Bootstrapped Web

Brian Casel: 00:07

Okay. Let's do this. Hello, Bootstrappers, and welcome to the first episode, the pilot episode, if you will, of Bootstrapped Web, the show for business owners like you and me who believe that to get to where we're going, we have to learn by doing. I'm Brian Casel. I'm also Castjam on Twitter.

Brian Casel: 00:26

And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk about what it means to learn by doing and why I believe that's at the core of the bootstrapped startup mentality. But before we get there, I wanna tell you about something that's on my radar this week, and that is reducing distractions. So I've been kind of on a kick lately in terms of reducing the distractions that are keeping me from getting my work done every single day. And this was all inspired by something that Nathan Barry put out on his blog a couple of weeks ago called the productivity manifesto. It's this short little ebook that, know, it's it's free, about 20 or 25 pages.

Brian Casel: 01:12

And just, you know, goes through a a handful of really actionable tips that seem to have been working pretty well for Nathan, in terms of, allowing him to pack more work into every single day. And so I'm just gonna run through a couple of the things that that I've been doing that that I picked up. Thanks to, Nathan Barry's tips here. Number one, removing Twitter from my Macs. I I have I run I work out of two Macs, one one desktop here in my home office and another laptop that I take out to Starbucks a couple times a week.

Brian Casel: 01:49

I I've been using the the Twitter the official Twitter client and also tweet bot a little bit. I removed those completely from the Mac, uninstalled them. Now if I'm at the Mac, I'm working. That's that's what these machines are for. So, you know, I'm not reading articles.

Brian Casel: 02:07

I'm not checking Twitter. You know, I even got rid of Adium, the I'm client that I was using. Now granted, I can still get, you know, Google Hangouts coming through Chrome, but, you know, that's besides the point here. The whole idea here is that I'm using the Mac computers for doing work, getting work done. And if I need to check Twitter, I'll do that on the iPhone or and and I'll read some articles on the iPad during my breaks or or later at night or or when I'm eating breakfast, that's break time.

Brian Casel: 02:39

But in the middle of the day, the the the big session of work in the morning, the big session of work in the afternoon, I'm on the computer, I'm doing work. So that's been huge. Another one is the Pomodoro Technique. This is something I I had never heard of before I read this this productivity manifesto. It's a cool idea.

Brian Casel: 02:59

I guess it's been around for for quite a while. But the the basic concept of of this Pomodoro technique is you work in these twenty five minute sprints of focused work time, and then you take a five minute short break. And and that break is when you kind of rest your mind, you go ahead and and check Twitter, you go ahead and and check your email, know, and then and then you know that you can get back into that twenty five minute work session. Now I've actually been having difficulty constraining it to twenty five minutes because once I get into Photoshop or something, you know, I really dig in and I'm so focused and I'm not distracted anymore that I actually wanna go beyond the twenty five minutes and I end up doing like forty five minute, sessions before I take that break. But anyway, that's been a cool thing to try and I've been really it's actually been working out pretty well.

Brian Casel: 03:54

I also tried a little app for Mac that it's a Pomodoro timer for Mac and that is called, Tadam app. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but you can check that out at, at tadamapp dot com and I'll link all this stuff up, in the show notes. And then one more tip that I picked up from Nathan Barry is to write every single day. Write something every single day. And I'm actually using Nathan's iPhone app that he developed called Commit.

Brian Casel: 04:28

And basically what that does is it bugs me every single day. Hey, did you write something today? So I've got that set up. I've got the alerts. It's it's driving my dog and my wife crazy, but it works.

Brian Casel: 04:41

Basically, the idea here is to make sure that that I'm I'm dedicating a certain amount of time every single day to do some kind of writing. And that could be blog posts on my personal blog. Lately, I've been writing a lot in preparation for these podcast episodes. So that would count as a writing session. I'm also writing a lot of guest articles on other sites.

Brian Casel: 05:04

So every time I'm writing, I'm not only getting better at improving my writing chops, but it's just putting more content out there, opening up more opportunities, opening up more doors. This stuff just always helps. And yeah, I have a lot of other work to do, but I I do find that, the more I write, the more I put myself out there, things just happen to, show up. Opportunities arise. You know, you you don't foresee these things unless you just put those those touch points out there on the web and and give people more ways to to interact with you.

Brian Casel: 05:44

So that's what's been on my radar, you know, reducing distractions and just getting more work done. It's probably the the only way that I've I've actually been able to start this podcast. You know, the only way I could actually carve out the time is to make sure that every workday, I'm I'm getting, you know, more bang for my buck. So so to speak in terms of, you know, getting more done every single day. So I hope that these tips help you guys.

Brian Casel: 06:10

You guys should definitely check out that productivity manifesto. I'll link it up in the show notes. But right now, we're gonna move on. So next up, I wanna tell you about this week's video case study, which is up on bootstrappedweb.com. So, I'm a cofounder of an app called SuiteProcess, and I handle all of the, design duties there.

