Lee Watkins

Lee Watkins

@unieklee.com

Building: sessionsupply.uk Current: 🍏 iOS Engineer & πŸ₯ frisbee player. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ Aspiring: πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» Entrepreneur

447 followers586 following260 posts

So incredibly grateful that we have the technology to get mid-day updates from the nursery. It's epic getting to see our baby girl having fun & learning while we can't be with her.

Any Shopify users built their storefront with Lovable? How've you found the experience, particularly after the store's been live for a while and/or you've had to make updates?

@figma.com's Buzz has been super helpful generating labels for all our different coffee variants - we've ended up with 64 different labels, and it would have been a real pain to do by hand. It's still a bit buggy, but so useful that it was worth dealing with the bugs.

Sharing the progress of building a business, while you're: - building the business, - working a full-time job, and - raising a family is hard work. How do all you other entrepreneurs do this?

Shopify is our go-to for our store. Getting our products and payments set up has been super easy - it's a really great experience for shop owners. There's still a load of design work to do, getting the shop looking like Session, but we're loving it!

Coffee supplier chosen - we're underway! We reached out to around 7 potential suppliers, 4 responded, we chatted to 3, trialled 2 and chose 1 to work with. We're making decisions quickly and moving forward - suppliers can always change later.

The next stage of Session is less about making more things and more about learning faster. The brand is good enough to share. The product direction is good enough to test. The website and email capture are live.

Now I need: - 20-50 feedback conversations - 100 email subscribers - first 10 customers after launch Small targets, but real ones.

I read a post earlier that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT. I could tell because it used a bunch of phrases that ChatGPT uses when I write with it. I started looking through the comments, expecting to see a whole bunch of people replying with "oh so AI, so AI" but...

all of the comments were also very clearly written by AI, most of them ChatGPT as well! Are we living in a world where social media is just one person's AI broadcasting something and everyone else’s AI commenting? Is AI the way that we do β€œconnection” now?

There's just something about that first coffee of the work day that is so beautiful. The ritual of brewing it, the punch of flavour, the moment of reflection. It's just lovely!

I've already ruled out one supplier route for Session. Not because the coffee was bad. The operating model just added too much complexity before validation.

Own bags, own labels, retainer/credit. Maybe later. Right now the job is simpler: - get to market - test the positioning - talk to the right people - learn before optimising

Sometimes a lie in bed at night excited for the morning because I get to have a cup of coffee. Am I the only one? οΏΌ

How am I gonna sell coffee? Genuinely unsure whether I’ll be able to build something convincing enough to get people to buy coffee from me. I’m a software engineer, not a marketer, not a coffee expert. So why would people buy coffee from me?

Apparently packaging is pretty important, so I've made some decision for Session: - no coffee bean graphics - no illustrations - no loud speciality coffee language

Typography first. Lots of whitespace. SESSION as the visual anchor. I want it to feel more like a premium notebook or modern software tool than a traditional coffee bag. Is that even possible?

I've started building something that's NOT software, and the amount of relief I feel each time I see a "post your SaaS" or "I'll review your SaaS for free" is SO liberating. Should have done this a long time ago. Physical products FTW!

Most people will probably see Session as a coffee company to start off with. That's fine...but it's not really how I'm thinking about it.

Coffee is the first product because it already fits into the working day. It sits on the desk, marks the start of a "session", and gives people a small ritual before they begin. The bigger idea is a brand for people who work online. Still testing whether that framing is clear.

Session became a lot more real last week. - name chosen - brand direction set - first coffee lineup mapped - suppliers contacted - website live - email capture live - socials created

The biggest shift is that I don't really think of it as a coffee company anymore. Coffee is chapter one. The real idea is a lifestyle brand for people who work online.

This weekend is all about starting to build out some social media posts for Session. Not something I’ve historically been good at, but thankfully I’ve got some support.

One upside about building a lifestyle brand that exists int he physical world is that it’s much easier to create media for - software is hard to make visually interesting on socials

Sending files between my phone and laptop was bit of a pain. So I built a little web app that lets me just yeet text/urls/files etc between them. Would this be useful for anyone else?

Lee Watkins reposted

One command now gets you a React SPA with full-stack types, backed by #AshFramework, #Phoenix, and #ElixirLang 🀯 Install and visit localhost:4000/ash-typescript for a handy guide 😎 Finally, a bridge to the reliability + elegance of Elixir for our React-loving friends!

The quality of the dictation from Wispr Flow is amazing. I'm loathed to type anything anymore. And the fact that it learns your vocab is delightful πŸ‘ŒπŸ»