"1 Second Everyday" - Indie Hackers Podcast
#podcast #entrepreneurship #digitalgarden
Written on: 2025-12-07
Well hello there. This is my first ever attempt at an actual blog post / garden entry. Yesterday was the first day I learned of the concept of a Digital Garden, from a short bit of this video (Relevant part at about 26:45 but the whole video is worth watching), which directed me to this article for more context on Digital Gardens.
Then, today, I was exploring more examples of the concept and read a couple relevant articles, including "Pick Up What They Put Down, which itself linked to the podcast that I'm about to discuss. [1]
What's this podcast?
"Bootstrapping an App to Millions Through Sheer Persistence with Cesar Kuriyama of 1 Second Everyday", published January 1, 2020.
It was a pretty good listen. It's about the founder of the app "1 Second Everyday", which has you take a 1 second video of your life, or whatever you want, every day, and then, presumably whenever you'd like to, export it into a continuous video of all those clips combined. I've never used it before, but I've definitely seen some other people's videos that they've shared. They're fun.
I have done something similar in the past with an outdated, possibly-no-longer-supported Android app called PhotoChron, which prompted me to take a picture just of my face everyday, so I could generate a cool timelapse of what I looked like (and what I was wearing, and what my background was) over time. I started in 2017 and mostly had been consistent (it's 2025 at the time I'm writing this) with taking daily pictures, with some lapses here and there.
I'm in a larger awkward period right now where I haven't done this in (I'm ashamed to admit this to myself because I'm kind of annoyed at losing the continuity) several months (or more) because I haven't redownloaded the app since getting a new phone (part of the problem is that it's no longer supported on the latest version of Android, so there'd have to be some "hacking" around to get it to work -- honestly, I should just have been taking pictures in my normal photos app and putting them in an album or something, but then I lose the little oval in the middle of the screen that PhotoChron overlays over the viewfinder to show me where to put my face, and I lose the niceness of it saving the photos All Together in The Right Place and backing it up to the folder in Google Drive where I already have all the rest of the pictures.) -- All that being said, I'll get around to fixing this setup someday, because I think I do still value the result.
What drew me to listen to the podcast was that the PUWTPD article mentioned that the app had been featured in the movie Chef [2], which came about because the app's creator tweeted to Jon Favreau about something unrelated to the app, and then Jon Favreau found and liked the app via his profile.
The actual key word, though, that made me want to listen was "bootstrapping". I love this term. It kind of makes me feel warm inside, in a nice way. I'm not joking. And I am talking about it in its intended context in this podcast.
Bootstrapping is when you develop an app/website/service/project, probably with the goal of making some income from it, without going the "traditional" route of raising money via investors of venture capitalists or similar. Instead, you kind of just go and make the thing and find ways to monetize it and organically grow it. I'm not exactly an expert on this topic, but it's the kind of thing that I want to do in the future to make something out of a personal project. I'd definitely like to listen to more episodes of the Indie Hackers podcast in the future.
I originally came across the term bootstrapping from a random video I stumbled upon (or maybe not so random) [3] of this guy giving a talk... It stuck with me, though I haven't exactly followed it -- not yet at least. I intend to. [4]
So anyway, this was an interesting listen.
Highlights
Some nice tidbits that stuck out
- A good callout to not be too secretive about your app idea. Probably no one is going to steal it, and even if they do, they probably won't have the same passion as you do. And there can be a lot of benefit in sharing your idea with others and having conversations about it and seeing what people might be interested in, etc.
- I really needed to hear this, because I have been working on an app idea (Specific Main App Pursuit I'm Currently Working On) for at least a year (progress and effort have been too slow for my liking) and pretty much across the board I've been not telling people about what I'm working on -- though, that's more because I was scared that one slightly negative comment (or someone pointing out my idea already exists) would cause me to lose motivation to continue working on it, and less about someone stealing my idea.
- Recently, though, I've started talking about the idea to some people (because honestly it was just taking too long for me to create an MVP that I had to backtrack on the secret-keeping, perhaps in part to see if it would motivate me to work on it more frequently (it kind of has worked)). But hearing this reinforced from the podcast will certainly encourage me to do this more.
- There was an interesting comment around the 44 minute mark when they were talking about the tweet to Jon Favreau. The app founder said that there's probably some tweet that anyone could make right now which could change their whole life. You would just need to identify what that tweet would be.
