Lines of code written
584
Books read
1
Courses taken
1
This week marks the beginning of an exciting new journey: after over a decade of work as a software engineer, I’m finally taking the courage to kick off my own business. Its scary, but its also one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
Zig Ziglar
Am I an expert in sales, marketing, design, and customer support? Not really! Do I feel prepared for this journey? (I wish!) Absolutely!(?) I certainly don’t have all the answers, and while I’m not an expert in everything, I’m an exceptional software engineer, so it is only natural for me to get started with what I love doing the most =)
The goal
Ensure anyone, regardless of expertise level, is capable of creating a brand new site with the perfect design, images, SEO, and internationalized content in under five minutes.
Action Plan
The macro plan is to develop five different satellite solutions that will be combined to power a SaaS:
Let’s now take a moment to pause and acknowledge that I am delusional. How on earth are you aiming to build all those things by yourself? Fair question: there will be a lot of work involved, but I’m a smart individual (with an obvious high self-esteem:D). I’m also lucky to have many exceptionally talented colleagues and friends in my life that I’m sure I can count on to help me find alternative solution paths and consult for advice.
The plan is to ship the MVP for those solutions as fast as I possibly can: by the end of this year, at least three of them should be live.
I’ll focus on engineering during these next few months while acquiring as much knowledge as I can about marketing and sales to help me take the next steps.
This post series
This is the first post of a series in which I’ll journal about my progress. While I’m aiming to publish content every Friday, depending on my inspiration levels, there might be some additional posts during the week.
This series will also be an opportunity to share the tools and resources I’m using to acquire knowledge and build this business from scratch: books, software, websites, courses, you name it! Whenever I find something useful, I’ll drop a link here.
In summary, If I can help at least one person in the world to get their business started faster by reading this series, I’ll consider my mission accomplished 😉
Highlights of the week
After multiple years of simply joining companies that already had the basic infrastructure in place, this is the first time where I have… absolutely nothing =) The market has endless options, so it’s tough to pick the right tools to get the job done.
Recommended Apps
Without risking spending too much time on this section, here are the tools I’ve decided to pick to get started:
Internal knowledgebase and project management: Notion
I’ve been using Notion for over a year now to keep track o basic things in my personal life (such as the books I read) and it has been great for that purpose.
This is the first time I’ve actually taken the time to read through Notion’s documentation and configure it for use in a business setting, and it was fairly simple to get started.
While it is still too soon to have a solid opinion formed about it as an internal documentation and project management tool, I’m looking forward to exploring more of its features and unlocking its power.
Hosting: Linode
This was an easy decision as I’ve been relying on Linode to host all of my websites and services for years: I trust and highly recommend their infrastructure and services. If you want to try it, you can get $100 in credit by using the link I share here to sign up.
Internal business communication: Slack
Truthfully, I didn’t spend any time looking for alternatives and decided to stick with Slack right away for internal business communication, as I already knew it from previous companies I worked on. This might change to something else down the line.
Version control and collaborative software development: GitHub
I didn’t spend any time looking for alternatives and decided to stick with the free version of GitHub immediately. Exploring GitLab as an alternative option is on deck, though I plan to revisit this point as soon as I decide it’s a good time to start paying for the premium perks.
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