Many developers have some sort of website. I always had one too. It’s a space on the web where you get to describe yourself. Unlike with Twitter profiles, you get to set the frame and present a neutral picture of yourself.

It’s important to me that people who are googling my name quickly know who I am and what I’m working on. They also shouldn’t have to rely on search to find all my social profiles.

That’s why my previous website looked like that:

As I’m a guy from Austria, I had the choice of going to the military for six months or doing some kind of social work for nine months. I chose the latter, where I made about 550€ per month.
Being passionate about building stuff on the web, I started a side project.

Step 1: Idea & Validation

Marketing on low budget starts where all marketing starts, at idea & validation. With a low budget it’s especially true that you can’t create demand, so you have to be certain that the demand for your product is already there.

Prospecting

Knowing who my idea might be helpful for…

My Bootstrapping Journey

Read last week’s article here.

In this series, I’ll try to bring my product to profitability.
Read the first part of this series here: What I Learnt Building a SaaS.
This is my product: Find Better Questions. Read my entire journey here.

I’d like to talk a little more about individual customers, but it would be too much of a pain to ask them individually whether I can write about them here, and I respect their privacy. But I can show you anonymized data.

This is a look at my CRM:

Let me explain these stages:

• Sign Up in App:
  They…

My Bootstrapping Journey

Read last week’s article here.

I planned to do quite a lot of marketing this week. I didn’t. That’s a shame.

The App

Bugs, bugs, bugs

Because of bugs, I had to write a lot of code this week. At one point, I shipped an app that couldn’t even create lists (Find Better Question’s main feature).

Testing

This bug really got me thinking about writing tests. A way to automatically make sure that nothing about my app is broken before shipping it sounds like a great idea.
I still don’t think that I’ll do it …

My Writing

It’s just hilarious when you think about what I’ve written…

My Bootstrapping Journey

Read last week’s article here.

When sitting down for these weekly write-ups, I always feel lost. I have the worst imaginable memory when it comes to telling people about my last couple of days. I always need my calendar for that.

My Look Into This Week’s Calendar

To get an overview of what to write about, I check the reminders I ticked off in Google Calendar.

How I Shouldn’t Plan My Day

I always add reminders into my calendar. I can’t always predict how long a task will take, so I end up feeling completely unstructured at the end of the day. I might for example add twelve reminders throughout my day…

Set out to build something? Don’t spend your time on building. Spend your time on talking to customers and marketing your product. That’s especially true for solopreneurs. The problem is that building a web or mobile app takes way more time then we’d like.

We’ve all heard of Pieter Levels’ 12 startups in 12 months, but most of us wonder how one can build apps in so little time. You have to validate your idea, design everything, market the thing and build your business logic.

To make things worse, you have to build an unnecessary amount of boilerplate. That can…

My Bootstrapping Journey

Read last week’s article here.

The main thing I did this week was publishing the new landing page. You can view it here: https://findbetterquestions.com/. I still want to add two or three images. One picture at the top, two in the how it works section. The footer might need some improvements too. I also didn’t add analytics yet.

I only published one answer on Quora this week: How do I advertise on Quora?

I’ve been working on an article that isn’t published yet.

That’s pretty much it. I fixes two minor things about the Find Better Questions app, but the…

My Bootstrapping Journey

Read last week’s article here.

The Landing Page

There are two reasons why I need a new landing page:

• Bad design
  The biggest problems are that it’s not super obvious that it’s a desktop application, nor that there’s a free trial. Also, the pain isn’t really communicated. Actually, someone tore down my landing page in a decent article. Read Pedro’s suggestions here.

• It’s slow
  Google’s PageSpeed Tool rates findbetterquestions.com with 63/100, while its blog used to hit 99/100. That’s because the landing page is built with an HTML template and the blog with Gatsby. So I’ll redo the landing page form scratch with Gatsby…