leanpreneur1•This week
Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5
My current side project started 56 days ago when I started writing 1,000 words per day.
My core businesses are an agency and job board, and I just needed a creative outlet.
The likes of Chris Guillebeau and Nathan Barry attribute their progression to writing so I thought I’d see if it might do the same for me.
At first I was just vomiting words onto the screen, I made a blog and wrote mainly technical guides related to my skills.
Over time I realised I was writing more and more about running a business as a solopreneur, or lean operator.
There is tons of content out there giving you the Birds Eye of going from 0 to £10m. Inspiring stuff, but I think there is a void in real content, explaining the nuts and bolts of the how.
What is the day-to-day like for the solopreneurs who make a good living and have plenty of free time? That’s what I’m striving for anyway.
I’m not talking about the 7-figure outliers.
Or the ones teaching you to make content so you can have a business teaching others how to make content, and so on.
I’m also sick of the ‘I made $X in 5 minutes and how you can too’
So, I started chatting to people in my network who run lean businesses and/or side hustles.
I ask them a bit about their journey and ask them to teach something - how they operate, or a skill/process/system/tool that other people like you/me will find useful.
One of my first chats was with Sam Dickie, who runs multiple side projects so thought I’d share here, see if others find it useful and get some feedback.
I’ve removed all links as I’ve never posted on Reddit before so conscious of not being promotional, I’m posting this stuff to a tiny email list of friends with no upsells.
Just finding my feet on whether others find it useful or not:
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Sam is a serial entrepreneur who builds projects in his spare time whilst working a 9-5. He’s scaled and sold multiple ventures and currently runs one of the best newsletters out there for builders and entrepreneurs.
Building audience through newsletters has always been a cornerstone strategy for him, so, along with sharing his advice on solopreneurism, he’s also generously shared his lean newsletter writing process.
About Sam
Sam is a Senior Product Manager who has spent the last 15 years working in the tech sector after starting his career as a town planner. In addition to his job he spends some of his spare time building side projects.
These have included a 3D printing startup, a tech directory, a newsletter, a beta product directory, and consultancy.
Sam is the epitome of making a success out of following your interest and curiosity. It’s clear he enjoys his business ventures and builds in a risk-free way.
It’s often touted by business gurus to avoid building around your interests, but Sam bucks the trend successfully. I think he’s someone who has already found his 1,000 true fans.
Descending rabbit holes, Sam’s journey of invention and curation
3D printing
Sam’s first foray into launching a startup was with Fiilo, a 3D printing business. This was at the height of the 3D printing craze and he self-admits that he used the launch as an excuse to buy a 3D printer.
He ended up with two and launching a product called GrowGo. GrowGo is a sustainable 3D-printed product that turns any bottle into somewhere that you can grow plants and herbs.
He eventually sold this business and the printers, making around £10k.
Along the way, he was exposed to various business tasks, including building a website in Weebly, the biggest nocode website builder of the time, and built an API that enabled print on demand for his product.
NoCode.Tech
The experiences of building as someone non-technical led to numerous friends asking how he built all of this tech.
Back then, nocode wasn’t popular, and it had almost zero search volume, so Sam created a basic directory. A quick landing page on Weebly with a basic value prop, a short explanation and a list of the tools he had used before.
It hit the top spot on Product Hunt, and he landed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours.
But, he hadn’t built it at this point, so he set about getting to work.
He built the directory and list to 30,000 subs and monetised the site through advertising. At its peak with Sam, it was receiving about £2,000 per month in ad revenue.
He was still working his 9-5 at this point, so thought it might be a good time to exit. The site was still growing, but it was becoming anxiety inducing whilst he was still working full-time. So, he ended up selling the site and making friend’s with the buyer.
Fast forwarding a bit, Nocode.tech was eventually acquired by Stackr, a nocode app. Sam was working for their competitor at the time and ended up being offered a job by his friend who acquired the site.
All of this from a side project in his area of passion.
Creator Club
After selling the directory, Sam lost his outlet for sharing his tools and learnings.
Being fascinated with curation and loving sifting through for nuggets, he invested more time into his personal website and launched Creator Club newsletter.
Sam writes monthly and currently has over 8,000 subs. It’s one of the few newsletters that I let bypass my email filters and land in my main inbox.
Life as a Part-Time Multipreneur Side Hustler
If it’s not obvious already Sam is a curiosity led business creator.
He’s found that the products without a revenue focus or intention have ironically outperformed those created for the sole purpose of creating money.
He enjoys working on his side hustles.
He could have run the Nocode.Tech for 10 more years and wouldn’t have tired of it as it’s a byproduct of his interest.
For this reason, he has also created the Beta Directory, simply because he loves unearthing early-stage products.