Brian Casel: 06:32

So for this case study, I walked through the design of the suiteprocess.com homepage, which is the main sales page for the app. So I kind of go through my thought process as I went about designing, copywriting, and organizing this this landing page design. So that case study video is up on bootstrappedweb.com. So please go ahead, check it out. Let me know what you think.

Brian Casel: 06:57

And, in a minute later in this episode, I'm I'm going to, tell you what these case studies are all about. But right now, it's time for the main event of this episode, and that is the idea that we learn by doing. So we, as bootstrapped entrepreneurs who work on the web, the way we do what we do is we learn by doing. Why do we choose to bootstrap our startups rather than seek out investors? Or why do we choose to start a company rather than go out and get a job at a company?

Brian Casel: 07:33

We do it because we can. We possess the ability, the skill sets, to build something from the ground up. And we're able to handle most, if not all, of the workload ourselves, at least at the beginning before we start hiring a team and employees and things. But a lot of time, if we're honest, we really have no idea what we're doing. We might have experience in certain areas, which gets us about half of the way there.

Brian Casel: 08:05

But there are always gaps in our knowledge, gaps in our experience. So how do we build and launch a product or grow a company when there is so much that we haven't learned how to do yet? The answer, we figure it out. Right? So we get in there, we get our hands dirty, we screw things up, we learn from our mistakes, we get better by taking action.

Brian Casel: 08:31

So we learn by doing. Let me give you a quick example of what I'm talking about. So, one of my bootstrapped startups that I run is called, Restaurant Engine at restaurantengine.com. And that's a web design service, for restaurants. It's packaged in a in a SaaS, software as a service model.

Brian Casel: 08:52

Now I come from a background as a web designer. So I'm already pretty comfortable when it comes to, designing a website for a restaurant. You know, I've I've designed websites for all sorts of clients. But, you know, when it comes to restaurant engine, there is much more involved. In fact, building Restaurant Engine was way more complicated than anything I had ever worked on prior to that.

Brian Casel: 09:17

This was my first time running a hosted web design service, so there is a lot of technical baggage that that comes with that. You know, for example, I needed to I needed to offer, customers the ability to map their own domain names to their sites on Restaurant Engine. So I had to I had to figure out and basically teach myself all the ins and outs of how DNS works, which honestly has always been kind of a cloudy subject for me. You know, I I tend to stay on the design, the the front end side of things where I feel safe. I mean, to tell you the truth, I I can't believe that I got by for for so many years as as a professional web designer, you know, without really understanding the difference between, like, a c name and and an a record and, and all the all all that fun stuff that happens at at the server level and and and how DNS works and all all that crazy stuff.

Brian Casel: 10:14

Basically, had to like really dig in and and and get a solid understanding of that. You know, and and this project, engine, building restaurant engine, that gave me the opportunity to go in and get my hands dirty in this area where I felt uncomfortable. I just started putting the pieces together, and every time I hit a roadblock, and there were lots of them, you know, I'd start Googling and reading up on it. I did a lot of testing and doing trial runs, and eventually, I felt confident enough that things were working and it's ready to to ship to to live customers. So so that's that's an example of, you know, how I I kind of learned by doing in in that situation.

Brian Casel: 11:01

And I think that gives you kind of a snapshot of what this podcast Bootstrapped Web is all about. I wanna dig into what it means to be a bootstrapped entrepreneur and what it really means to learn by doing. So that brings me back to the case studies. So the goal of each case study video on Bootstrapped Web is to give you a glimpse of a project that happens behind the scenes at a startup. I wanna show you the work, the thought processes, the hurdles, the decisions that are made during the course of of any given project.

Brian Casel: 11:40

And basically, it's your chance to see firsthand everything that goes on between point A and point B. So I'll be doing some case studies myself, and hopefully I'll get some guests on who are, you know, way more talented than I am, to come on and share their case studies. So in a nutshell, there are two parts to Bootstrapped Web. First, there is this podcast, which will be released every week on Monday morning. Subscribe in iTunes for that.

Brian Casel: 12:11

And then there are the video case studies, which are available to watch on the site at bootstrappedweb.com, and also on the YouTube channel. So, new case studies will come out every two weeks. So we'll have a new podcast episode every week and a new case study video every two weeks. So now it's time for the big question. And here's my question for you this week.

Brian Casel: 12:36

What was one thing that you learned on the job while building your Bootstrap startup? Tell me in the comments on this episode, and I'll share them in next week's show. And be sure to include your website URL so we can see what you do. Next week on Bootstrapped Web, I I'm hoping to have our first interview. I have a list of of other Bootstrapped entrepreneurs who I plan to reach out to and try to get them on the show to interview and and hear what they're working on right now and where things are going in their start ups.

Brian Casel: 13:12

So I'm hoping to have, the first one of those, in next week's episode. So stay tuned for that next Monday. Hey, guys. I've got a mailing list, so please head over to bootstrappedweb.com, enter your email, and you'll be in the loop on everything that's going on here. Thanks for tuning in to Bootstrapped Web.