How to Become a Better Entrepreneur by Wiping Down Car Windows on Sunday Mornings
Work For Free Strategy Progress Update #2
Note: This is part two of my monthly progress update, check out part one if haven't already.
I recently met a really cool dude on the internet. Let's call him Dexter.
When Dexter was around 11 years old, his dad would go drink at a local bar every Sunday morning and take young Dexter with him.
Young Dexter got bored. At first, he would just play videos game, but then his saw a business opportunity.
He started taking some dry rags with him on those Sunday trips, and he would wipe down all the dirty car windows in the parking lot.
"Did you ask people to pay you after you wipe their windows?" I asked.
"No. I just stood next to their car, smiled really brightly when they came out the bar, and they would usually tip me nicely," Dexter explained. "I would make around $50 dollars on those Sunday trips."
It feels really refreshing to hear a young boy had carried out the "work for free" strategy successfully.
Dexter now has a successful web marketing company that he has owned for the past nine years.
Let's go over the third and fourth highlights from this month (Feb 22, 2021 ~ Mar 21, 2021).
3) Designed And Built My Portfolio Website
I've been using Charlie Hoehn's "Recession Proof Graduate" book as a blueprint for how I am implementing the "work for free" strategy.
In the book, Charlie recommends his readers stop sending out boring resumes. What he encourages us to do is to reach out to the people we want to work for with a link to our portfolio website.
Don't worry if you don't have any coding experience or never built a website. You could make a decent website in less than a week using web building tools like Squarespace or WordPress.
On the other hand, if you are looking to become a software or website developer, then I do recommend you try building your website from scratch.
It took me two weeks to redesign and build my new portfolio website.
I learned how to use Figma for designing websites. It's a great tool, and it's also free if you are not collaborating on the project with anybody else.
In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I'm currently using Affinity Designer for graphic designs. Some people also use it to make websites, but since Figma is free and made specifically for designing websites, I decided to use Figma in this scenario.
I also had to learn Next.js, it's a software framework that makes building simple websites from scratch more efficient.
Building a static website from scratch does take a lot longer, but you get the benefit of having services like Github Pages, Netlify, and Vercel to host your website for free if there isn't too much traffic going to the website.
I am currently using Vercel for my portfolio website, I am pretty happy with how my portfolio website turned out.
4) Building a Simple Version of Tynan.com
Tynan is probably one the most interesting dudes on the internet. Some of the cool things he did in the past include being a professional poker player, living in an RV for 10 years, and purchasing an island with a few friends. Now, he spends his time coaching people building better habits and social skills, while running his online cruise agency on the side.
Anyways, Tynan mentioned recently on a YouTube Live stream that he was considering moving to a new platform for his blog. Hi current blogging platform, SETT, which he programmed himself years ago has been running into some issues.
I saw this as an opportunity to connect. My plan was to email him about Webflow, which in my opinion is the most powerful website builder platform in the market at the moment, and recommended to him some resources I used to learn Webflow.
Webflow does have a much steeper learning curve than Squarespace and WordPress, but Tynan has a ton of programming experience, so I'm sure he'll be fine.
My friend Dexter had a better suggestion.
He said, "George. If you really want to impress Tynan, how about you build him the website using Webflow instead of just telling him about it?"
"You kidding?!" I exclaimed. " Tynan has been blogging for 15 years, there's no way I can copy and paste all of his content over in less than a month."
"How about you just bringing over his 10 newest blog posts as an example?" Dexter recommended.
"Oh. That's a good point."
So I ended up building a simple version of Tynan's blog and emailed it to him along with the login info.
The simple version includes two main pages and five of his most recent blog posts. This surprisingly only took me about two days considering how much time I spent on my own website.
If you haven’t already, subscribe below to get my BEST updates.
Thanks for reading!
-George 🐙