He admits he gets the fear when he thinks about quitting his 9-5, although he suspects if he devoted the same energy to one of his projects it could replace his income (no doubts from me here).
This same fear means that he can run his ventures with less fear. This way, he can experiment with freedom and isn’t risking the ranch with a young family to consider.
For example, recently he stopped paid sponsors on his newsletter as it was more stress than the value of the income to him.
Sam divides his time on evenings and weekends (unequally) between the following:
Creator Club
Validation Co
Beta directory
Consultancy
The pure side hustle status magnifies the need to run lean, let’s jump into his process….
Sam’s lean newsletter curation and creation process
Starting out publishing his personal newsletter
Going against his expertise, Sam originally over-engineered his process.
He curated with Feedly and tried to automate the full writing process with Zapier.
The trouble is that there are too many points of failure which can lead the whole chain to break down, and you spend more time fixing the system.
For a 200 subscriber newsletter, he needed to pare things back.
His set-up now
Sam scaled back and now simple builds automations when he needs them.
He keeps the process simple, right down to the design and any welcome automations.
Keeping things real
We touched on the trend that keeping things raw is better.
Content has come full circle with the advent of AI. Everything looks too perfect and consequently, people’s tastes are changing.
Sam mentioned watermarks that show content isn’t AI written, and we referenced content such as Greg Isenberg’s sketches, and Chris Donnelly’s image posts.
\\Step by Step Process:\\
Using Stoop Inbox to manage sources
Curation with Pocket
Managing content with Airtable and Zapier
Using Bearly to summarise
Substack for writing
Monitoring content sources
Sam uses Stoop Inbox, an RSS curation tool, to manage his content sources. It gives him a dedicated email address for newsletters and he follows an Inbox Zero methodology. He checks in daily in Stoop, and on X, Reddit and IndieHackers.
With X, he just uses the standard interface but has been careful to curate his feed, sometimes adding in extra notifications to hear from interesting people.
Highlighting content
When curating links, Sam uses Arc browser and the Pocket extension to save links. It’s super simple and lightweight. He creates tags which trigger an automation that curates the link to Airtable.
If you watch the video, here’s a shoutout to Alice, the AI interface I use which has recently featured on Product Hunt. It’s a fantastic tool with bags of potential to enhance a solopreneur’s life.
Ranking and sorting content
He sends the links indexed using Pocket to a basic Airtable base via Zapier. From there, he grades the content and sets aside some time to read it in more depth.
Pocket pulls through the title, metadata, and URL link.
Review
Sam does this manually but has used a tool as a shortcut for digesting long form content — Bearly.ai. Bearly.ai was created by Trung Phan and linking back to raw content, Trung is 1/3 of the hosts on the Not Investment Advice podcast. Its irreverent style and thumbnail are an example of a successful podcast that doesn’t over polish.
Writing it all up
Being a huge Notion fan (check out the free templates on his site), Sam originally used Notion for writing and linked it into Revue.
When Elon sunsetted Revue, he switched to Substack. He loves the Substack interface so drafts in Substack based on a duplication of last month’s edition.
Before publishing, Sam runs through a 10-point Notion checklist, which he shared with me.
Parting Advice
Keep your tool stack as lean as possible.
Avoid tool switching to the shiny new object. Getting launched quickly is key.
Don’t think that you have to be everywhere for distribution, Sam sticks with what he knows on X and LinkedIn.
Overall, he advises just keeping things simple and therefore minimising risk.
Resources
He says they’re cliche, but I don’t agree; they’re timeless.
Paul Graham of Y Combinator is someone Sam recommends following. He doesn’t write much, which is great as Sam gets anxiety when someone good often writes and he can’t keep up with the writing. His content is well thought out and distills complex concepts in entrepreneurship and startups.
In addition, Sam loves Naval Ravikant’s approach. He mentions checking out the Almanac of Naval Ravikant for collected wisdom.
Follow Sam’s Journey
Again, not going to link here but you can find Sam’s stuff easily enough if you want to.
His personal website is beautiful and contains loads of free downloads. He has also curated personal websites he admires if you need some inspiration.
Sam is a super nice guy so reach out to him, I did before I started my personal blog recently, and he gave me some great advice.
Also, worth keeping an eye on Validation Co, where he aims to help early-stage makers and creators validate their ideas. He’s building super slow — trying to enjoy the process without unachievable deadlines.
Maintaining his stamina and passion. Amazing, I hope he writes more about that soon!
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That’s my second shot at an interview, hope you enjoyed it and found something useful in it.
I’m talking to a marketplace founder who spends 2–3 hours per month his project, a multiple job board owner with a 9-5 and a leading book designer next.
As this is my side project, should I keep going?
