Read a really interesting article on Forbes today about Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva, on how she went about pitching Canva to Venture Capitalists in the early days. Perkin’s says that when she first started pitching Canva, she always started with her solution to the problem she was trying to solve. However, when she switched up her pitch and started leading with the problem instead, she finally found success raising money for Canva.

I don’t think leading with the problem is necessarily intuitive, so I wanted to make a quick note of Perkins insight here on my blog so that I’ll remember to always lead with the problem when pitching MoneyPhone. I’m planning on re-shooting a video about MoneyPhone for my landing page explaining the product this month, and I think I now have a much better idea on how to go about presenting MoneyPhone to potential users. But this time, I’m going to make sure to lead with the problem before presenting my solution:

• Habit– You eye-ball your bank account balance and have no idea how much exactly you are spending every month and where all of your money is going.
• Problem– You end up living paycheck-to-paycheck. Make more money and you spend more money. Make less money and you spend less money.
• Solution– You need MoneyPhone in your life!

Late night idea I don’t want to forget before I go to bed: The Startup Cooperative— a zero equity startup accelerator/incubator where all of the founders agree to use each other’s MVPs (minimum viable products).

Just wanted to write a quick post about a new startup I discovered today called Synapse. Synapse is a programmable banking platform that “enable[s] companies to build and launch best-in-class financial products. ” At the moment I happen to be working on a new personal finance app called, MoneyPhone, and I think it would be really interesting to see what sorts of features I might be able to add using Synapse. Specifically, I think it would be really awesome if I could create a checking account that gives users control to prevent companies from pulling money from your account at will. Here’s an example: I signed up for some sort of dental plan through my dentist last year under the assumption that I was making one payment for one year of this dental treatment plan. Well 12 months later the dental plan company just pull $300+ dollars from my account unannounced. Month-to-month payments aren’t that bad, but companies shouldn’t just be able to pull money from your account unexpectedly. So I’m going to have to check out Synapse and what all I can do with it. I am very excited about the new features I might be able to add to MoneyPhone in the future with the power of Synapse.

Oregon Trail Tutorial for my Students…

Last night while working on my latest project, a personal finance application, I ran across the need to strip certain (special) characters from a string of user input in JavaScript. I assumed that there was an easy built in feature to do this in JavaScript, but most of the examples I found either used Regex which I don’t really want to use, or utilized some other confusing method that was not particularly straight forward. So, I decided to go ahead and post my ugly yet simple solution here on the blog in case anyone else might one day need it.

For my technique, I simply have one string variable that I want to strip special characters from, and another empty string which I will append characters from the original string excluding any special characters that I want to ‘strip’: SOURCE CODE ON GITHUB

Was talking to a friend recently about Wikipedia, and found myself wondering, “why don’t I ever (attempt) to contribute to Wikipedia anymore?” And then I realized… edit wars. Almost every time I tried to contribute to Wikipedia I would end up in some stupid edit war with another neckbeard somewhere out there in cyberspace.

However, I find that I’m blogging a lot more now post-Wikipedia. So maybe contributing to Wikipedia is somewhat of a gateway drug to blogging. I dunno, don’t really have anything else to say. Just, blogging is the way to go. No edit wars, no comments. Just thinking out-loud and contributing little snippets of information to the collective knowledge bank over time.

Source code available on Github: https://github.com/topherPedersen/Trivia-JS-Starter-Template/tree/master

The beginnings of a JS trivia game (starter template). Made by my students you know where…

Souce Code on Github

// Young man, and young woman, create a function called
// andHisNameIsJohnCena... GO!
var questionOneCorrect = null;
var questionTwoCorrect = null;
var questionThreeCorrect = null;
var questionFourCorrect = null;
var questionFiveCorrect = null;
var questionSixCorrect = null;
var questionSevenCorrect = null;
var questionEightCorrect = null;
var questionNineCorrect = null;
var questionTenCorrect = null;

function andHisNameIsJohnCena() {
    document.write("AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!");
    document.write('<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g6EnrLlofL0?autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>');
    var vid = document.getElementById("myVideo");
    vid.autoplay = true;
    vid.load(); 
}
function answer(questionNumber,ans) {
    if (questionNumber==1 &amp;&amp; ans=="Nihonium") {
        questionOneCorrect = true;
        alert("Correct! I didn't think you were smart enough to get it. Give yourself a pat on the back.");
    } else if (questionNumber==1 &amp;&amp; ans=="Johncenium") {
        andHisNameIsJohnCena();
    } else if (questionNumber==1) {
        questionOneCorrect = false;
        alert("Get rekt m8.")
    }
}

“There are some games you don’t get to play unless you’re all in.”

Dr. Jordan Peterson

Ran into sort of an ugly problem last night pushing version 2 of my latest app MoneyPhone into production. I did all of the testing for the app on my desktop computer and used Chrome Dev Tools to make sure everything looked good on mobile and tablets. However, after pushing my V2 update/redesign to my server, I quickly found that the new version of my site looked awful on small/low-res laptops such as my 11 inch Acer Chromebook. Whoops!

So, today I’m getting started with ngrok so I can make sure to test my app on actual devices during development and avoid making the same mistake next time around. If you don’t know what ngrok is, it is a tool for exposing your local webserver (http://127.0.0.1:5000 or just http://127.0.0.1 etc.) to the greater world wide web.

Conclusion: You I need ngrok.

I met up with an old friend of mine from college today. We’ve known each other for 13 years, and earlier today he hit me up out of the blue. He said he was in town from Lubbock and wanted to hang out. I dropped everything I was doing (about to get started working on my startup for the day on my day off), and met up with him in North Dallas.

It was good seeing him, but it was really quite disappointing. I told him about the project I’ve been working on hoping he might be somewhat interested in what I’ve been up to. But he didn’t really care, and completely refused to try my new app. And that’s when an uncomfortable truth set in.

To date I’ve acquired over 9,000 users for my most popular app, RoboStop (a telemarketer call blocking application for Android). RoboStop is a real app, with real users, and I receive real emails and reviews on the Google Play Store from people telling me how much they love the app. However, none of those 9,000 people are friends, family, or acquaintances. I literally convinced 9,000 people to use my app before a single person that I know in real life. Uncomfortable but true. Thinking back, I probably should have ignored my friend’s text and just kept working on my startup for the day. It’s 7:11 PM now, so that’s an entire work day wasted.

Lessons learned: your time is valuable, and your friends– maybe not so much. Don’t waste your time on zero, go for the 9,000 strangers instead.

EDIT (5/19/2019): Shout out to a certain someone that wishes to remain nameless that has been giving me some help with MoneyPhone, and another certain someone that is at least considering signing up.