Recently a reader asked me about the 2010 Dream Context Tracker (DCT), an experimental form for pursuing nebulous dreams. Although I didn’t reread the original post, I had to admit that the the DCT looks neat.

It helps you define your dream using an “ad-lib” format, then provides a drawing space where you can log your progress over a week. Over time, your dream should become a little clearer by harnessing the resolving power of daily mindfulness.

I never released the old form publicly, but it’s today’s February Product of the Day.

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Readers have been leaving interesting ideas on the ETP Printable Template Kit post, which is the indirect inspiration for today’s product of the day: a Visual Hierarchy Basics primer, of sorts. It started out as an attempt to make a simpler “Form Making 101” template. However, I found I couldn’t even start to make a template without explaining some basics—or rather, I wanted to be sure that potential users knew just what goes into a form. This got writing more about the foundation of 2D design as I understand it.

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I received a nice email from someone who planned on buying the ETP Planner Kit, but realized he actually wanted a “commissioned” modification of an existing form. In the past, I’ve done custom form designs, but these were actual projects billed at my design rate for 4-8 hours. That’s well-over $500, and the price just gets higher. This puts custom forms out of the price range of most individuals and companies; beautiful forms are really a luxury, not a necessity, when it comes to just getting things done.

The commission idea ate at me for days, and I had a sudden brainstorm: perhaps I could combine Skype screen sharing with the old “sounding board” service.

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WARNING: THE FOLLOWING SUBJECT MATTER INVOKES MY NEED TO SPELL-OUT THE WORD BS. IT IS A PROBABLY A MEDICAL CONDITION.

Today’s product-of-the-day is a refresh of a 2006 form I made, the sales version of the Concrete Goals Tracker (CGT). This embodies the sales process as I’ve come to understand it, based on observation and very occasional practice. The part I suck at in sales is lead generation, probably because I don’t have a service-type product that is easy to offer; “web development” and “graphic design” are specific services that people understand, but what I do isn’t either of them. But I digress. The CGT is the ORIGINAL “Printable CEO”. It focuses only on what moves you forward, cutting out the bullshit that doesn’t contribute meaningfully. However, it does it in a positive manner, without so much swearing, by emphasizing points you get for doing the “right things” from the handy included list. It doesn’t punish with negative points because I believe that focusing on the positive behaviors generates a better atmosphere: a culture of doing, rather than pain avoidance. On a pragmatic level, that helps support the sale on many levels; that’s my theory, anyway.

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Today’s product-of-the-day is geared again to commerce, and came from a review of my website hosting statistics. I used to use a Mint Analytics plugin called Download Counter, which showed me how many files were being downloaded. It was only a few weeks ago that I realized that it was kind of useless in telling me anything useful. The new download counter gives me a breakdown by file, so I can now see at-a-glance which downloads are the most popular. The top 3:

• The Excel Gantt Chart zip file, which gets over 100 downloads every day.
• The Compact Calendar is next, with about 60 downloads/day.
• The Emergent Task Planner US Version, with color taking about 60% of the 40 daily downloads.

I’m not including the popularity of the product-of-the-day downloads in my review, because these are special cases. My data doesn’t go back further than three weeks, but historically total downloads have been in excess of 20,000 downloads. That’s quite a bit of data flowing out of my server. You might think that I get a lot of feedback from all the free forms, or that there are a lot of sales of the Amazon product, but that isn’t the case. Perhaps it isn’t unreasonable to subsidize the costs of providing free downloads with sponsorship.

So that’s today’s product: FORM SPONSORSHIP. If you’re interested in the details, keep reading. (more…)