What does a flexible solopreneur stack for testing out ideas look like, and how can costs be kept down?
I’m relatively new to the world of micro/solopreneurialism, but I’ve jumped into the pool this year and I’ve been thinking about how to work through my experiments and ideas without breaking the bank just to find out if something is going to gain traction. As opposed to the technology stack of languages, databases and frameworks that I’m choosing to build my apps, I’d like to better understand what an agile stack of tools and services that enable the testing and launching of projects looks like. I’m calling this my experimentation stack. If you have an MVP actually up and running, these costs can include app-related costs as well, just to stand up the MVP.
Example: Put up a landing page → code/publish an MVP → get beta users/feedback → experiment with pricing/features → tweak app → keep going, or scrap….rinse, repeat.
I would love to share ideas about how to make this process more flexible, and less costly at each stage if possible.
I try to take advantage of free, open-source, or low-cost tools wherever I can, and if I can re-use tools across projects then even better. Some set-ups and expenses seem to be per-domain, though.
Here are the costs I’m working with so far.
My Cost Details
- Hosting: Digital Ocean droplet. This was relatively painless to set up.
- Blog (tbd): I’m thinking of using Medium for all my projects until I have a real need to change to something else more costly. Alternatively I suppose I could host my own blog on my DO droplet, but I don’t want to create any more work for myself than necessary since I’m already doing all the coding, design, marketing, etc.
- Email/Office: I opted for Gsuite for now, as I wanted to use the forms for collecting beta feedback.
- Landing pages: I’m really rethinking this one from a cost standpoint. I signed up for Leadpages because I like their testing and integrations capabilities, and I only committed to the monthly tier, which is more expensive than the annual tier. So I either need to switch to annual to reduce the monthly expense and consider it a cost to share among my future experiments, OR, opt for basic landing pages that I code and host myself.
- App email: I’m on the free tier of Mailgun for now, and it’s working.
- Campaigns: I’m not using too much of this right now, but I’m set up and within the free tiers of both Mailchimp and Drip.
- Tracking: Google Analytics for now (and Leadpages stats). GA needs tweaking if I’m going to get anything out of it in my SPA app.
- Logging: I’m using Papertrail free tier (only 7 days trailing)
- Let’s Encrypt!
Questions
Is it possible to do some of these things in a not-so-domain-specific way?
Do these expenses seem reasonable? I think I’ve gone pretty deep in these expenses so far, for not yet having traction in my first app, but I was committed to launching Setlistic.com regardless of traction, for the learning experience and because it’s kind of a personal thing.
Future Expenses
- Moving past the free tiers of things.
- Stripe transactional fees
- Separate staging/build server
Closing Thoughts
I have many ideas piling up. For the next few ideas, I think I’ll follow the sage advice of those who went before me, and publish different landing pages before coding anything and see what seems to have the most interest and the best problem/solution fit. That should save time and money.
As I spin these experiments up/down in the future, I’d like to make efficient use of my time by not reinventing wheels and making use of existing tools and services — while keeping expenses and time to a minimum.
I know once I find traction, those costs will just go up.
Would love to know your thoughts. :-)
Great post! Thanks for sharing. One issue I encountered with my 'experimentation stack' was the cost for hosting was increasing significantly for every new project while I was using heroku so I like the recommendation to go with a VPS instead.
For Rails devs that don't want to spend a ton of time on DevOps, I recommend checking out hatch.gorails.com. It allows you to automate multiple project deployments to a single VPS (i.e. digital ocean droplet).
It is similar to heroku but more flexible and cost effective if you have multiple side projects because you don't have to pay per project fees for things like redis, ssl, db backups, etc. It also makes it very easy to setup staging environments
A lot of people have recommended https://carrd.co for easy, cheap landing pages I have yet to try it, but I plan to.
Cool, I hadn't heard of them so I'll definitely check that out.
carrd have a lot of options but you can replace it with gohugo it have four landing page (isn't great design, but works). With zero cost!
Nice to see your setup! I'm afraid I'm even more of a cheapskate for my experiments. I host a static site for free on Github pages (just create a new organisation), or if I need some backend code, on App Engine. The only thing I pay for is the domain name. I'm currently using Mailchimp for signups but considering switching to https://formspree.io/ for more flexibility and a cleaner signup process. I'm still using my personal email (or my sometimes my professional one from my contracting company).
Formspree is AGPL and freemium. Interesting business model for open source. Hope they succeed!
Do you plan to build some kind of integration to have the form submissions add people to a mailing/drip list? From their landing page it seems like they only send you emails with the data, which would make integrations a bit tough.
At the moment I just want to have conversations with customers and find out what they want, so just an email is fine. If I need to do something automated I guess I could use Zapier or build my own backend.
Thanks for sharing! Your costs ($60/month) seem more than reasonable to me. And it makes a lot of sense to prioritize choosing tools you're comfortable and productive with.
I don't think I've come across anyone in the past with such a streamlined flow for getting a succession of MVPs out the door!
In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to go through this process more than once or twice. I wonder if books like The Lean Startup haven't shifted all of us too far in the direction of testing and iterating our way to success. There's a lot to be said for investing more time into ideation upfront.
Do you think you'll continue working on Setlistic, or move on to other things? Would be interesting to hear about the other ideas you're considering.
Thank you!
Yes, I agree about The Lean Startup. There's a balance, to be sure. You still have to have a pretty decent idea to start, and you want to make sure you don't give up too early, right? I think I have a history of being too soon to shoot down one of my ideas and find its fatal flaws -- but pursuing an idea does take a lot of time and energy, potentially at the opportunity cost of a better idea.
