used to pay me, within a day.
Have a great day,
Paul
As of what happened in May and June. After failing to get traction on this guide and failing to land a client, I borrowed some money from a friend to pay out in a year. That gave me some runway and I started working on the guide again. Then the AI hackathon got announced, which I saw as an opportunity to win some $ to help me out of that debt. It took up my full commitment then, and it was a lucky call — I won it. With the win came client requests, which after a fruitless winter and spring I couldn’t afford to reject. Now I’m just grinding it while I still can, until I have enough funds to live through the blackouts and stuff. I’m also on a constant lookout for other things that could bring me some passive income and free me up to make edu content, e.g. some innovative packs like this.