Lee Watkins

@unieklee.com

Building: sessionsupply.uk Current: 🍏 iOS Engineer & 🥏 frisbee player. 🇬🇧 Aspiring: 👨🏻‍💻 Entrepreneur

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?