As I get closer to the end of my notice period, the reality of no income hits. After being consistently employed for the last 25+ years, receiving last month’s paycheck was a real “wow, okay, there’s only one more” moment.
But I’m not panicked. I’m excited. And I’ve achieved so much this week. I feel like i’m finally where i belong career wise.
The Money Reality (But Not Dramatic)
Without making it sound too dramatic, I sold some old tech on eBay for £100 to pay for subscriptions. Sometimes you do what you need to do and this is bootstrapping at its best.
This Week’s Wins
Bottle Bond Market Validation I put myself out there and contacted people who’ve done some sales. That was a big personal hurdle to get over, but the response has been really positive. People like the concept and think the pricing is reasonable.
SEO Breakthrough Bottle Bond had a massive SEO win. We’re now on the second page for “whisky storage.” This felt like a real momentous achievement. Second page might not sound like much, but we moved up 143 places and I’m getting actual traffic. That’s progress. Being new to SEO and using Sheer SEO to track my site I’m learning day by day
Tech Building I built an automation tool that scans my emails and summarises the important ones to Slack. Created this blog in its simplest form, which is all I need right now. I’m working on automating voice notes into blog posts too.
Learning and Engagement I’ve participated and engaged on X, contributed to forums, done exercises in my AI course. Even smaller tasks each day make me feel proud of the progress and excited about this journey.
Revenue Pipeline
I have a sales deal in the pipeline for my old employer. I’ll still be representing and supporting them which is great. Fingers crossed this comes off. It would give me the runway to work with a big tech firm (which I enjoy) plus a little bit of stability to pay bills and invest more into what I’m building. Most importantly, it delays having to work for somebody else again.
The Bottle Bond Challenge
Here’s the interesting thing about sales. People respond positively to Bottle Bond. They like it, think the pricing is reasonable. Yet sales conversion isn’t high, and I need it to be high to get this properly going.
I’ve been thinking about barriers to market. Alex West’s insights about B2C markets really hit home. I’m asking people to give away their hard-earned money, and costs feel high.
But there’s also a practical barrier. The thought of packing up bottles, documenting them, getting them into a van, shipping to storage… unless there’s an immediate urgent need, that just drifts. People think “I’ll do it later.”
Removing the Barriers
One solution I’m exploring is offering a managed service. We come and pick up your bottles, pack them, document them. Remove all the friction.
I’ve also been looking at ways to categorise bottles easier, which I’m prototyping now. I feel like this could be an important case study for a separate post about my experiences using Replit, OCR etc.
Building the Automation
As mentioned in my previous post, this started as a voice note. It’s now getting processed through Claude to tidy things up. My goal is voice notes to AI for formatting and tidying in my style, then I proofread, make edits, and almost hit submit to publish.
This automation is going to be a game changer for consistency and time saving plus interesting to build.
Overall Reflection
It’s been a great week. Made fantastic progress across all four focus areas. The combination of small daily tasks, big wins like the SEO jump, and tackling personal hurdles like reaching out for sales has me genuinely excited.
Next week, let’s keep building.