My daily email counter goes back in the oven

I remember one time as a kid, my mom made a cake. It took hours to mix the ingredients, and it took hours more to bake in the oven.

When the cake re-emerged from the oven, it was 10pm already. And something was off— I don’t remember what. Maybe the taste was off, or the appearance, or the consistency.

I do remember my mom sitting on the couch afterwards and muttering to herself about what could have gone wrong, and what she could do in round two to fix it.

She sat there and ruminated, and sat some more. Eventually, she stood up.

“I’m going to try it again,” she said.

By this time, it was probably 11pm. I just shrugged and went to bed.

I found out the next morning that my mom finished round two of the cake at 2am. This time, it turned out exactly how she wanted.

And it was delicious.

This made a deep impression on young Bejako.

At the time, my childish attitude was, “Try, and if at first you don’t succeed, clearly this is not meant to happen, at least not today.”

Well, actually, that’s still my attitude today, though with the years, I’ve also learned some persistence.

One week ago, last Monday to be exact, I released my Daily Email Habit service to the priority list.

Daily Email Habit is at core a daily prompt to get you over the initial hurdle of what to write about each day in a daily email. The prompt is the core of Daily Email Habit, but I also have some extra bits to make the experience more engaging and fun.

One of these is a streak counter at the bottom of each email that shows you how many straight days you’ve been sending a daily email. You update the counter by pressing a button in each Daily Email Habit email, and you have 24 hours to do so — otherwise the counter resets to 0.

It took a surprising amount of backend tomfoolery and jerry-rigging to make this simple counter. (Email is not a very sophisticated technical platform.)

Of course, the counter seemed to be working fine when I released Daily Email Habit last Monday… but by Tuesday I already had a bunch of emails from people saying their streaks were all wrong.

So I went in, debugged, updated the database by hand. Problem confidently solved.

The streak counter has been running smoothly ever since… until this morning, when I got a message from a Daily Email Habit subscriber:

===

Hey John,

My streak reset for some reason…

even though I put YES for everything

writing to you at 10:57 EST (I made the time limit)

===

… and beneath this was a screenshot of all the daily emails this subscriber has sent to his list over the past week, to back up his claim.

What to do?

The usual. Go to the couch, sit, mutter to myself about what could have gone wrong, and what I can do in round two to fix it. And then get to work, even if it’s getting late in the day.

One thing is for sure. I won’t let this stupid email counter get the better of me.

By the way, I am planning to have an official launch for Daily Email Habit at some date in the future. But before that happens, I want to create a launch bonus, equivalent in value to what I’m charging monthly for Daily Email Habit, and this is taking time. Honestly, I don’t know how long it will take.

But if you think that writing a daily email consistently could be valuable to you, and if you’re interested in seeing if Daily Email habit could help you get there, then hit reply and tell me why this service sounds interesting to you.

Do this, and I’ll get you the details all about how Daily Email Habit works so you can decide if it’s for you or not. Plus, if you do join now, you will still get any bonuses I offer when I have the official launch, per my usual protocol of rewarding early buyers.