A month in the life of a solopreneur - July

A summary of July of a solopreneur

👋 Hey, it’s Orel here! Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share my journey and lessons as a solopreneur who quit his job to chase his dreams.

I am a software developer, and so far I have x3 failed projects, and x2 ongoing.

I also publish Tech Books summaries along with Anton Zaides.

To reveal more of my journey as a solopreneur, I figured I should share the progress of all the projects I am working on, in addition to the lessons and failures.

So starting today, once a month I’ll share the progress of the last month and plans for the next one.

I am going to attach images for most sections, so if you’re short on time, you can scroll through and look at the images to get the gist of the article :)

Social

Linkedin

This month I was less engaged and didn’t post consistently and it shows. Although some posts attracted more followers, in general, the metrics are down.

Plans to improve for next month:

Engage with other posts at least 5 times a week, 30 minutes each time.

Substack

Plans to improve for next month:

Engage with articles that I read and comment on most of them.

YouTube

After not uploading for more than 40 days, due to its high costs (15$ per minute for editing), I decided to give it another go and see if people were attracted to my entrepreneurship content.

And apparently, they do. I uploaded a video on how to launch a product, and it blew up (For the size of my channel).

I will upload another one next week and see how it goes.

Products

Chess App

At the beginning of the month, I decided to give the Chess App one last try.

The purpose of the app is to save chess club managers time by replacing manual work with automatic tasks.

After developing for a few days and giving into the fear of cold calling those managers and asking them directly, I took the step and called many clubs.

90% of them are managed by old folks who don’t care about technology and don’t want anything with it.

The rest didn’t care too much about it either.

Since it’s a large project, I decided to give up and move on.

Sharpic

This was a pretty promising idea.

After going through thousands of properties on Booking.com and Airbnb, I noticed that I clicked on those with the best images first. The rating came in second place.

So, the tool was meant to improve images for property owners to make them pop and more engaging, through Photoshop API.

A few months after I came up with the idea I decided to give it a go and build a pipeline.

But it didn’t work.

A few days after I looked into the idea, Adobe decided to practically open their API only to enterprises, which killed the idea on the spot.

I have a few ideas for how to revive it, but I’ll consider it in the future. For now, it’s in the drawer.

PlayTaylor

In the last 3 weeks, I have been working on a product with my sister for Taylor Swift fans.

It’s a Kahoot game, but Taylor tailored.

We have 2 sessions a week, 2.5 hours each, to avoid having too many things to do and half-assing all of them.

BookWiz

BookWiz is finally going to see the light of day and be published on ProductHunt!

It happens on Monday, so be prepared! :)

Secret Project

Last week,

Anton Zaides

sent me a message, detailing an idea he had to improve his team’s meeting efficiency.

It sounded great and quite easy to implement, so I jumped on the opportunity to build a B2B product and that’s my main focus right now.

More about it soon!

Books read/to read

1. Books read

   1. The Aspiring Solopreneur

   2. Slow Productivity

   3. The Wealth Money Can’t Buy

   4. Sapiens

2. Books I plan to read

   1. The Personal MBA

   2. The Road Less Stupid - Recommended by Noah Kagan

   3. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years - Recommended by Noah Kagan

   4. Dotcom Secrets - Loved Russel Branson’s Experts Secrets, so give this one a chance

I created a list with more details and personal notes for each book on BookWiz:

 July’s books on BookWiz

Final words

Before I wrote the article I had a feeling that I didn’t progress at all this month.

Having everything I have done and how I progressed really puts everything in perspective and makes me appreciate all the hard work.

Let me know what you think about this type of post and if they’re interesting, so I’ll know if to keep up with this format every month.