Ben Robertson
@ben.robertson.is
independent software developer and solopreneur building colorbliss.com and other fun projects writing about it at ben.robertson.is
this is what customer support looks like when you run an image generation company this originally appeared at ben.robertson.is/jottles/thi... on May 11, 2026
something has gone horribly wrong this originally appeared at ben.robertson.is/jottles/som... on May 8, 2026
celebrated my 37th birthday over the weekend, surrounded by some little ones who love me unconditionally life is good
should i add this to the colorbliss landing page? after seeing the savannah bananas sign up, i had my ai scan signup domains and found some legit companies in our database. not sure customers will care, but i think it’s pretty cool. ben.robertson.is/jottles/sho...
I had the great privilege to take this past week off, spend all day in quiet and prayer, and answer support tickets from this nice little bench for 30 minutes or so each evening huge thanks to my wife for holding down the fort while I was gone. coming back super recharged and ready to work clean
i found out about this clone of ColorBliss because someone submitted a responsible disclosure not only did this clone forget to change the brand name from ColorBliss to their name on most of the pages of the site, the contact email is my email 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
testing out a new image model for colorbliss photo conversion it works really well with text! this originally appeared at ben.robertson.is/jottles/tes... on April 10, 2026
adding a bit of fun to the colorbliss home page or rather, a bit MORE fun, since there is already plenty of fun on the page 🖼️👨🎨 (this originally appeared at ben.robertson.is/jottles/add... on April 8, 2026)
the engagement baiting on chatgpt has gotten really bad in the past few days. first noticed it over the weekend. i'll ask it a question, and it will give me an answer and a long rationale for that answer example: ben.robertson.is/jottles/the...
a trial user just let me know that the ColorBliss pricing plans are more expensive than a company that has $45 million in funding with a team across 25 countries (pictured below) that's my competition. pretty wild that a 1 person operation can even be on the same field!
A new thing I'm trying out: having the LLM keep track of the experiments I ship I realized I'm shipping a ton of updates but having a hard time remembering two weeks out to go back and check to see if they worked (this originally appeared at ben.robertson.is/jottles/a-n... on February 23, 2026)
i was inspired to try making an astro theme that is semi-terminal based why? i'm not sure i don't even plan to use this for my personal site i just kind of thought it would be an interesting UI quick demo of what i came up with this afternoon would you use it?
Just shipped bsky-comments! Embed Bluesky threads anywhere with a zero-dependency Web Component. • Framework Agnostic (Native WC) • < 3kb gzipped • Zero Config: Just paste the Post URL • Light DOM: Fully customizable (CSS/Tailwind) github.com/florianschep... #webdev #opensource #buildinpublic
I like the idea of using something like Super Whisper or another speech to text app, but found them a little too clunky or hard to use. Plus it seems like the kind of software that shouldn't require a subscription I was excited to come across handy.computer this week!
Handy
Handy is a cross platform, open-source, speech-to-text application for your computer
handy.computer
someone made a little web app to generate settings for the yamaha thr series of guitar amps, and I think that's really coool ben.robertson.is/notes/using...
Using AI to configure your guitar amplifier
A few weeks ago I picked up a new amplifier for my guitar. Rather I should say a new to me amplifier. It's a Yamaha THR30ii wireless…
ben.robertson.is
If you haven't been able to tell, I've been spending a lot of time on email marketing for ColorBliss this month. One big initiative is a new drip campaign. After folks go through the onboarding flow, I'll hit them with one email a week. Each one is short, following the rule of one.
✅ launch new feature ✅ announce the new feature ✅ follow up with an upgrade email one week later to the people who clicked on the new feature announcement 93% open and 89% click rate is an all time high for me. but so far a 0% conversion to paid plan
Conversions slowed way down for ColorBliss in January. It's been a little concerning for me, but December was a really great month so I've been trying to roll with the punches. But I have a new theory as to why...
did a little spelunking on stats for a year in review email for ColorBliss 92k new users, up from 51k previous year!! interestingly, total coloring pages created was down quite a bit from the previous year (500k this year versus 750k last) I think there's a few reasons:
decided to go ye olde schoole with the dates on my personal site
this looks like a legit review, and then upon further inspection... i flagged it to amazon, but i wonder how they are handling this kind of thing at scale and if they can
