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My Ideal Average Day

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on My Ideal Average Day

In line with the Ideal Average Day exercise, here’s mine…

I wake up at 6am to my beautiful girlfriend feeling well rested. We’d start the day by having sex or working out, followed by a breakfast.

Our breakfast would consist of fresh fruit or scrambled eggs & toast. With ice cold water and juices. We’ll eat by a large window over looking the city, while smiling and talking about what we want to do with the day.

While my girlfriend is in the large shower, I typically check on my ventures by reviewing dashboards. My dashboards give me a birds-eye view of my projects’ metrics. I typically focus on the acquisition, retention, and cashflow. This gives me some indication of where I need to focus and what my next moves are.

At this point, Journal then, dive into messages from; family, friends, clients and, the guys that I work with. I’ll be getting updates on business projects, sales recently closed, Investment opportunities, marketing opportunities, adventures and events that we’re all excited about. I will also be confirming sales and checking in on happy customers. I normally round up by pinging a few things to our assistant like booking flights, and booking some time with my mentee.

When my girlfriend is done in the shower and getting dressed, I normally jump in the shower while she checks on her business.

Once I’m out of the shower, we’ll chat about the dogs, flying out to London / NY, parties and dinners, while I am getting dressed and we’re making our way down 20 plus floors. While selecting between our vintage cars and the S Class, we are greeted by friends and staff before we leave the building.

Once in the car, we head to one of the popular shopping districts to pick up some things for our friends and ourselves. We’d both have our laptops / iPads on us, so after shopping and a light lunch at one of the best restaurants in the city. We often have lunch with business partners and clients too. After which, we’d separate to go and get some stuff done from our work spaces.

I mostly work in a beautiful shared office in Manhattan or Canary Wharf. They are great places to getting work done, bouncing ideas off the guys and, meeting clients. I enjoy my work; closing deals; adding value by rolling out new features; optimising marketing strategies and, building my portfolio. I get paid well because I add massive value to the other businesses.

Wrapping up the work day, I typically respond to messages on the way home. These will be confirmations from our assistant; tattoos, flights, sales closed, funny things from the family / friends and anyone I want to see before I fly out.

Once back, I freshen up then change into a casual suit while my misses gets ready and we head out to dinner with friends. The dinner is held at a friends house or one of the best restaurants in town. The evening is filled with laughter and ends with a starlit walk home on a warm summer’s evening. If it’s cold out, I’ll book an UberLux.

Tools for finding the email addresses for people you need to contact

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on Tools for finding the email addresses for people you need to contact

For those of you looking for B2B leads for your business, LinkedIn can be a very powerful tool but, it can be tricky getting contact details without a premium account.

In this video, I show you how to use Skrapp, a really powerful tool for getting contact details to add to your CRM / pipeline…

 

Visit Skrapp

It might also be worth checking out hunter.io, it’s a really popular tool in the bootstrapping community.

 

Further reading & resources

How to work out your runway for non-accountants

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on How to work out your runway for non-accountants

One of your main goals on this journey should simply be to stay alive – the ability to cover your bills, rent and food.

  • It’s simply budgeting over time
  • Here is why it’s useful
  • Revisit it monthly
  • Here is how to build a basic cashflow thats easy to understand
  • Here is how to extend your runway
    • Lower costs
    • Sell more
      • Optimise your funnel
      • Old fashioned sales
      • Ebay stuff you don’t need
    • Take a loan
      • I recommend avoiding this at all costs, you are simply pushing back the expense, but it can be useful if you get your unit economics under control
    • Take on investment

Starting to feel out my chosen market

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on Starting to feel out my chosen market

The opportunity for Indie Hackers is growing right now. More and more people are trying to build businesses online. More and more people are happy to try out new software. More and more people expect to use software while working and to pay for it. I truly believe one simply has to pick a market and do a decent job, not even great, or amazing, just good and they can make a living wage.

Think about it, I am not trying to start a company of 15 people. I don’t need to manage a payroll of 15+ people. Assuming that I was paying 15 people on average £2,000 a month that’s £30,000 a month. £360,000 a year. Thats before the office, desks, computers, software… I would be happy with £30,000 a year from my next project LOL …I wouldn’t stop there but it would be an amazing start or benchmark to hit.

Let’s look at some numbers – to hit £30,000 a year for something I could charge £29 for a month – I would need 86 users throughout the year. If it was an ebook, I would need to sell 1,034. Now there is obviously a cost per acquisition but, these numbers are obviously achievable.

Going back to look at where I am with my project for getting there. I currently have a few app ideas that I like and want to build:

  1. Digital Downloads Cart, which I am thinking of calling “Soobu”
  2. The AirBnB for ads platform

…there are others, but the main issue here is that these are not monthly subscription businesses. They are businesses that rely on the customer making sales so I can in turn make a percentage from the sale. While I know there is a lot of demand for these businesses, it also means it will be hard to get decent unit economics from paid traffic. I would have to rely on content and referrals. While I don’t think this would be impossible, it’s ideal. I want to have as many options as possible.