- This kind of thought gives me chills. I find I want to believe it's true. It might take a billion alternate universe scenarios to find what that one tweet would be, but there probably is one out there. (Caveat that it'd be easier to find a tweet that could destroy your life rather than generate tremendous positive change -- the former case makes me shudder, rather than positive chills, with a sort of call-of-the-void[5] type feeling.)
- This gives me similar vibes to thinking about the butterfly effect. You can track one small action in the past to where you are now. The tweet thing is kind of like a future projection of this. Maybe the tweet sets off a chain of events (like attracting the attention of a movie director on your app).
- There was a mention of the book The Art of Non-Conformity (don't remember the exact context in the podcast around it - something related to running your own business rather than working within a corporation I think). I checked and it was already on my to-read list. Seems like something I would like reading and would get something out of.
- Towards the end of the podcast, there was a discussion about future forms of social media, and what a "better" version of it would be. A platform that doesn't want you to just scroll infinitely so that you see more ads, or get more data collected about you. (This was in the context of the 1 Second Everyday app possibly having a form of feed / social media integrated in it in the future (and making it the "better" form). This podcast is a few years old, so maybe this is already a thing in the app.)
- Always an interesting topic, but right now it made me think of the concept of Digital Gardening, since in a way, I've approached it from an alleyway of being frustrated with traditional social media not giving me the kind of platform that I've felt myself craving for a while where I can have more meaningful engagement, both letting me put content/thoughts/writing out there (god forbid me putting this post in an Instagram caption or story) and receiving feedback/commentary in response to what I've put out there (yes, I'd like to participate in the other side of PUWTPD, too), and also just having a place where I can put my stuff and feeling more secure in it lasting there forever, and not having to worry about limitations like video length or worrying about "which account" to post something on.
- More directly related to what they were talking about on the podcast, though, is that the Digital Gardening concept is related to evading the "algorithm" and infinite-scrolling feeds. Blogging and longer form content in itself is an antidote to this. Engaging more deeply with specific content rather than flitting from one short video/image to the next. (The video I mentioned earlier talks about this and other related antidotes)
- Another video mentioned in the podcast that I'd like to watch: "Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off" (TED talk)
That's what was top on mind. I noted a couple things while listening to the podcast (I was on a walk in The Park) and I covered them all above.
One final note, on my experience writing this right now (spent about 1hr 45 min btw)... I've had the idea of starting a more traditional blog here and there, but it always felt like a big scary task, so of course I never got to it. The concept of the Digital Garden helped me get the initiative to do it — mainly because of the emphasis that it's a living, growing thing.
You don't have to view an article as a one-and-done entity. I could have just written the first third of this page and been happy with it for now and still had it be public on the web and maybe send it to some people. I also don't have to worry about this being perfect and polished and super cohesive and meaningful... It's more of a scrapbook journaling vibe than a perfected portfolio.
I also feel like I don't need to be self-conscious about what material is on here — meaning, my "first post" can be this arbitrary podcast episode that I listened to. There are seeds I need to plant in the garden that maybe normally would come first, like giving a brief summary of who I am, or expanding more on my ideas and purposes for this site. But I can plant those seeds another day.
Another core concept of the Digital Garden is it not meant to be a chronological list of posts like a traditional blog — a post I write a year ago can be just as valuable and as open to being edited as any more recent post. Just the idea of having a hierarchy of categories and tags as a way to navigate a site, rather than a time-sorted list of posts, drew me in as well.
Maybe these things aren't so different from traditional blogs, but the concept just gave me the push I needed (and surely some circumstances of general life right now, or the type of energy I've had in the last few days).
Ideally I shall make a separate post about my feelings and inspiration for the Digital Garden concept, but I wanted to mention a bit here since this is the first post and it kind of led me directly to this podcast. Also, I can mention that I am kind of following the advice from "Pick Up What They Put Down" in that I'm responding to a podcast that I just listened to (and kind of also responding to that article in a way). ↩︎
(a movie I've watched probably twice but only once really in my recent memory i.e. in the last five years -- great movie, and I'm feeling inspired to watch it again because of the discussion on this podcast) ↩︎
(TODO: Find this video and link it) ↩︎
Given what goes on in my mind and with projects that I pursue, I would be surprised if I'm not making a decisive effort (and hopefully succeeding) to generate passive income from a bootstrapped app/website in the next x years (no i'm not defining x for you) ↩︎
"The call of the void describes the sudden, unexplained desire to participate in dangerous or self-destructive behaviors" (source ) It's scary sometimes how easy it might be to ruin your own life. ↩︎