How I manage my time bootstrapping a business.
It's been a busy start to the year, which has made it a little hard to work on my business. But, I'm not in rush and I'm playing the long game.
My last few weeks have been taken up with work, university assignments and exams (Summer semester).
But I've still made a bit of business progress. I've also decided to cut down my studies to only 1 unit for the upcoming semester, it's not a big deal because I only have 2 units left.
Business:
In my (rare) free time, I've built out the basic framework of the SAAS app.
Although I haven't fully decided what exact problem the app will solve, I have narrowed it down to two ideas.
The good is that both web apps will require the same functions:
- Login/registration
- Password reset
- Email confirmations
- User accounts/permissions
- User dashboard
- Admin dashboard
- Payments, billings and invoices
- A separate website for marketing purposes
Finances:
The project currently has $948.82 in its bank account.
The only new expense is a domain name I purchased for $14.75.
Each fortnight I've added $250 to the account, I've added $750 since my last post. I've also added an extra $49 that I earned from another online product (I finally reached the minimum Shutterstock payout figure after 3 years).
Marketing:
I've been starting to think about how I'll get initial beta users and early customers.
Last week I created a Facebook group for one of my target markets. This group isn't for selling or having any direct connection to a product. It's a discussion group for a niche of the industry.
Over the last week, I've grown the group to 390 members and some great discussion is already happening. I've previously created 3 groups with between 900–8,000 members.
I plan to use this group for research and initial awareness of the product and as a way to give back to the industry.
I'm also considering turning this group into an online forum and I purchased a related domain name for $14.75. I'll talk about this in a later post.
To the other bootstrappers out there, how did you decide what to build?
