My Bootstrapper Diary

🤠Hi, Wes here!

Every week I send a newsletter of:

• my weekly progress as an Indie Hacker
• 1 thought about bootstrapping products
• 1 product idea anyone can steal
• 1 thing I used that week that I loved

💎What I accomplished this week

• Started Relationbean SAAS (Still in progress)
  • An app that helps you build relationships and grow your network.
  • Inspired by this viral post by Jakob Greenfield https://jakobgreenfeld.com/stay-in-touch
  • Every day it sends you an email of people to contact.
  • Built with Laravel, MySQL, TailwindCSS and the Laravel Breeze package.

• Used potion to create my new personal site 👇 https://www.westonwalker.com/
  • This is an awesome tool. More details are in the Sick Pick section below 🙂
  • Integrated convertkit signup forms.
  • Integrated usefathom analytics.
• This blog post 🙂

🤔Thoughts

I’ve been down the Indie Hacker journey before. It usually starts with me thinking of a couple of ideas to niche down to in the same “space”. For instance, for about a month I was going to be the “C#/dotnet guy”. I could build tutorials for C# developers called dotnetcasts (similar to laracasts.com). This was easy because I’ve been a professional dotnet developer for years. Then after I built an audience, I could build a dotnet job board, a dotnet SAAS template to sell... The list went on and on.

What happened after a month? I lost momentum. I felt trapped. I felt like a prisoner to my own ideas. I was the “C#” guy. Want to build a new SAAS completely unrelated to dotnet? Nope, I can’t because I’m the C# guy. Want to sell an info product about building applications with Laravel? Nope, I’m the C# guy.

I’ve stopped putting any limitations on myself. Nothing is tied to some imaginary brand I created in my head. It’s freeing and very motivating.

💡Ideas

I recently started using Notion at my day job (I’m a software engineer for a fairly large company). I only use it for to-do lists and reminders for day-to-day tasks. I wish I could unleash its full power but the fear of something privy to the company being uploaded to Notion’s cloud scares me (as it should).

I believe there is a market for desktop/mac applications that only store data locally. Nothing is stored in the cloud. The user can choose to have their notes backed up to their company's one drive. The best part? The target market would be Enterprise companies worried about where their data is being stored. This equates to a higher price tag and an easy sales pitch.

✨Sick Pick

Every week I pick a tool or product that I found sick!

This week is Potion - https://potion.so/

ELI5?

• Potion is a platform that lets you build websites with Notion.
• Simply take the public URL from a notion page and create a new site in Potion with it.

Benefits

• Create a personal site in 30 minutes.
• Use your custom domain.
• Use notion as your CRM. You can even add site content with your phone by just using the notion mobile app.
• Includes subpages and pretty URLs.
• Add custom CSS to style your notion pages. This is what they refer to as themes.
• Makes writing content very easy since you are using notion.
• Most Notion blocks supported.
• The site is instantly updated with your changes in Notion.

My site was built with it 🙂

• https://www.westonwalker.com/

📈Analytics

• Twitter Followers +2
• Email List +0
• Income +0

🙂 Thanks for reading!

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