I will have a look through some of the other ideas I have…

  • SMS blaster – send out SMS rather than just email
  • Simple Dojo – this could be monthly but I haven’t figured out what to do about video hosting
  • Excel course for accountants…

None of these ideas are in the right vein. I will go look at the funnel of one of my personas to see what they are currently doing…

Looking at Cici the “Six Figure Chick”…

She has an Instagram profile, which she updates daily. This is where new followers find her, and where she keeps her community engaged until they are ready to buy from her.

She keeps people engaged with a mixture of Inspirational content and advice on building personal brands and businesses on Instagram.

While at first glance it would seem like there is nothing original here, she is one of the best people in the game as far as I can tell. Her delivery is rough around the edges, but she is VERY consistent and knows her market inside out. She’s built an amazing business and should be commended for it.

Back to her funnel – The link in her bio leads to a landing page with links in it…

The design of this page is very simple, clean and, to the point. It’s simply buttons with text on them, pretty much what I was trying to achieve with lnks.to

When you click on the links they all lead to a samcart.com page selling everything from free ebooks to $1,000+ consulting packages…

When you sit back and think about it, it’s classic internet marketing: “Buy my ebook on how I got rich selling ebooks” LOL, but it works.

While I have never used or even looked at SamCart in the past, it looks like a solid, feature rich platform…

Interestingly, you pay monthly for this platform…

This is good to know, while it would take me some time before I am able to compete from a features perspective, it means the market may not be against paying monthly for platforms like this. Having said that, I wouldn’t know what to do about transaction fees. I would have to pay these myself. While they could be rolled into the monthly fee, I think that would be a risky play.

It just occurred to me that it might be worth making a membership site, so form people pay to have access to your entire volt. Or maybe they pay to get access to the information, which is kinda in the site so there can always be ads to other things right by the content. You can add ads to ebooks as I have done lots of times in the past, but they will be out of date shortly if not handled well. I could potentially do a video on how I went about building ebooks.

Back to looking at the funnel…

Looking at Cici’s SamCart landing pages, it looks like you’re buying ebooks

Doing a quick search to see if many instagram accounts are linking to SamCart pages…

Only 413 results. This suggests that I am looking at this in the wrong place.

I will check twitter and then see if I can search linktr.ee

…again, not much with twitter…

Not much here for now, but back to looking at Cici’s funnel…

When you go to her site, interestingly the home page is the collection of links as seen above but, there are other pages…

She’s got…

  • A blog
  • Earn with Cici, leads to the page with links
  • About, is her story
  • Contact page

Very simple site, most of her efforts are on Instagram so, not sure she’d need much else. Interestingly, she (and I have seen this on many other sites) has a page where she talks about tools she uses on a regular basis…

This post allows me to see what tools she uses and what she likes about them. It also has comments from some of her followers. This means I can see what some of them are interested in and what their likes and dislikes are.

I can go through this to work out what she’s using and look for subscription based tools. Knowing that this is one of the common behaviours in this market makes it much easier to look for ideas. It also means I might be able to reach out to these creators to see if they would be interested in creating a review for sharing with their followers. This can be a really powerful way to grow, especially when linked to an affiliate or referral program.

I’ve got to take a break for now as I have to make something to eat and sort out some stuff before the day is over, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Goal Cards

Creating goal cards

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on Creating goal cards

 

Once you have mapped out your Ideal Average Day and, broken it down into your goals. One you might want to consider making Goal Cards.

This isn’t my idea, I got it from an old school friend, years ago and I’m grateful he share it with me. The underlying concept is pretty simple: On one side of the card you have an image and on the other you have your clearly written goal. By having your goals in this format, you can take them with you where ever you go. Each time you reach into your pocket, they will be a reminder of what you are or, should be working towards.

They don’t have to be perfect. My Goal Cards are simply printed at home (I was out of colour ink at the time). I trimmed them with scissors to fit laminating pouches from Amazon. I don’t even have a laminator, I use an iron with some cloth over the card. Works surprisingly well.

Wire-framing to plan the creation of sites or apps

Posted on | by Peter | Leave a Comment on Wire-framing to plan the creation of sites or apps

This is an opportunity to guide people through the process of structuring the app so they can plan what should be on each page. It’s also a tool that can be used to illustrate funnels and landing pages.

Keep in mind that one who is more experienced, might simply want to code the app up sticking to something like Bootstraps fundamentals. Coding up could be quicker in the short term but I feel like there is some value to be had in mapping things out be fore you build things in code.

Here is a wireframe taken from Root. Root is a template I bought for Figma which allows me to create my wireframes in Figma now, rather than Balsamiq. In theory, Figma should be more robust, but it’s a very young app. To be honest Balsmiq has been one of the buggiest apps I have ever used, pretty consistently too.