Frustrated losing as a Solopreneur? Let's team up: Devs | Design | Growth | Marketing | Biz Dev
I'm a developer myself Laravel/Node/Vue primarily. I'm wanting to team up with maybe 2 other devs, 1 biz dev or growth marketer, and maybe a designer and come up with a solid team before the startup idea. A good team could build an app in a couple weeks and then launch, biz dev person should be good at validating an idea so we can start onboarding clients asap.
If anyone is interested let me know.
I'm a growth marketer and have some interesting projects in the pipeline, both as a product owner and consultant.
Hey anyone still interested in this -- if you can give me as much info as possible about your skills/talents/etc it'd really help put something together. Here's a form: https://airtable.com/shrLMpq9UKSxMpY2Y
I'm a designer and definitely interested. I believe being part of a team will allow me to concentrate on what I love doing best and not have to worry about other aspects of the business.
If you need a designer, feel free to send me a message!
Where are you located? As a BD/Marketing person, I know it's important that you validate your idea BEFORE you build. Check my profile, I'm seeking tech co-founder for business that's ready to scale.
I'm in utah, but as a dev can code/work remotely. As a dev, I tend to think in terms of 'build it' and they will come, or build something else...and repeat the cycle of failure. That's why it might be nice to have a BD person doing the biz dev stuff right while I just work on code and infrastructure/devops.
These days we can all work remotely
Any ideas in particular you want to pursue? Product/UX/Design/Front End here, would be interested in teaming up
Some ideas. Unified social communications. E.g. see all your starred posts and @replies/threads across all slack workspaces and channels (not sure if that's possible w/ their api), rinse and repeat on discord, et al -- Also add FB messenger, reddit inbox/comments, hackernews comments/upvotes/saved posts, and linkedin. My original goal was to have a trello-like board attached to the app that you could send a lead from your inboxes straight to a column like 'hot' or 'luke warm' or maybe 'try again in 3 months'... w/ notes and logs of all events.
As a freelancer I get a lot of jobs off reddit, and sometimes if I don't log on for a day or so I miss a job. Having one source of truth for all comms would make it easier... I'd also like it to have scheduled posts to reddit, linkedin, fb, and twitter.
I'm not a great marketer, someone better at marketing could come up w/ more 'marketing automation' type features geared at the freelance developer/designer or small startup agency w/ a small budget -- though I'm sure there'd be other use cases than just freelancers, I'm sure all sorts of people could use it.
Idea #2: Airtables -- but on steroids. More column types. Social Embeds + Markdown support in 'text fields' -- you could literally create all aspects of a blog from a spreadsheet.
Have different views to take notes and then your notes become the foundation for the blog post.
Have revisionable snapshots of a board... say you want to clean out some fields you take a snapshot for later in case you ever want to come back to that point in time. Also more granular permissions.
I envision someone being able to run an entire business or create an ERP from multiple 'bases' which interconnect via cross-database joins. Say you want to keep all your employee and customer data in there, but you don't want everyone to be able to see all the content, maybe HR can see all employees but non-hr can only see their own record, or maybe they can see their record + anyone in their department or maybe they can see anyone in their department's email/phone but not address and social security or other sensitive data. So you can create groups, groups and single users can be permissionable against a whole sheet, individual rows on that sheet, or rows and specific columns.
We could sell custom ready-to-go solutions for different verticles as well as have an app marketplace like shopify has and charge like 25% cut of app installs.
Idea #3: Micro-saas's as a foundation for my a dev agency. I'd like to create a website monitoring service w/ links promoting our other services such as a ManageWP clone, and a WordPress Hosting Service and a WordPress Maintenance Plan, and an all you can eat Graphic Design plan, and of course Custom Development services. Maybe a cron-monitoring service. Maybe whitelabel everything and take a cut so other devs can use these as 'funnels' for their agencies and take a cut.
