Don't automate these emails. People can tell and they won't respond. Even the WIP email you mentioned gets a very low response rate despite it being short and personal.
It seems like you only got a couple dozen email subscribers, so you should be able to manually email them. Research them for a bit (google their email address, but don't go over board into creepy territory) and make the email personal. About them.
It's a lot more work and not scalable to do forever for a large amount of subscribers. But for those first 100 subscribers or so, you should totally be able to do it. And you'll get a much better response rate.
I don't have any relevant experience I'm afraid, but what I will say is that you don't need to jump right in immediately. You can just go for an extended holiday somewhere and see if you can find the necessary amenities and services to remain productive while also caring for your child.
If that works out well you can consider staying somewhere for a longer time period, etc. No need to take huge leap. Just baby steps (pun intended).
I'm not sure if there's any nomad parents on WIP (although there might be), but I'm sure you'll find some on @levelsio 's nomadlist.com – there's a very active Slack chat group with I'm sure plenty of people able to answer your question more in depth.
Hey Lillo, welcome to WIP and apologies if it took me a while to approve your intro post 😅
You definitely have an interesting background with journalism and communications. That's actually something many bootstrappers seem to be lacking in haha. Anything you've learned so far with regards to communication and storytelling that others could benefit from?
Also curious to hear what your current project is, and if there's anything we can do to help?
Unless your friends have experience building a business, I'd take their opinions of building a business with a grain of salt.
They might mean well, but it doesn't seem like they don't know what they are talking about. They might even want to believe it's impossible, so that they don't need to admit they aren't as ambitious and couragous as you.
Probably best to avoid this topic. Ask them to respectfully stop telling you it's a bad idea and focus on topics that you can have a productive conversation around. If that proves impossible, reconsider what the friendship is providing you.
I'd also consider finding additional friends that do share that entrepreurial mindset. It's a long road to go on all by yourself. Being on WIP hopefully helps, but there's nothing like having IRL chats with like-minded people.
Thanks @marc . I really want to be an entrepreneur and really want to solve and big problem in the near future. My friends never done this type of things ever before. Thanks for this platform. And, I dont know what is IRL chats means. Can you point me there?
Regarding burn out: building a solo business can be hard and chaotic work. I think the key is learning how to prioritize and getting comfortable with many parts of the business being broken or incomplete. There's always more to do, and you'll never finish your todo list.
So practically that might mean ignoring certains bugs that are not crucial, being okay with some design issues, "firing" customers that take up too much of your time, limiting your availability to certain people (especially people that want to chat without a clear goal).
I also think each project can feel different. Some feel like an uphill battle, while others almost pull you forward. It requires having worked on multiple projects to develop a solid awareness of this. So feel free to experiment with different ideas and compare how easy or hard they feel to work on.
I've always had problems with webpack and webpacker (the tool that integrats webpack into Rails). It might simply be because I don't understand enough of the eco-system and I never bothered to really look into it. But with some recent changes to Rails and new alternatives I finally decided to get rid of webpacker altogether. It's actually the new default for Rails apps as many developers had issues with it.
So what do you use if not webpack?
@kimsia I would imagine he moved to import map, which is the rails 7 default - github.com/rails/importmap-ra…
Their rationale is here: world.hey.com/dhh/rails-7-wil…
I'm saying to focus on the things that deliver value to the users. Ignore everything else until it becomes a necessity.
The billing system is just an example of something many makers invest a lot of time on upfront when it's not necessary yet. (Because for the first couple dozen customers you can handle it manually.)
My main piece of feedback is that I'm unclear why I should care?
I don't go looking for random questions or random questions. If I have a specific question, I go and find a person or a community of people who's opinion I trust on the subject matter. A big group of random strangers is probably the last place I'd go.
I think the concept would make more sense if it was geared towards a specific industry where people can't use their real name for some reason and where experience/expertise is less relevant. Not sure what that would be, but that's for you to figure out.
Thanks Marc,
It so happens that from our research we found that there is a large number of people that hold back on seeking feedback either because a) they do not have an individual or group of sufficiently trustworthy people to rely on, or b) they do not feel they have a safe and confortable medium or space to do so, or c) they are just too proud or feel they would show weakness towards others by doing so or being vulnerable.
So it is a mix of social pressure, insecurities and lack of a safe and confortable space that for many people many topics and questions often remain hidden or unasked.
Topic range from self-esteem, family or relationship advise, career advise, parenting advise, difficult life situations, big decisions, sex questions, religion or politics among others...
Throw aims to become this safe, confortable and unbiased space where anyone can be themselves without fear of being criticized.
Beyond that, there is a strong power behind allowing every user have a large audience at the tip of their hands.
"Crowdsourcing minds"
If you are not an influencer or public profile (which most people aren't) who has thousands of followers on your social media accounts, this tool becomes pretty interesting and powerful.
Some additional use cases from the ones I mentioned before are project and product feedback, market research, content validation or feedback (for content creators before actually posting stuff for real), crowdsourcing ideas, trivia (for fun), curious questions. Which you mentioned you wouldn't do yourself. However it's come back as a potentially large interest on our research.
People in general tend to be curious and they may be curious to know what other people really think about a certain topics at different points in time (controversial stuff, social taboos and so forth...).
Finally, we do plan to become expertise specific down the road. So users will eventually be able to target a very specific audience of experts with their questions. But that takes time and a large crowd...
Anyway, hope this makes sense and thanks for the roast!
Feel free to contact me or roast this response too if you wish! Happy to hear more!
Cheers!
All makes sense! But I still think it will be very challenging to get people into the habit of going to Throw when it's not geared towards a specific topic.
I think people aren't wired to think "Oh I have a question, let's go to a Q&A site". I think they are much more likely to think "I have a question about $topic. Let's go to a $topic site"
Similarly when someone does happen to come across Throw randomly (like me right now), it doesn't necessarily immediately resonate or is mentally bookmarked because it doesn't feel relevant yet. Whereas if I would randomly come across a site that's about a topic I'm interested in, then I might (mentally) bookmark it.
I believe if you start out within a specific niche it will be easier to expand from there, rather than when you start off very broadly.
Thanks again for the insightful feedback Marc! It certainly helps!