Hi [person], I'm Jesse. [How I found you] [What I like about you] I'm wondering if you'd be interested in getting to know each other a bit more?
A bit about me: I'm a full-stack web developer with fifteen years of experience. I live San Francisco. I left Airbnb six months ago to start a startup. I'm looking to grow my personal network with the goal of eventually finding a great cofounder. You can learn more about me on my personal webpage: http://jessealdridge.com/resume
Here's my current plan:
- Learn to develop WordPress webpages
- Work as a contract developer on Upwork
- Become more efficient and grow revenue over time
- Use the knowledge gained in this process to build a better web development platform
- Build a company around this platform
- Broaden into other areas of software development
- Eventually become the primary place people go to get software built
The eventual goal here is a fully automated software development platform. I believe there is a $10 trillion opportunity here. WordPress websites are just a small, high-demand niche where I can get started immediately. Here is a brief presentation with more info: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pU-z6QShrAtoCwn3KoTegC7Sc_Gf-8L_A8FleyYLPcg
More concretely, I think the next immediate step for me is to build what I'm calling a "website builder wrapper". What does that mean? Well, many clients I've been working with have a desire to modify and maintain their own websites themselves. They don't want to deal with the ~48 hour round-trip time, hourly fees, and various other hassles that come from dealing with third party devshops. But they don't have the time or skills required to build a professional quality website, even using one of the existing website building tools. What they can do is make tweaks to existing pages via a visual page-building tool, as well as update content, administer the database, and other basic stuff like that. But they still need someone to get on the phone with them, understand their needs, come up with a solution, put the initial version of the site together in a visual builder, connect various other services like Shopify or MailChimp or whatever, give them a bit of training, and then fix things if they break.
I'm currently averaging ~$500 a week in revenue doing what I just described. I expect this number to increase a lot as I become more familiar with the ecosystem and build tooling to gradually automate my work.
So there you have it. Let me know if you'd like to talk more.
- Jesse