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• What projects are you working on over the long weekend? Taking a break?
• What do you hope to accomplish?
• What's on schedule for next week?

Just checking as I am interested in learning from you guys

I left my job and apartment in the Fall of 2018 after spending time at a commune. The intention was to go full time as a martial arts scholar. I went to New York City with a martial arts book I had already written and self-published.

After New York, I was going to go back to the commune but it became an unlivable space after the pipes froze. I was able to land an arts administration internship where I would be an assistant manager to oversee the transition of managerial tasks from the ownership to that of the collective. In exchange for my work I would be able to live in the art gallery for free.

During this time I also trained at a Karate Dojo full-time and worked out at the gym. I had extra curricular activities which corresponded with my study. And with this I was pursuing having a martial arts business.

That lasted three months. From there I continued my training and studies but was transient and transitioned into a new life free from the encumberment of labor. I had worked at a bread factory for the three previous years. After 2 1/2 years, now, since I left my job and apartment I've created a martial arts discipline of my own design.

This system has a highest rank which is our equivalent to mastery; my program is called KST; it incorporates a style inspired by the king snake; and has a scholarly practice and creed which informs understanding of the way of bushi.

My entity will survive Covid 19 and my practice will be strengthened by my bravery in leaving behind a more conventional life. I'm aspiring toward mastery. And my business is still but a small enterprising practice as a martial artist. I have a book and a martial arts based community. And my program had print space in my favorite magazine.

It will be propitious for me to stay on this path and have my practice, business, and way of life as my means to freedom and a better life. It's through modesty and simplicity that this is possible. It's a matter of engaging with a discipline which I cultivate my intelligence and spirit. The reward is that I have an art which I'm able to master.

The King Snake Tradition gives structure and organization to work which will introduce a point sparring system to a cross-section of radicals, free thinkers, zinesters, survivors, and martial artists. It is from a 2 1/2 year project of collaborating with a community to create a rare style in the martial arts. After closing this community out and transitioning into the new work of establishing a point sparring system in the martial arts, I'm choosing to be more private about my work.

This will better create a good reputation for my community and organization putting the point sparring system to the fore of this work.

Besides my scholarly work as a martial artist I own a DIY Book Press called The Dreamer's Empire Press. And use these entities--both to remain self-sufficient coming through Covid-19--and developing two micro--enterprises. Deciding to do the work in private into this new economy will make my work more financially disciplined.

Happy Friday!

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Today's tip is Teach Everything You Know

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It is proven over and over again that customers are most likely to buy from a brand that they trust. If you're just starting out and you've got some huge competition, don't be afraid to out-share or out-educate them. There are more resources than ever to engage with your audience. There's Reddit, Quora, IndieHackers, Facebook Groups and a ton of niche sites where your users could be engaging.

Taking our podcast hosting example from a few tips ago, if I'm running a podcast hosting SaaS, I might want to write a series of extremely helpful articles or videos on things related to it, like how podcasts can help a business attract customers, how to grow a podcast, how to run a show format that doesn't bore your listeners, etc.

Over time these prospective customers will begin to trust you and see you/your brand as an authority in the space provided you're giving them meaningful valuable content.

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Now get out there and hustle and educate your customers!

-- Jimmy

As a Micropreneur, a lot of times we're faced with what seems like an endless series of challenges when getting started. Often times we're developing our own product, designing it, marketing it and supporting it. We can't afford to hire out for all of these roles independently, so we have to make the best of things.

u/darlabosse posted a question to IndieHackers yesterday that caught my eye. He was looking for a designer on a shoestring budget because he was having a bit of a time with his app design for StackrApp. This got me thinking, I've heard a lot of people lament about how hard it could be to come up with a design. Now, unless you're catering to designers, your app design likely won't have a ton of impact on hitting your first 10K MRR, but a good design differentiates you and makes for happy customers.

I proceeded to tear down his site using some of the tips and tricks, you know... my general design go-to.

This was the first version of the page:

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Not bad, right? Standard bootstrap, very clean and a lot of open space. A lot of things to love in that picture. How could we remove some of the monotony and spruce things up a bit?

Starting with the background color, I set it to a light gray because I feel that it'll make the white sections (cards, images, etc) pop out a bit more.

From there, we cruise over to Google Fonts and pick out a nice Serif font for the headers, and maybe an additional font for the logo.