I've found that trying to come up with ideas for a micropreneur project has been tougher than I thought. I tend to think of larger market ideas that require outside funding, so trying to target ideas that would be suitable to controlled growth and self-funding has been challenging.
I'm kind of at a bit of a motivational lull with Setlistic, and trying to push through that stage. There are no paying customers as of yet. In my ideal world, I'd be able to launch it, allow it to grow organically....and move on to the other ideas that I have (B2B ideas). I don't know to what degree having paid customers for one app will interfere with pursuing better ideas, so I know I need to be careful of that.
Coming up with ideas is really hard. What's your process like?
I've had a few big successes in the past year, after probably 8 years of mostly bad ideas haha, and I think the number one difference for me has been effort.
Specifically, in the past I would spend 5 or 10 minutes thinking of ideas in bursts. Whereas recently, I've gone on 2-3 day sprees where I do nothing but think about ideas, talk to people about ideas, and read about ideas.
It's maddening and frustrating, but I swear, every time at a certain point, something just seems to click and I'm suddenly better at it two days in than I was when I started. It feels like riding a bike after a long time away.
Long time reader, first time poster here!
Someone in another thread linked to James Altucher's "Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine" (http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-idea-machine/) which basically says practise coming up with ideas daily. That seems to match with your realisation that you get better at it after two days in.
That's a great article, hadn't come across it before. Totally agree with his point.
And more broadly speaking, I think everything just takes some practice. Most of us are too quick to judge that if someone is good at something we aren't, it's because they're a natural or have some secret/insurmountable challenge.
The reality is usually that it just takes some practice, and with a few days/weeks of conscious practice you'll be far better than ever before. Applies to founders coming up with ideas, programmers learning to design, and so on and so forth.
I don't really have a specific process for coming up with the ideas. I think I've trained myself over time to spot problems, unhappy customers....areas where people are using spreadsheets or other processes that could use improving. I do have a lot of ideas that come from personally experienced frustrations, either in marketing, sales or dev.
I keep a Trello board for random ideas, and then I try to vet them and order them by potential. I love Startups For The Rest of Us -- that podcast has been very inspirational and helpful. You can find a decent way to vet product ideas here: ("Product Test" podcast, Episode 134 in their greatest hits: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/greatest-hits).
I like your idea of taking specific time to brainstorm about ideas! I think that can work for many people.
I'll make an analogy to songwriting -- something I'm familiar with for idea generation: I keep a notebook, recorders around and any time something strikes me, I document it. I find that for whatever reason my brain seems to work on things on its own for days, chewing on things in the background or subconscious before emerging, so I've learned to just go with that flow. I experimented in the past with trying to be more "disciplined" about the process, like forcing myself to write a song a day for a week. I eventually ended up with a good song or two, but it didn't really seem to work too well for me (although the personality of the songs was very different so that was interesting).
It's better for me when I'm in a regular "habit" of problem spotting and documenting for later vetting.
I think my problem now is not a lack of ideas, it's more of a need to vet them appropriately and know what to spend the time on. I'm now sorting through my songbook (so to speak), trying to figure out what should go on the album. ;-)
Just wanted to say thanks for the link to Startups For The Rest Of Us! I hadn't heard of it before and it looks great!
Cool! Hope you get something out of it. There's a lot of great stuff there.
Cost per experiment is a good thing to keep down, and it's nice to have a set of tools and processes to start getting market feedback as soon and as cheaply as possible.
If the upfront cost in compiling the tools and process knowledge is amortized across many experiments for one person, that's a win.
A bigger win is sharing these tools and processes among many people, which I assume is a big part of IH's purpose: compiling market testing knowledge for solopreneurs. If each person needs only 2 or 3 experiments to find some desired outcome, all the better.
Not thinking things through upfront (love Tyler Tringas' "idea meat grinder") and not sticking with them long enough are indeed common causes of failure, but there is something to be said about people like Pieter Levels who went on his now-famous "12 startups in 12 months" spree and hit it big. As with all things, YMMV.
Good points, all 👍
I think you have underestimated the 5$ droplet from digitalocean, 5$ droplet is able to support up 5k concurrent visitors for your landing page!
Thanks. This is incredibly useful. I have something similar. Mine is basically WP, Hosting, Mailchimp, Domain. All in that is like $20-00 per site, primarily because I have a "reseller" hosting account. I do not resell anything just use the space for my projects. Three items that might be useful (1) Marketing costs. I have not yet got a solution to this. But, have started experimenting with ads, and content marketing. (2) Costing my time. I work as a public policy analyst. Again not entirely sure how to cost this, but have started doing this. Basically an hourly rate x hours. (3) Specific to WordPress - have started to buy developer licenses, because if I use the plugins across sites it reduces the cost per site. (P.S. Will be sharing more on this from 1 October 2017, as I go along at https://wpossible.com.
Great tips, thanks!
Thanks for sharing! I'm working on my own validation stack currently, and found out thar Firebase is actually great all-in-one solution for building a fast MVP.
It looks like you're looking for some advice which I can't give, because I'm not as far as you are with starting my own thing, so instead I came to say thanks for giving me a good idea of someone else's setup (yours) and how to go about thinking about an inexpensive tech stack to begin with!
Thanks! :-)
Random: gsuite is $5/mo? One thing I do is use alias's so you can have me@, support@, contact@ email addresses but have them all appear in your inbox.
Yeah, I do have one other part-time person, so Gsuite for 2. :-)
Ah k!!