#2 is my favorite from an 'excitement' level, #1 is most important for me as something I could see myself using daily. #3 I like the simplicity of just building launching quick mini apps getting some users and monthly recurring revenue that I can then spend a lot more time on #'s 1 & 2.
Some ideas indeed!..
#1 - The first part sounds like a unified inbox across social and Slack, the second part like a way to tag messages/contacts and add some notes, the third involves some scheduling of new messages/posts?
#2 - Sounds similar to Coda & Notion, essentially making spreadsheets/databases more user friendly?
#3 - Not in my wheelhouse, but white-labeling sounds sensible to get recurring value out of the product
yeah, really a way to organize guerilla freebie marketing channels that a lot of us freelance devs use. Could also pull in upwork and other similar service job feeds and let you create templates that you can reply to jobs from. I find half the time as a freelancer I'm also tempted to go to the light side (get a real job), so having a way to manage job posts and follow ups for the job market might be cool too.
I know the feeling, keeping a pipeline full of interesting opportunities is an ongoing challenge. Timing is important from both client and consultant perspective. It’s just so much ‘easier’ to not have to worry about lining up the next job. I could see a lot of value in making the process of CRM easier for freelancers taking into account modern channels for sourcing jobs.
email me at: patrickwcurl@gmail.com if you're interested. Ownership will be based on time applied toward projects. MRR will be doled out based on shares earned. If you want to work as part of an agency, we might try to become an agency focusing on startups -- with in-house SEO, Marketing, BD, UI/UX, Graphic Design, Development, Etc... between clients we'll do side projects that are validated by our BD team and build some MRR that everyone can get paid on.
We could also do some training/online-school so we can put our students to work on some startup ideas as school projects.
So, I've been talking w/ another developer. We're going to jump in and just build an uptime monitor. Sure there's a bunch of others, but as web developers -- it's a good funnel for possible clients down the road for our services.
Would your skills align w/ this project? Frontend will be vue + vuetify, and probably the same + cordova for a mobile version.
Also -- w/ the airtables clone -- I'd like to also have some sort of web/mobile app creator off of the data. So something like bubble.is -- that uses the data from their bases/spreadsheets.
Also another app idea is a federated medium, but not using ipfs... instead there'd be a centralized 'hub' that would manage everything -- Design would look a lot like medium, it'd have claps and comments and a payment system very similar except more like patreon -- in that any blog you follow automatically get's a little bigger cut than ones you 'clap' for and instead of $5 per month it's an open donation model $3 minimum. You can opt-in for hosted or self-hosted (like wordpress.com vs wordpress.org) and any post in the 'partner' plan shows up locally on your site but also on our main site or potentially a media partner (blog w/ a huge following), similar to when medium blogs ask to publish your content on their blog but you still get credit / paid for claps/etc. It'd also have a way better interface especially as far as 'code' snippets are concerned.
It's good to team up ! I'm a BD / Growth Marketer and I'm up for the challenge. At least to help you guys validate the idea
I'm definitely starting to think that things might be easier in a team.
It feels like there is just so much to consider and do by oneself, can also get a bit discouraging if things don't move fast enough.
@jaakit yeah -- I also get discouraged and I'm not the best at validating an idea and then I come up w/ a better idea and think let's build that get halfway and decide to jump to a new project. Having a team -- all committed to a single app/purpose would make there be more accountability about what the real focus is. Having a BD person do all the legwork on validation also helps cement the fact that there will be revenue potential after launch.
haha, yes, us devs want to build it first, then check if someone actually wants it!
This is the point I'm trying to get myself to listen to:D
It could be really cool to have one or a few BDs just run through ideas.
After ideas get validated, the design and build teams can get going.
Now, the funny thing is, this sounds like a normal DevShop, something many people try to get away from... strange huh!
Number one thing for me would be to help with motivation for these personal projects, with a few people all focused on a project, there's a certain level of energy there that I don't get when working alone.
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