Bootstrapping a business while working full time.

Hi, I’m Ryan.

I’m 28 years old and I live in Brisbane Australia. I work full time, study part-time and have been tinkering around on the internet for the last few years.

Unfortunately, I've been plagued by shiny-object syndrome and have moved from project to project.
That stops now!

This semi-regular blog won’t just be a brutally honest account of bootstrapping an internet business. It’s designed to keep me accountable and stay focused.

My key accountabilities are going to be consistency, compounding and long term thinking.

Consistency: I’ll dedicate time each week to work on this business to help it grow. I’m also going to consistently fund the project every fortnight. This money comes from my full-time job and it’s a portion of what I usually invest in the share market. I’ll start at $250 per fortnight for now.

Compounding: The goal for everything I do with this business is to build compounding returns.

Long term thinking: In the past, I’ve failed at this. I have never sat back and built something I would still be happy working on in 10 years. This business will be something I feel I can keep working on even if things get hard or progress stagnates.

So, what am I building?
Well, the details of the final business are still being ironed out, so I’ll release them in a future blog. But here is how I thought about the product.

My current web skills include accounting, content, design, and some python.

A benefit I have is that my full-time job is shift work. This means that I frequently have days off during the week or in the mornings to work on a business.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve built an investing blog/community to 7,000 members and 1200 email subscribers. This isn't well monetised and has only generated about $500.

I'm considering building a stock or property portfolio research/tracking web app to leverage off this audience. However, there are several similar apps that are heavily developed, and charge $10-$40 per month. I would have to find an on how I could get customers to use my app over the other established products.

I do want to focus on business to business (B2B). From my experience businesses are less price-sensitive and more willing to pay for a product or service that offers real value.
The idea.
I’m going to build a software as a service (SAAS) web app.

I’ll cover why I chose SAAS as a business model in a future post. I’m sure the few readers of this post will likely know the benefits.

I don’t want to be in a winner take all market. I’ve decided I want to be small fish in a big pond.

I’m going to enter a market where even 1% market share is a huge success.

To stand out, I’ll focus heavily on a specific niche in this market but still have the capacity to expand further into the market.

UPDATES:
With each future post, I’ll add some updates on the business.

This week I invested the initial $250 in the dedicated bank account for the business.
I spent $85.43 on a course to help brush up on some specific skills to code the web app.

(This was originally written on 19/01/22)