For the first one, if you're trying to be a multi-hyphenate and none of them are a primary source of income then stop all but one.
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You only add more when one is doing very well; ideally, it's self-sustaining or you have leadership in place to hand most or all of it off to.
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For the second, I talk with founders weekly who think they have to build everything. From scratch.
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If there's one thing I've learned in the last quarter-century of building it's that you only need to solve one pain point at a time.
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And often there are tools that you can cobble together, combined with your expertise and your insights, that will resonate with people. Resonate enough for them to pay you to take away that pain they're feeling.
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At one startup, we combined Sheets, Airtable, and BigCommerce and sold to commercial property designers. But we did manual work on the backend through grit.
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Clients paid good money for the service, and we raised over $1M pre-seed with a 95% off-the-shelf toolset. To scale it later took custom dev. But we avoided it early on.
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So if you know your customers' pain, then ask yourself if a free/cheap tool like the options below could potentially solve it NOW and get you growing $$$.
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Remember that startups win through hustle - so use a tool or two and do the rest of the work yourself. Until it doesn't scale, then add more tools or dev work!
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Notion.so - offers public-facing 'pages', airtable-like databases, forms for sign-up, etc. People use Notion for job postings, sign-ups, project management, and a million other things.
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Airtable.com - a relational database that's easy like Excel but powerful in that you can program actions, link things together, publish forms, data, etc to the web.
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G-Suite - it seems cheesy, but Sheets is a web-native 'excel' spreadsheet that can monitor, trigger, and take action on things out on the internet. And it can link up to Sites, Forms, Docs, etc.
All free or cheap. I've even built web apps that feed entirely off of Sheets!
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Bubble.io - need more 'tech' but still don't want to hire devs, try Bubble.
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Webflow.com - powerful, modern websites with no or very little coding required. Works with all the fav tools like Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc, etc.
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Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress - all affordable, managed frontends for websites, shopping, etc.
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Thunkable.com - a mobile app builder and host. Cheap way to launch on mobile. Only build it yourself when you've got money to spare!
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AppGyver.com - a more advanced version of thunkable above.
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Softr.io - powerful no-code / low-code tooling on top of webflow.
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And there are soooo many more. Reply to this post with your favorite free/cheap tools so everyone can benefit!
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