My attempt at creating a niche dropship ecommerce store specifically stocking alternative, independent sportswear brands you haven't heard of before. I'm always looking for new gym or running gear but got sick of wearing the same generic, low performing high street brands. After spending countless hours searching online for alternative brands I decided I would start cataloging them and perhaps create an affiliate based platform and later move into dropshipping.
The premise of the site was to curate unique Airbnb cabins within a trains ride from London. We both have been huge fans of Airbnb since it's early days. However, since the recent explosion of properties on the platform it's been increasingly hard to find some of the unique properties. We also considered adding a blog - documenting our stays at some of the featured properties on the platform. We will be looking to make the final tweaks to the site and get an early version out in 2019.
I summarise tech & business content via twitter so you don't have to.
In 2018 I read over 2.4m words online, equating to approximately 19 books. All of this was logged on a popular reading app I use called Pocket. After reading a tweet by Neil Strauss discussing retaining information - I was intrigued. How can I retain more of what I read online? So I decided to conduct a simple experiment by logging the key points of particularly interesting posts I read and condensing them into 280 characters on twitter.
Inspired by an Indie Hackers post - titled 'Post your landing page and let others describe what your company does in 10s'. The post got a lot of attention and upvotes. Clearly, this is something the maker community liked.
In the interests of keeping the thread active, I knocked up a quick site using Weebly and Airtable, allowing makers to continue to get feedback on their landing pages for free. I don't actively manage the site now Indie Hackers have a similar feature.
A blog consisting of interviews with early stage founders and makers. I wanted to dig into some of the burning questions I wish I knew whilst building an online business. As you can see from the logo design it was a old school phase I was going through taken from Pacman. I managed to publish 6 interviews with some fascinating businesses and founders but it fizzled out. I had underestimated the amount of time it took to find interviewees, edit the content and promote it.
A London based tuition service focusing on providing 1-2-1 hourly tuition teaching website creation using drag and drop website builders. This was a great little side business leveraging my knowledge on Weebly and other website builders together with various online design tools and plugins. I used Gumtree to advertise my services and had over 20 clients in the space of a year working with me after hours during the week days and across weekends. I had to stop once my other side projects and new full time job took precedence. I later provided the website to a friend who took over.
The Sustainable Glasgow Project (SGP) was my first attempt at creating a business and website for that matter. I was in second year of uni in Glasgow studying Environmental Science whilst working at Apple. I was initially inspired at some of my colleagues at Apple creating online side projects or blogs and decided to create an environmental blog myself. I curated all the latest environmental news and events in Glasgow. The website later pivoted into a social enterprise and won a grant from UnLtd and started Glasgow's first carbon offsetting scheme. After moving to London I had to unfortunately close shop.
