Building a Foundation
When you first start out as a micro-entrepreneur, you’ll pivot and change course a bunch before things settle into a more predictable rhythm. It happened to me, and it probably happened to everyone else who’s begun a business. And that’s totally fine. Sometimes plans and ideas sound great before they’re actually put into practice. The important thing is to keep forging ahead, making changes as needed.
However, the velocity of change in the early days, combined with the goal of building the very foundation for your business, can at times feel like a complete whirlwind. When this happens, be sure that your decision-making abilities aren’t clouded by the storm. Because rushing into early-stage decisions can easily introduce problems in the form of over-engineering, over-optimizing, or over-spending of your time and money. Issues like these can cause a ripple effect, negatively impacting your business for weeks, months, or more.
First, rethink decision-making
Early on, I was making decisions like I was still an employee at some company. And in retrospect, several of those decisions I made cost me valuable time and money. Excellent lessons learned, for sure, but I think my biggest issue was that I had spent the last fifteen years as a tech employee. In that type of environment, decision-making is just done differently, especially when you’re an individual contributor. There are generally many layers to the corporate onion, and when it comes to any sort of decisions that need to be made, you bet there’s a person with varying authority at every layer giving their opinion, approval, or disapproval. With that in mind, the scope of what needs to be decided upon generally narrows once it trickles down to you.
But this sort of mindset doesn’t fit when you’re a micro-entrepreneur! I finally realized it once a few key pieces fell into place around how to best approach not only the creation of my micro-startup studio but also how to best approach work itself. This led me to develop a few simple questions to ponder before any sort of decision-making that requires a shred or more of critical thinking:
- Do I need this today to earn revenue tomorrow?
- What systems can I build instead of buy?
- What’s the minimum to spin the flywheel?
What I like most about this is that these questions cut right to the chase. No convoluted frameworks for you to follow or drawn-out processes. They’re simple. But they’re also a friendly reminder that you’re in charge now, so make sure you’re thinking of things less like an IC and more like a founder.
Next, apply simple guidelines
Before you jump into building or buying anything for the foundation of your business, it’s a good idea to apply some simple guidelines that embody the spirit of micro-entrepreneurship while you filter through your options:
1. Services should do one job really well
This isn’t just limited to software, but really any service that is either offered or received. The idea is that the service should do one job really well. When this is the case, the service will almost always be easier to operate and maintain, easier to market, easier to use, easier to enjoy by all, just plain easy all around.
2. Systems should support rapid iteration
This, too, isn’t limited to software, but really any system that is used by the business or for the business. In effect, most things should be decoupled and have a smaller surface area so that when changes are introduced, these smaller cogs in the machine can be easily swapped out with minimal friction.
Lastly, build a purposeful foundation
After spending my first few months weathering that whirlwind of change I mentioned earlier, I came out on the other side with a renewed sense of direction and focus, ready to bring my micro-startup studio concept to life.
At its core, a micro-startup studio is a collection of micro-businesses. The idea is to rapidly ideate, validate, and ship multiple small-scale digital products and services. With that in mind, I began to think about what was fundamentally necessary to get the crank turning:
- Systems that promote rapid development
- Local LLMs and agents as force multipliers
- Email marketing automation to build lists
And while your journey may be different, you’ll need to start with your own lasting foundation, too. Using the tactics described in detail above, below is a summary of what I chose and why.
My goal is to provide this to you as an example and even inspiration to help you get headed in the right direction.
Systems that promote rapid development
Each micro-business will need a content-driven website. Whether it’s a single landing page or more, the “digital storefront” will be powered by the content, the knowledge, and the narrative presented to the customer. For this, I chose Astro, as it’s an excellent framework that checks off a lot of boxes.
Next, I wanted to avoid the convoluted developer experience that a massive cloud platform can introduce given the above-mentioned guidelines and overall vibe of keeping things small by nature. For this, I chose Digital Ocean for their virtual private servers, known as Droplets. They totally encompass the simplicity and freedom I’m a fan of.
Lastly, I wrote software to facilitate the provisioning of Droplets and their dependencies (and their apps’ dependencies), CI/CD pipelines, and other services that support the idea of rapidly building small-scale websites and persistent web apps with a minimal footprint and cost.
Local LLMs and agents as force multipliers
In the spirit of keeping things small and micro, and in having some decent compute power in-house, I decided to limit my LLM use to local models running natively on my own hardware. It’s so far been a positive experience on par with what all of the tech bros on LinkedIn rave about in regard to Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, without the annoyance of running out of tokens, shelling out a monthly subscription, or concerns regarding privacy.
I chose LM Studio for its ease of setup and ability to host models over my network with a click of a button. For foreground development work, Zed code editor has been my go-to and it offers very capable engineering agent abilities that can make use of whatever model is hosted via LM Studio. For background development work, Opencode has been a great experience so far and is also a very capable engineering agent that will happily cook the small stuff while I focus on things that need my attention most.
Email marketing automation to build lists
A key piece of the marketing strategy for each micro-business will be email. Say what you will about other channels, but email cuts directly through the noise and algorithms to get you a direct line to someone who has a problem that you can solve when they are purchasing your goods or services.
For this, I jumped around on a few different free trials but ultimately landed on Kit. Their REST API seems to offer a good mix of what I was looking for and their free tier is incredibly generous. The only caveat here is, and it’ll be a good problem to have, is that there’s a bit of manual building necessary to work around some of the paid features. More on this in a future article for sure.
Wrapping up
When you approach your decision-making early on with a clear perspective, unperturbed by the changes endured during the early starting-up days, just know that a simple set of questions and guidelines can help you tremendously when you’re building the foundation of your business. Move fast, sure, but don’t do it in a way where you’re zapped by the negative effects of over-engineering, over-optimizing, or over-spending of your time and money.
