I run an online marketplace selling digital study notes and taking a commission. It's provided most of my income for the past 10 years, often exceeding a developer's salary. I've got a YouTube video where I talk about the MVP and growing it in the early days: https://youtu.be/aKXlZz-wbmg
Your write ups and Vidoes are ahmazing. Working on my own rails app and intend copy paste your SEO techniques literally into my code. With your permission ofcourse
My personal strategies are
- investing in group hobbies that remain doable later in life (e.g. My granny in her 80s can't play piano anymore due to arthritis, but still sings in 3 choirs)
- making it a yearly goal to make a new friend every year, so as to fight off attrition
I'm a programmer/marketer with a YouTube channel teaching the SEO, copywriting, and marketing techniques I used to earn a cumulative 7 figures with my Rails app (2—sided marketplace for college notes).
I give each of these big ideas a folder on my computer and then fill that folder with markdown documents and think aloud via writing. The core idea is that I don't want to lose the momentum of my thoughts. Maybe that might be helpful for your use-case.
You specifically mentioned marketing/growth hacks etc.
I'm a programmer who bootstrapped a site 10 years ago and it's supported me since as an indie hacker. In order to learn about marketing, I held a monthly closed-doors growth hacking meet-up with other bootstrappers and founders to share our experiences about what works, so I've seen a fair amount of the territory.
Anyway I've got a YouTube channel where I share a lot of what I know, especially with respect to getting those first 1000 users. The focus is on marketing techniques that appeal to engineering types like me (e.g. scalable SEO generated from data; paid ads that you can leave running long-term etc.)
My context is scrappy (the biz only had between 1 and 4 employees), but what I know should be of interest to people in the early stages (less so for funded startups, where scale changes the game somewhat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzT-LQI6x0&list=PLpkoC9yJXD...
I was so disappointed when Gary stopped filming these videos that I started making my own screencasts in that style (non-beginner concepts, fast-paced, language agnostic, and terminal-first).
I'm not Gary, so the focus is shifted towards areas I have special interests in — namely: the day-to-day of running a software product business as an indie hacker/solopreneur.
For those reading this thread whose products or ambitions are more along the "indie hacker"/bootstrapper lines, I've got a bunch of screencasts talking about my experiences over a 10 year period building and living completely from the income of a (Rails/JS) web app (Oxbridge Notes) I built as a one man show.
The screencast topics include everything from getting an MVP out, to a tour of my web app and its admin area, to SEO/Google Analytics/online marketing strategies, to some system design stuff to make maintaining the code easier.
It might be worthwhile to figure out what brings you joy by randomly asking yourself how you are feeling from 1 to 10 throughout the day. You might be surprised, in that your joy rating in the moment may deviate heavily from what you predict. With this data you can start prioritizing activities and trying to change your situation.
