I started listening to Flow on my morning run with the kids. Here is how Mihaly describes flow:

Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses. It is easy to enter flow in games such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules that make it possible for the player to act without questioning what should be done, and how. For the duration of the game the player lives in a self-contained universe where everything is black and white.

I’ve been very intrigued by the concept of flow recently. I’ve written about the concept of flow in the past, and is the best word I can think of when describing the days when I feel most productive.

The last few weeks I’ve found myself largely out of “flow.” As mentioned in the Growing Pains post yesterday on Tend’s blog, the last few weeks I’ve been working on the massive infrastructure...

I’m going to stick with my goal of writing every day, however I’m going to switch gears a bit and give private blogging a try. In other words - I won’t be posting this blog any longer.

I’ve liked the journal blog formatting, but I’ve found myself holding back because I knew it would be public. I want to experiment a bit with writting privatly. So I may be pack to post here at some point in the future.

In the mean time, you’ll be able to keep updated with Tend, and Purlem through their blogs, and via my [twitter]{https://twitter.com/martyjthomas) feed.

The other day, reading through Feedly, I noticed that Sumsung was offering a “Test Drive” of their devices for only $1. The twist was, that you needed to sign up for the Test Drive with an iPhone. Thought that was brilliant!

I’ve been looking for an excuse to try Samsung (and more specifically Android) since nearly all of my productivity tools are on Google’s platform - Google Inbox, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc… Apple has not been playing very nicely integrating with Google, so this was a perfect opportunity to see what Android had to offer.

So yesterday I got my phone. It comes ready to go with a free month’s service from Verizon. And they couldn’t have made it easier to get up and running. You literally connect your iPhone to the Samsung, and everything syncs right up. Pretty impressive.

Apparently others thought the offer was pretty clever as well...

I’ve always had a hard time with delegating work. Not being able to effectively delegate, is probably my worst trait as an entrepreneur. I think what it comes down to is money. If money was plentiful, delegating would be easy. But as a solo-entrepreneur, delegating means taking less of a paycheck. That can be a hard pill to swallow.

I set a new years resolution to try and get better at delegating. A month or so ago, I posted a job on Elance: PHP Developer for possible long-term assigment. And Dmitry submitted a proposal. Strangely enough, Dmitry has been working with Ryan for the past couple years on bitesizepr and sourcesleauth.

I’ve been working with Dmitry now for the last couple weeks. Has has helped me to knock out a few Purlem features. Most recently helped me launch Multiple redirect rules. I’m extremely happy working with Dmitry so far. Maybe he’ll help solve my...

So yesterday I woke up to a few new Tend users in my Inbox. This is unusual for a Sunday morning, so of course I go take a look at Tend to see where they’re coming from. Tend showed me that they are coming from a site called ProductHunt.com.

So of course I jump on Product Hunt to see us listed on their home page!

Come to find out, Tom Masiero posted Tend to the Product Hunt after seeing a tweet by @earthlingworks.

24 Hours later, we received about 50 new users, and 1,600 visitors from Product Hunt.

Getting listed on sites like Product Hunt, TechCrunch and other platforms can be a nice boost of new users for a startup. Days like yesterday are super exciting and encouraging. However, initial success like this can be very misleading. It’s so common, that Paul Graham came up with the startup curve that actually shows the “TechCrunch of Initiation” as the initial boost of a...

We introduced client accounts into Tend a couple weeks ago, but just got to posting about it.

There have been a lot of “agency” types using Tend. More so than we originally expected. So they naturally would like to a way to “manage” their clients in a single account. It was an easy thing to add, so no Minimum Viable Feature necessary. See more on Tend’s blog: Adding Client Accounts

I’m heading home from my DC trip, appreciating that I blogged about the experience. It’s nice to be able to reflect on the day, and write about what’s going on in business and life. Not that I would expect to look back at any specific post. Or that any other people would read it for that matter. But it helps to give some “definition” to the day. It’s kind of like marking a to-do item off an check list. It’s not only rewarding, but also helps me to focus, and contemplate how I’m spending my time.

Hanging out in DC today. I came, kind-of on a whim, to meet with a Purlem user. This is not something I do often. Scratch that. I’ve never gone anywhere to meet with a Purlem user. Although Bob is different.

On my morning run

Bob is using PURLs in an entirely different way - as a means to identify who are the most influential people, teams, and states for political campaigns.

Together, Bob and I “hacked” together a solution with Purlem for the Carly for America campaign. I say “hacked” because we used Purlem in ways that it wasn’t necessarily intended. We did it this way to first test how effective the PURLs would be. Turned out, they were effective.

The Carly PURL

So we got together today to brainstorm a more permanent solution. I’m excited about this project as it could open up some very interesting (and effective) use-cases for PURLs.

Meeting in person probably wasn’t...

Laravel 5 came out with a nice Auth scaffolding, which included all of the routes/controllers/views for registering and authenticating a user. Laravel 5 got away with this to keep the product slim (which I think is a good move).

Laravel does have documentation on building authentication into your Laravel 5.1 app. However, I’ll go through this in a bit more detail below…

Install Laravel

First, make sure you have a fresh install of Laravel. Here is my tutorial on Installing Laravel 5.1 on OSX with MAMP.

Twitter Bootstrap

After downloading bootstrap add the bootstrap.css file into the public/css directory. (you may have to create the css directory.

Also copy over bootstrap’s fonts directory into your app’s public directory.

Authentication Routes

Add the following routes to the app/Http/routes.php file.

// Authentication routes...
Route::get('auth/login',

1) Install Composer

If you don’t yet have composer installed, you will need to do that. You can test weather you have composer installed by simply typing in the composer command into mac’s terminal. You should see a list of available commands if composer is installed.

If you don’t yet have composer installed, you can see Getting Started with Composer

2) Install Laravel

Laravel has good documentation in installing Laravel. I’ll walk through exactly what steps I took to get Laravel up and running on OSX Yosemite.

Install via Laravel Installer. Type the following into terminal.

cd ~/
composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"

Add the composer executable to the Path environment, so to that the laravel executable can be found.

PATH=$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin

Install a fresh Laravel instance, and give it a name. In our case we’ll name the project saas.

laravel new