An unexpected pivot this week

Make yourself a cup of tea and strap in, this week is a big one! ☕️

TL;DR
I was going to start with an Airbnb marketplace but am now doing a CrossFit dating app

I want to build SaaS from my laptop and leverage is non-negotiable

I have built a landing page, done some initial user research, wireframed the concept and started to build it in Adalo.

Here’s this week’s wrap up:

My mum arrives from the UK in a couple of days and is here for four weeks. With a little time away from work and the Zapier comp on the 13th, I had all but decided my first project should be Angelhost. A short-term rental platform to connect owners with service providers in the industry. I still plan to build this and I’ll likely use Softr so shouldn’t be too hard to knock up. The challenging bit though is that it’s a marketplace that needs populating!

Anyway, back to the pivot. My wife was sat on the couch flicking through Facebook when she saw a post from someone on the “Women of CrossFit” page wishing there was a dating app for the CrossFit community. Hmmm… I thought about it for a few minutes and decided - why not!

Essentially I just need to get my teeth into something and actually ship it! If it makes money, then it’s a bonus! I have a long list of projects I want to build, the challenge is a) making up my monkey mind and b) having enough hours in the day to get it done!

A little history… I arrived in Australia nearly twenty years ago and that’s around the time I picked up an interest in business and entrepreneurship. I’ve dabbled along the way to varying levels of success. One thing I’ve know for a while is that when the time came for me to build a business, I wanted it to have minimal overheads.

Since COVID hit the aviation industry so hard, I started looking at various avenues to pursue that I could do remotely while still flying. Enjoying what I planned to do was a non-negotiable so I tried my hand at coding, then UI/UX design which I preferred and more recently some tinkering with no-code tools.
I have read a lot of books on the subject and I foolishly had convinced myself the only way to make a success of this was to build a startup and get funding through VC’s. The romance is nice and if I were twenty years younger and single it would have much more appeal. Being forty-five with three young sons, that reality nauseated me somewhat. How do I have my cake and eat it?

A chance episode of the Indie Hackers podcast with an interview with Pieter Levels changed all that. Pieter is a digital nomad / indie hacker. Whatever you call him, he’s a guy that works from his laptop wherever in the world he likes and builds websites and other things that currently generate nearly $3M a year!
Bingo. THAT is what I want to do. Forget the $3M a year, if I can even replace my salary by working whenever and wherever I want from a laptop - WOW. Life changing.

The only other requirement is I don’t want to freelance. a) I don’t see the point in swapping one big boss for lots of little ones; I want to be my own boss. b) Leverage. I want what I build to work while I’m sleeping. Most folk are aware of what this is now but if you’re not, check out “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki or more specifically for the tech industry I’d highly recommend “The Almanac of Naval Ravikant”. The latter is a bunch of tweets by Naval combined to be readable as a book and is put together by Eric Jorgenson - This is the book I want my kids to read if nothing else.

If you’ve suffered through that waffling back story, my roadmap from here on should make more sense now. I want to build lots of stuff from my laptop. It needs to be able to work while I sleep. I’d like it to make money but if it doesn’t I wont take it personally, I’ll just build the next thing.

Back to single CrossFitters. They may or may not need a stand alone dating app but I may as well build one anyway and see! Traditional wisdom is to find out if the customer wants what you have before you build it. While I agree with this to an extent, my situation is a bit more unique. I get paid relatively well from my full time job. There is opportunity for me to read and to build stuff when I’m at work, and if the project is a flop I’m still getting paid.

Obviously while I wouldn’t start building something I thought no-one would want, I’m also happy to take a leap of faith as I want to learn how to use as many no-code tools as I can. What better way to do that than to build stuff?! The added bonus of shipping it is that I get to hone my skills at finding users, marketing, sales, analytics etc. Win-win.

To gauge interest in MatchFit, I started by knocking up a landing page. The quickest and cheapest way I could think of doing this was Carrd. I found a template that suited the vibe I wanted and modified it to what I needed. I linked a Mailer Lite account to it that captures the addresses and sends out a welcome email. I put together a logo and setup some social media pages too. This is a contentious issue and seen by some as a waste of time, but this was my initial user research. I jumped on a bunch of groups with my personal profile to ask the question around the idea and only today followed a couple of hundred people on Instagram and Twitter each with the MatchFit profile, many of whom have followed back. Not sales obviously but exposure non the less.
At the end of the week I have had sixty people enter their email address to be part of the early release of the app.

I use Squarespace for this blog and it has built in analytics so I totally forgot until yesterday that I may need to do something different for Carrd. I did, I had to connect Google Analytics to it. A simple process but unfortunately the data only started yesterday. That said, it shows 75 visits. 7 second average visit time but there’s not much to read on there! 😂

The Reddit post in the CrossFit group had fifty replies and 14 upvotes.

This is all super interesting to me as I’ve not got this far before. I fully designed two other app concepts prior to our third son being born. One was a flawed concept as a whole but I can build out some of the individual features as stand alone apps - something I definitely plan to do. The other was a (IMHO) a great idea, but it was Mammoth. It was this project that made me realise I want to focus on SaaS (Software as a service) rather than a business in the traditional sense that requires premises and a sizeable workforce.

Beyond the user research I was performing, I grabbed some inspo from Dribbble and started to put together a wireframe in Figma. It’s pretty crude but does the job.

Just today I have started to build it out in Adalo. I don’t know if I’ll get all the design and features that I want but that’s the trade-off with no-code at this current point in time. I’d like to have a go with Draftbit too but find Adalo easier for my first project.

I’ve found a couple of great YouTube tutorials by Michael Ionita on modifying the standard Adalo chat component and even a Tinder clone so they should save some build time.

I still need to work out the monetisation. Adalo doesn’t currently offer in-app subscriptions, only one off so I have to think how I’ll make this work. I can do interstitial ads with Admob but this is unlikely to generate the revenue I would like.

I’ll come back to this as I give it more thought.

I think that’s everything for this week! I look forward to sharing something semi-functional next week!!

Rich 🤓

Read the blog post with images here: https://www.flyinghacker.co/blog/an-unexpected-pivot-this-week-