Solo Builders Club

A newsletter to help you build, deploy, and sell your dream projects ✨

Hey — It’s Jerrell

It finally feels like fall in the Bay Area. That means leaves falling down and Halloween decorations going up.

My neighborhood is starting to look like the set of Halloweentown from Nightmare Before Christmas.

My wife and I’s contribution: we put one glow in the dark skeleton hand in our front yard. Its fingers form the peace sign.

Let no neighbor say we didn’t contribute to the vibe.

Estimated read time: ~3 minutes and 25 seconds.

Three Video Editing Tools

1/ Capcut

Look. I’m no authority on video editing tools. I tried to produce my first Youtube short this weekend and 30 seconds in found myself on Twitter. But as a newbie, all of my professional video editing friends recommended Capcut as a good starting tool. It takes hours not weeks / months to learn and abstracts away some of the more complicated parts of editing. And yep, I can hear that question you’re thinking: it also uses AI. A lot. If you’re like me and just starting to learn how to edit videos then it’s worth checking out.

2/ Descript

Okay, don’t tell my friends, but I tried another video editor this weekend as well. There was a lot of discussion on Reddit (very divisive, in fact) about Descript. This tool is AI from start to finish. The pitch: a video editor that works like docs and slides, so no need to learn a new editing tool. Arrange visuals like a slide deck. Type to generate words in your own voice using AI. I’m still playing around with this one, but as a first timer it has made the thought of creating and editing videos seem way less overwhelming.

3/ Wondershare Filmora

I came across this one in a list of AI video editors. Honestly, it seems like the most traditional of the three in this newsletter. Its got a couple of AI features, but probably not outside the norm for video editors nowadays. The talk on social media says this is very similar to Capcut. I’ll give some updates on this one, but so far I do like that it is mostly free and because its been around for awhile there is a decent community to provide support.

Two Tips on Promoting Yourself When You Have Zero Followers

I’ve been following John Rush for sometime. He’s all in on the solo builder lifestyle and is the self-proclaimed king of building directories. He had a great tweet thread recently that started like this:

As a person starting new projects and who has ZERO followers on social for any of them I was instantly like “tell me more kind sir.”

It’s a 15 tweet thread, but I’m going to call out two specific tweets that I like.

1/

This one immediately resonated. I’ve done this multiple times for both projects and companies I’ve started. Reddit is specifically effective, because users will be both frank (at the cost of any feelings you may have) and provide (mostly) constructive feedback. As John says, be honest. Be you. Tell your story. If you try the hard sell approach you will get promptly (and rightly) destroyed.

2/

This feels the same as the one above but it’s different. I’m part of dozens of Slack and Discord communities. Unlike Reddit, the hard sell approach can be effective. Many members of these community are actively looking for tools to help them. It’s part of the reason they joined. The strategy here though is to find the right channels and the right approach to post your product. Try to get a sense of how members discuss and share with each other. And then copy the most successful approaches.

One Thought on Automating Yourself

Steph Smith is one of my favorite creators on the internet. She’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling digital products. And I think a lot of her success is because of ideas like this. Being a solo builder doesn’t mean you have to always take the hard route. In the age of AI you should always ask yourself: is there a way to automate this task?

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And that’s it for issue #2. Thanks for reading.

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See you next Monday — Jerrell & Chase

P.S. — I have hundreds of tools to share with you. I’m going to put together a database (see image below) of all of them in the next few weeks. I’ll share the first and, limited time only, free link to it in this newsletter so stayed tuned…

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