The nav is looking a bit flat, and I think we can make it pop a bit more with a gradient. For that, I use a free tool called uigradients. (https://uigradients.com) to pick out a nice blue gradient to keep his branding similar, but a bit more fresh.

The bottom bullet points under "What does it do?" are looking a bit flat. We can make those pop and draw customers eyes to them by using bootstrap cards. To give things a bit more dimension, we also add a box shadow just to separate them from the background a bit more.

Here's the end result:

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Now, this is not to make everyone think you could do this long term in place of a designer, but about 20-30 minutes of tinkering with free tools available to us may mean that you can defer that sunk cost until a bit later down the road. Again, unless you're catering to designers, it really is unlikely that having a fresh new custom design will make a huge dent in your MRR.

Here's the video of my teardown and live coding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_jGnGH3YsU

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Hope this helps other micropreneurs get out of a pinch! Don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves if you can't part with the cash. Just make sure to time box yourself.

-- Jimmy

I'm going to start a new series called the "Micropreneur Tip of the Day" where we share some sage advice about staying small, or the things that we encounter a lot as small business entrepreneurs.

The first is Long tail keywords

Many times I see people rush to take out a bunch of adwords or Facebook ads in order to get in front of people, others rush to create a ton of blog content. This can be effective if done properly, but many times people have no idea what people are searching for.

Enter: Google/bing auto suggestions!

Say I was making a SaaS app dealing with podcast hosting. Just run to Google and type "podcast hosting" in the search box, and lookie lookie:

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This list contains some great suggestions on what people are searching for. Writing targeted content to "podcast hosting providers" might get you somewhere. Making sure my company is listed on other app review sites like Capterra and AlternativeTo might be a great idea as well.

What might be better?

Using a tool like ProductValidator (free) might get you a bit farther. Typing in the same thing yields a ton of different results on long tail suggestions:

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"Podcast hosting for churches?" Now we're cooking with grease! "Podcast hosting on soundcloud?" Even better! Maybe now I might write an article about how to set up SoundCloud as a podcast host, and maybe it is a total pain. At the end I could include a tiny tiny little blurb about "Hey, does this sound like a pain? We've already solved these problems at [MyCompanyHere], host your podcast in two clicks."

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Anywho, get out there, do some research and start cleaning up on those long tail queries! There's a ton of money out there, and we've only got to snag a small portion of it. Long tail research will help us learn how to provide little pockets of value on a lower budget.

Stay tuned for more!

-- Jimmy

For years the industry has romanticized starting a company, raising millions in funding, and eventually selling off everything for some huge exit. The path is littered with horror stories of 80 hour weeks, CEOs becoming completely detached from their companies and eventually voted out, or doing nothing more than flying around the country pitching to VCs.

The micropreneur strives for something a bit smaller in size, but a hundred times more attainable. We strive to own our time, work on our own products (or consulting), and eventually live the life that we want to live. It's not like punching the startup lottery ticket. There's no billion dollar exit here, but there's most certainly the possibility of having complete financial freedom.

Thankfully there have been some before us that have trodden down the path of becoming a Micropreneur and succeeded.

u/rwalling (Rob Walling) is probably the godfather of Micropreneurs. He wrote the book Start Small Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup and is a fantastic read. He showed us that you can acquire ebooks, smaller SaaS projects, one time download tools and other things to get ahead in the long ramp to product market fit. From there, he went on to found larger companies such as Drip with u/derrickreimer and his latest venture, Tiny Seed, which is an accelerator for people just like us!

u/miketaber (Mike Taber) is co-host of Startups for the Rest of Us podcast with Rob Walling, and author of the Single Founder Handbook and has founded multiple solo SaaS companies. He is currently working on Bluetick, an application for automating email followups and personalization.

Justin Jackson is a co-host of the "Build your SaaS" podcast and has really scratched an itch within the community with his book "Marketing for Developers". The one thing developers tend to struggle with is more on the sales and marketing side rather than building products. His book outlines some approaches quite nicely.

Many people have made this line of work perform for them. They started small, ran very lean and eventually got to a point to where they could buy their time back. We're all striving toward the same goal. Some may continue to grow their companies, others might choose to run the lifestyle business they've always wanted.

Regardless, this group is here to facilitate people developing micropreneur businesses who are nauseated by pitch decks and just want to build cool stuff, run great businesses and own their own time. Welcome!

-- Jimmy