Hi Reader, it’s Friday, and here’s this week’s edition of the Build In Public newsletter.

I’m Pierre, documenting my journey of building a software consulting business from scratch.

Time Management and Paperwork

So much paperwork this week! I was considering setting up a SASU (Société par Actions Simplifiée Unipersonnelle) to optimize taxes, but after diving into the details, I realized it would be a lot of work. Registering a SASU takes time, requires an accountant (with annual fees ranging from 1000 to 2000 EUR), there are creation and registration fees, fees to shut it down, and you need capital. So, I’ve decided to hold off on that for now. I’ll tackle it later when I have enough yearly income to justify the extra cost and complexity.

In the meantime, I opted for a sole trader structure. It’s much simpler to register, and the accounting is straightforward. However, the downside is that I can’t deduct expenses, so there’s no tax optimization possible.

New Project on the Horizon

On the business front, I’m starting a new project soon where I’ll help someone with their Ruby on Rails application. I’ll be assisting with automation, refining feature requirements, and implementing those features. It should be an interesting challenge!

Time Off and Reading

Next week, I’m taking some time off to visit a friend I haven’t seen in years and meet his son. It’ll be a nice break to recharge.

In the meantime, I’ve started reading $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi. It seems like everyone has read this book, so there must be something to it. The concepts are interesting, and the gist of it is about creating an offer that’s so good that prospects would be foolish to refuse it. For example, Hormozi shares the methods he used to grow businesses to $3M per year when others would charge 10-50k for the same knowledge. The idea is to offer these methods for free, help businesses reach that point, and then, if it works, invest in the business to help grow it further. It’s an offer that seems too good to refuse: you get $10-50k worth of knowledge for free, and the author makes money only if it works. There’s not much downside for the prospects. There are other examples in the book, and I’ll report back once I’ve finished it.

LinkedIn Stats and Newsletter Schedule

• LinkedIn: 247 impressions, 108 people reached, 8 engagements (likes, comments).
• Audience breakdown: 11.1% software engineers, 15.1% decision-makers.

I didn’t send a newsletter last Friday because something personal came up, and this might explain the lower LinkedIn stats. I only posted twice instead of three times last week.

Jobhelper.ch and Coding Experiment

I’ve also added a new calculator on jobhelper.ch. Most of the site’s visitors came from Google, looking for the one calculator the tool didn’t have (I could tell from the search terms that brought people to the site from Google.) I thought I’d try the Codeium AI to implement it, but that didn’t go well. It insisted on using React, which isn’t part of this project. In the end, I went the good old-fashioned route: using my own brain. While I was at it, I fell into a rabbit hole, updated most of the dependencies, added sharding to parallelize the Playwright tests, and made some other tweaks here and there. I’ll be watching the Plausible analytics to see if these updates have any impact on traffic—it’ll be interesting to track.

Final Thoughts

Time management continues to be a challenge. For example, I’m not doing nearly enough prospecting as I should be. I’m working on creating prospecting email templates, but I’m not making as much progress as I’d like. Finding a way to be concise, to the point, and convincing is hard! It’s tricky to strike the right balance—being brief without losing the core message or sounding too pushy. It’s a work in progress, but I’m hoping that once I nail these templates, it’ll be much easier to scale my outreach.

That's all for this week. As always, feel free to hit reply if you have any thoughts or want to chat. I read every message.

Have a great weekend, and see you in the next one!